Repression with Flowers

Can there still be doubts that Russia has shed its brutal Stalinist past? Not after what happened last week. In the course of arresting a noted Soviet author, two carloads of tough KGB (secret police) agents stopped everything, piled out of their autos and waded into a field to pick bunches of wild lilacs. Dissidents may be tossed into prison or insane asylums under Leonid Brezhnev's regime, but this is repression with hearts and flowers.

Or is it? Andrei Amalric, the defiant young writer who was the object of the KGB's attention, may not feel quite so cheerful about it. Amalric, 32, is the author of Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, which openly predicts the downfall of the Soviet system (TIME, Dec. 19). Ever since the book was published in the West earlier this year, observers of the Moscow scene have wondered how he managed to avoid arrest. One unlovely theory was that Amalric was part of a KGB plot to infiltrate the dissident Soviet intellectual community. "The subject of my possible arrest," complained Amalric, "has become the litmus test of whether or not I am a KGB agent."

Combative Nature. One morning last week, the KGB silenced Amalric's detractors. Four cars bearing a total of 14 men pulled up outside the author's country cottage near the village of Aku-lovo, 85 miles southeast of Moscow. Two men knocked on the door. They wanted to inquire, they explained, whether Amalric and his beautiful Tartar wife Giselle planned to vote in the next elections. Once inside, the two identified themselves as KGB agents and beckoned to their twelve colleagues.

True to his combative nature, Amalric insisted on his right to examine the credentials of each of the KGB officers. He also studied the arrest warrant, and when he detected an incorrect date for his birthday, he said jokingly: "You see, you have the wrong man." Amalric learned that half of the agents were from the Siberian border city of Sverdlovsk, where a copy of his book, which was circulating in typed form via the Samizdat underground press, had been confiscated by the authorities.

After an hour, the Moscow agents decided to take Amalric to the capital, where he has one room in a crowded communal apartment. Protesting that he had a right to be present while his cottage was being searched, Amalric refused to budge. Two KGB men lifted him up by the arms and led him away.

The remaining agents went through the cottage and confiscated 30 items. One was a Dutch edition in Russian of Amalric's book, which one arresting officer ominously referred to as "a slanderous fabrication." Another was an inoperable old hunting rifle, for which Amalric had no license -an offense punishable in the Soviet Union by up to two years in prison.

It was on the road back to Moscow that the KGB men spotted the field of lilacs and filled the trunk of one of the autos with them. When they came to a town, one of the officers suggested to Giselle that she buy some food for her husband. "He'll need it where he's going," said the KGB man solicitously.

When Giselle returned to Moscow, Amalric and his captors were still in his room, where the agents seized another long list of items. Among them were five unpublished plays that figured in his 1965 conviction as a "parasite"; he spent 21 years in Siberian exile then. The Moscow KGB agents refused to let him accept the food Giselle had bought. Said Amalric to his wife: "Goodbye, and don't worry, little woman. Stay well."

By week's end Giselle had not yet been told where her husband is being held or the nature of the charges against him. The most likely indictment: engaging in anti-Soviet propaganda -an offense that carries a maximum term of seven years in prison and an additional five years in exile.

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