On Monday, March 24, 1975, at 6 p.m., two French students, Jacques Arnold and Francis Bergeron, could be seen standing near the escalator of the Square of the Revolution Metro station in Moscow. Suddenly they began extracting books from two bags they were carrying, and handing them out to the surprised passers-by. At first the busy commuters paid little attention, but then someone spotted the cover of one of the books and electrified the crowd with one word, “Solzhenitsyn!” Bergeron re-counts: “Some took books and then returned for more. There was a moment when I was surrounded by ten hands grasping for the literature. As soon as I took a book from the bag, someone would immediately grab it.” The books were Russian, written in Russian by Russians, but still forbidden reading in their native country. “I didn’t have too many books left when an agent in civilian clothes grabbed me. . .
The Frenchmen who so startled the Moscow subway riders were part of a growing number of Western students who try to help the struggle for human rights in the USSR actively by smuggling books and leaflets into the country. In doing this they break no laws. Arnold and Bergeron were protected by the iron-clad guarantees of the much-admired Stalin constitution (now known as the Brezhnev constitution), which guarantees freedom of the press; while those who have followed in their steps have been able to point to the ringing declarations of the Helsinki agreement.
Comments