Shaming Their Elders

The Kremlin went easy on its discontented intellectuals during the preliminaries for its 50th anniversary fete, unwilling to court unfavorable publicity abroad. Now that the celebration is over, it has resumed dragging the more restive ones through the courts. To its surprise and consternation, the younger writers and their educated circle of friends are stubbornly resisting the regime's pressures--sticking together, chiding their doctrinaire and bureaucratic elders, and risking jail or worse to win more freedom. To the Kremlin's embarrassment, the grandson of Old Bolshevik Maksim Litvinov, Stalin's Foreign Minister from 1930 to 1939, has turned out to be one of the writers' most aggressive allies. Last week Pavel Litvinov's notes on the proceedings of the September trial in Moscow of his friend, Writer Vladimir Bukovsky, 26, reached several Western newspapers. In them Litvinov, 30, a physicist, describes an interview with a KGB (secret police) officer, who warned him that he would be charged with "slandering" the Soviet state if he had the notes smuggled out of Russia. "What kind of slander can there be in recording the hearing of a Soviet court?" Litvinov asked his interrogator. "Well," said the KGB man, "your notes will be a biased distortion."

The Price of Protest. Bukovsky, who was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for a demonstration in Pushkin Square on behalf of three other arrested writers, read at his trial sections from the Soviet constitution guaranteeing "freedom of demonstrations and gatherings on the street." By way of contrast, he pointed out that in the U.S., the Supreme Court had assured the right of Communists to peaceful dissent. "What the prosecutor would like to hear from me, he won't hear," said Bukovsky. "There is no criminal act in my case. I absolutely do not repent." Nonetheless, the Soviet press reported that Bukovsky had pleaded guilty.

Of the Soviet writers now in prison, the regime has kept at least three in jail for a full year without even going through the formalities of declaring them guilty at a trial. Some 150 leading scientists and writers have petitioned the government to hold an open trial for Aleksei Dobrovolsky, 29, and Yuri Galanskov, 29, who circulated an underground literary journal called Phoenix, and for Aleksandr Ginzburg, 30, who had smuggled to the West the transcript of the 1966 trial of Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.

The pressures on a young Soviet writer these days are subtle. If he presumes to criticize the regime, even in private, a writer may forfeit his job and his chances for promotion, or the possible publication of his work (all the publishing houses are state-owned). If he cooperates, he may win appointment to the board of a prestigious journal or get a luxury apartment in the Moscow suburbs. Though the regime has made dissent highly unprofitable, many of the younger writers still seem to feel that the price of resistance is indeed well worth paying.

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