On the Right

Moscow, Dec. 16—In three years, the people of Moscow are better dressed, slightly better housed, slightly less harassed, it would appear. There isn’t any reason for this that issues out of any recent access of Soviet efficiency or benevolence. The top rulers of the Soviet Union aren’t sadists, like their predecessors. But cruelty does not particularly disturb them, if they can think up uses for it, and there are plenty. It is useful for staying in power, maintaining a worldwide force of menacing potential, and suppressing any organized effort to provide the Russian people with an alternative life. What progress the Russian people have made in recent years can be said to have leaked through. If 95 per cent of the bureaucracy retired tomorrow, along with their rules and regulations, the Russian people would prosper as never before.

One hears, in the West, about the few conspicuous Soviet dissenters. Most notably, now that Solzhenitsyn has gone, Sakharov; echoes, every now and then, from Amalrik, who gave one interview too many to a CBS correspondent, producing that distribution of justice to which we have become accustomed: the CBS man was booted out of the country, sentenced to life outside the Soviet Union. Amalrik was sent to a labor camp, with special treatments at a neighborhood psychiatric asylum that specializes in blowing the minds of dissenters. But it has been four years now since an American correspondent was tossed out of the country. And although their movements are monitored as keenly as ever, they do not, any longer, disguise their movements as diligently as they used to do. They reason as follows: that if the Kremlin is going to permit traffic with the dissidents, as journalists they must go ahead and pursue those contacts. If the dissidents, knowing they will be observed, want to take the risk, why, there isn’t very much the foreign correspondents can do about it. It is an entirely unpredictable matter when, on what pretext, or in what numbers the dissidents will be rounded up and sent off to torture. Those who collect the benefits of detente like to think that official Russo-American amity serves as something of a life insurance policy for the dissenters.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Moscow, Dec. 16—In three years, the people of Moscow are better dressed, slightly better housed, slightly less harassed, it would appear. There isn’t any reason for this that issues out of any recent access of Soviet efficiency or benevolence. The top rulers of the Soviet Union aren’t sadists, like their predecessors. But cruelty does not particularly disturb them, if they can think up uses for it, and there are plenty. It is useful for staying in power, maintaining a worldwide force of menacing potential, and suppressing any organized effort to provide the Russian people with an alternative life. What progress the Russian people have made in recent years can be said to have leaked through. If 95 per cent of the bureaucracy retired tomorrow, along with their rules and regulations, the Russian people would prosper as never before.

One hears, in the West, about the few conspicuous Soviet dissenters. Most notably, now that Solzhenitsyn has gone, Sakharov; echoes, every now and then, from Amalrik, who gave one interview too many to a CBS correspondent, producing that distribution of justice to which we have become accustomed: the CBS man was booted out of the country, sentenced to life outside the Soviet Union. Amalrik was sent to a labor camp, with special treatments at a neighborhood psychiatric asylum that specializes in blowing the minds of dissenters. But it has been four years now since an American correspondent was tossed out of the country. And although their movements are monitored as keenly as ever, they do not, any longer, disguise their movements as diligently as they used to do. They reason as follows: that if the Kremlin is going to permit traffic with the dissidents, as journalists they must go ahead and pursue those contacts. If the dissidents, knowing they will be observed, want to take the risk, why, there isn’t very much the foreign correspondents can do about it. It is an entirely unpredictable matter when, on what pretext, or in what numbers the dissidents will be rounded up and sent off to torture. Those who collect the benefits of detente like to think that official Russo-American amity serves as something of a life insurance policy for the dissenters.