We knew that the new political situation of 1969 that had been caused by the invasion of Czechoslovakia would mean that our visit was going to be a difficult one. The process of "normalisation" (the term used for the reintroduction of Stalinist modes of government in Eastern Europe) was also spreading to the sphere of higher education and intellectual life in the Soviet Union itself. Accounts of the increased repression of Soviet dissidents were already filtering through to the West during 1969. The relative cultural "thaw" which had been ushered in by Khrushchev after Stalin’s death 1956 had lasted fitfully into the second half of the 1960s, even after the change of leadership when Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev and Kosygin in 1964. After Prague, however, the partially-raised Iron Curtain came down again in Europe decisively – and in Russia the fates of those who dared to speak out against the repressive nature of the Soviet regime became known in the West. It was a system which denied even the most elementary political freedoms to its citizens, and imprisoned and tortured those whom it could not assimilate and subdue. Thanks to the activities of human rights organisations like Amnesty International, the names of those who resisted were by now becoming well known in the West. The leading dissidents included the poet Joseph Brodsky, the writers Andrei Sinyavsky (who wrote under the pen name Abram Terts), Yuli Daniel (whose pen name was Nikolai Arzhak), Anatoly V. Kuznetsov (who defected to Britain in 1969), Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, and Andrei Amalrik; the editor Alexander Tvardovsky; the economist Viktor Krasin; retired general Petro Grigorenko; and the historian Pyotr Yakir. Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the West in 1967 and took up residence in the United States. The repression did not only affect writers, artists, historians, economists and retired military personnel – it also crept increasingly into scientific circles: the Nobel Prize winning nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov and the geneticist Zhores Medvedev were leading figures in the loosely-connected dissident movement. My wife, who was preparing to write her first research paper in pure algebra, was already in contact with figures in the Soviet mathematical world who were associated with the workings of these groups. if not actively involved in them.
Aware that we were going into a country where information about the outside world was growing increasingly scarce, and where the activities and writings of the dissidents were suppressed on an ongoing basis, we decided to take with us some printed material that might or might not get past the security and customs checks at the disembarkation point. In our luggage we took some of Solzhenitsyn’s work, both in Russian and English, including One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which had actually been published in 1962 by Tvardovsky’s journal Novy Mir – the only work of Solzhenitsyn’s to be officially permitted (in 1969 it was also the only "dissident" work recommended by the British Council as suitable for the postgraduate students to take in with them). We also took work by Sinyavsky, published in Paris in the Russian original, well aware that it was likely to be confiscated if discovered, and one or two émigré books that had been recommended by Viktor and his Finnish wife, by now based in Canada, but also visiting from time to time in Finland and England. I also took quite a large number of books related to my dissertation, a few works of history (including Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, published only the year before) and some contemporary English novels in paperback – though many famous classics were also available in Moscow thanks to the British Embassy’s cultural section, and the students were encouraged to give those as presents (not always welcome ones, as hardly anyone in Moscow, even the most educated people, seemed or professed to know much English).
The boat trip from Tilbury aboard the Marya Ulyanova, on which we had sailed three years earlier, was a rather subdued affair compared to the lively voyage I’d made in ’67. On the boat we met several people with whom we subsequently maintained contact, but there wasn’t the same sense of group solidarity I remembered from the previous visit. One of the people we met was a postgraduate student of education, Mary, who was also bound for Moscow. Mary told us that the year before, while on a visit to Leningrad, she had met the poet Joseph Brodsky, and had interviewed him in a rowing boat on the Gulf of Finland, far out of the reach of observers and potential informers. She had recorded the interviews – much of which consisted of Brodsky reading his poems aloud – on a portable tape recorder, and had made some of them available to Index on Censorship, the Amnesty International magazine published in London. She was planning to contact Brodsky again on this visit, and promised to introduce me to him, though it would involve me travelling to Leningrad.
On the Ulyanova we all had a chance to think about our situation, and there were discussions about the role we were playing: whether it was a good thing to be a "cultural diplomat" in this sense. There were certainly some in the group who didn’t see themselves in that light at all, and were merely going along on the trip for purely practical purposes of research. But it was, almost by definition (the "British Council" label stuck), hard to stay aloof from what was, after all, an attempt to reach out from the West to people in the East through almost impenetrable barriers of fear and suspicion. It’s also hard to recall now the very real sense of threat posed at that time by the nuclear arms race between the two great powers, and the periodic crises during which the world’s continued existence seemed to hang in the balance. All of that, plus the political upheavals of the past year in Prague and Paris and Berlin, made a journey to the Soviet Union for the purposes of cultural exchange an occasion for quiet reflection. After the docking at Helsinki, as we sailed parallel to the coast of Estonia and thought about what had happened and was still happening there, the old oppressive feeling I’d had in 1967 returned. I think some of the others in the group also felt it – but they were mostly those who, like me, had been on a British Council visit before. At Leningrad, the first of the hurdles arose: we had to get through customs those books we’d brought with us.
(to be continued)
See also: Going Back Again
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