Books in Brief: The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime, 1953-1970

The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime, 1953-1970, by Abraham Rothberg (Cornell, 450 pp., $14.50). On February 1, 1973, Avraham Shifrin testified before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that millions of political prisoners remain confined in conditions of brutality and near-starvation in scores of Russian concentration camps. Shifrin knows whereof he speaks: He was himself a concentration-camp inmate for ten years, fleeing to Israel in 1970. A few months before Shifrin’s testimony the same Senate subcommittee had published the testimony of Dr. Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin, a distinguished Soviet mathematician, describing the “abuse of psychiatry for political repression” in the USSR and dealing specifically with such cases as that of Vladimir Bukovsky, Pyotr Grigorenko, Viktor Feinberg, and others, who all had made the mistake of taking Soviet constitutional guarantees of free speech seriously. Rothberg, former managing editor of The New Leader and author of a major book on the novels of Solzhenitsyn, has written the indispensable background study of this continuing political repression in the Soviet Union and of the various forms it currently takes. “There is no possible evolution in a totalitarian society,” Albert Camus wrote once, “terror does not evolve except toward a worse terror.” The delusion that Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin would also bring a change in established Soviet police-state methods did not last long. But even now Sinyavsky and Daniel, Kuznetsov, and Amalrik, whose ordeal is so ably described in these pages, are viewed in some Western quarters as relative rarities in the Soviet political process. Rothberg’s carefully documented study suggests otherwise. In the Soviet Union the reaction to Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” came from a wide front in the Soviet elite, from party hacks to “farm bureaucrats,” and its fearridden essence particularly came to light in the manner in which one Madame Saveleva, the judge in the notorious case against the poet Iosif Brodsky, in February 1964, chose to exercise her role: “She was ignorant, dogmatic, arbitrary, and antisemitic,” Rothberg writes, “and appealed to all those qualities in the courtroom audience.” Just so.

JK

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J. M. van der Kroef

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Cold War

The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime, 1953-1970, by Abraham Rothberg (Cornell, 450 pp., $14.50). On February 1, 1973, Avraham Shifrin testified before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that millions of political prisoners remain confined in conditions of brutality and near-starvation in scores of Russian concentration camps. Shifrin knows whereof he speaks: He was himself a concentration-camp inmate for ten years, fleeing to Israel in 1970. A few months before Shifrin’s testimony the same Senate subcommittee had published the testimony of Dr. Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin, a distinguished Soviet mathematician, describing the “abuse of psychiatry for political repression” in the USSR and dealing specifically with such cases as that of Vladimir Bukovsky, Pyotr Grigorenko, Viktor Feinberg, and others, who all had made the mistake of taking Soviet constitutional guarantees of free speech seriously. Rothberg, former managing editor of The New Leader and author of a major book on the novels of Solzhenitsyn, has written the indispensable background study of this continuing political repression in the Soviet Union and of the various forms it currently takes. “There is no possible evolution in a totalitarian society,” Albert Camus wrote once, “terror does not evolve except toward a worse terror.” The delusion that Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin would also bring a change in established Soviet police-state methods did not last long. But even now Sinyavsky and Daniel, Kuznetsov, and Amalrik, whose ordeal is so ably described in these pages, are viewed in some Western quarters as relative rarities in the Soviet political process. Rothberg’s carefully documented study suggests otherwise. In the Soviet Union the reaction to Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” came from a wide front in the Soviet elite, from party hacks to “farm bureaucrats,” and its fearridden essence particularly came to light in the manner in which one Madame Saveleva, the judge in the notorious case against the poet Iosif Brodsky, in February 1964, chose to exercise her role: “She was ignorant, dogmatic, arbitrary, and antisemitic,” Rothberg writes, “and appealed to all those qualities in the courtroom audience.” Just so.