Tito’s Yugoslavia, the hope of American Liberal visionaries, recently jailed a 30-year-old professor of Russian literature, Mihajlo Mihajlov, for publishing a series of articles on his “Summer in Moscow.”
Mihajlov went to Russia last year as an exchange professor. He observed the Soviet world, talked with students, interviewed film directors, poets, folksingers and writers—among them such luminaries as Ilyia Ehrenburg, Vladimir Dudintsev and Leonid Leonov. The articles he wrote are amazingly honest, and deal with Soviet reality in a way one never finds in travel notes by Western observers. He found a tremendous but suppressed hope for freedom: Dudintsev told him, for instance, that following publication of Not by Bread Alone, strangers on buses, streetcars and subways would surreptitiously shake his hand; poets told him of confrères locked in insane asylums; museum officials whispered that there were hidden treasures of beauty (impressionists and cubist paintings among them) kept under lock and key, considered not suitable for Communist eyes.
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