The Quiet Before, page 13
Increasingly, the samizdat drew Natasha into a community of dissidents. Just by virtue of engaging in an artistic act, even if its subject was more personal than political, she found herself in defiance of a regime and an ideology that wanted control over all cultural production. In the early 1960s she helped organize two samizdat poetry magazines, Syntax and Phoenix, both of which so riled the authorities that they arrested their editors, charged them as criminals, and sent them away to prison camps. Natasha continued to write. In 1962 she was even taken by a friend to meet Anna Akhmatova, a godmother to the country’s dissident poets. Akhmatova’s circle of young acolytes then included Joseph Brodsky, who would soon be denounced and put on trial for what were deemed “pornographic and anti-Soviet” poems. Then in her seventies, Akhmatova’s regal, uncompromising presence made a strong impression on Natasha, and she became set on her identity as a poet, with all the difficulties this life would entail.
If samizdat started this way for her, as a form of self-expression, Natasha was also beginning to see how it could unify the community of dissident artists and writers then increasingly under attack. It fused them together, providing a form of currency when all the usual avenues of culture were closed. But just how instrumental it could be in helping their burgeoning opposition to home in on a clear purpose, hammering away day after day at the same immovable force of the state—that only became evident once the aperture that had allowed some light into their creative lives began to close.
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THE THAW ENDED for Natasha and her friends on the day Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested in September 1965. Both were respected and established writers. Whenever purveyors of samizdat had been prosecuted before, it was almost always for invented or planted crimes, but Sinyavsky and Daniel were put on trial specifically for their words. They were charged under a new Article 70, which made “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation” illegal and punishable by prison sentence.
On December 5, 1965, an official holiday celebrating the Soviet constitution, the dissidents gathered at Pushkin Square in central Moscow in protest, a terrifying prospect coming just a decade after Stalin’s death. The banners they unfurled gave an indication of their strategy: not to call for revolution or overthrow, but simply to ask the Soviet state to abide by its own laws—the civil and human rights principles codified in the country’s guiding charter. “Respect the Constitution, the Basic Law of the USSR,” they insisted, and “We Demand That the Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial Be Public.” A couple months later, Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years and Daniel to five in the notorious labor camps in Mordovia.
Natasha knew both of them well. She had often visited Sinyavsky, whose seminar in Soviet poetry she had taken as a student, and she had once met Yuli Daniel at his home. This was her community, with all of its squabbles and love affairs, and the sentencing fell on her hard. What followed over the next two or three years was best captured in the title of one of the samizdat books about the various repressions: “The Process of the Chain Reaction.” There would be an arrest and a trial and then exile or imprisonment, and samizdat began to serve as a way to document it all, the facts of it, including secretly gathered testimony from trials, and the accounts of those few open displays of protest that were often dispersed in seconds. The appearance of the samizdat in turn led to more arrests, leading to even more samizdat. In this way, throughout 1966 and 1967, Natasha saw many of her friends either sent to prison camps themselves or taking care of those who were—not to mention the families they had left behind. The days of poetry deemed subversive simply because its themes were not cheery enough, those days were over. They were now fighting a war with the regime and their only real weapon was onionskin paper.
Natasha made her part in this battle public in February 1968, when she signed a letter addressed to the troika of leaders then running the country and guiding the crackdown—Nikolai Podgorny, Alexei Kosygin, and Leonid Brezhnev—to demand that her friends, arrested for producing samizdat, be given an open trial, as mandated by law. “As long as arbitrary action of this kind continues uncondemned, no one can feel safe.” Natasha knew she was taking an enormous risk and that she was in a particularly vulnerable situation. She was living with her mother and her son, Yasik, in one unit of a noisy, dimly lit communal apartment with shared bathrooms and kitchens. Natasha’s father was killed at the front in 1943, and she had grown up with a single parent. Her own decision now to raise a child by herself—with the help of her mother, of course—was voluntary but unusual. There was a pervasive eccentricity about Natasha. In a photo from 1968, when she was thirty-two, she is dressed in baggy pants, a formless dark, knitted sweater, and tennis shoes. Her hair is messy and comes down only to her chin; cat-eye glasses dominate her face. And now she was pregnant again, once more without the child’s father’s involvement.
Two days after sending off her protest letter, she felt the hand of the state slap her down, and in the strangest, most unsettling way. Early in the last trimester of her pregnancy, she woke up ill one day and, fearing there was a problem with the baby, checked herself into a maternity hospital and was diagnosed with anemia. As in a horror story, once admitted, she wasn’t allowed to leave. In a series of notes that she managed to smuggle out, she described the ordeal in real time. “Why are they keeping me here?” she wrote. “After each ‘Wait until tomorrow’ I collapse like an empty sack.” After a few days, a psychiatrist examined her and deemed her insistence on being discharged a symptom of schizophrenia. She was then forcibly strip-searched and placed in an ambulance, where she was taken to Moscow’s main psychiatric institution, known as Kashchenko.
The nightmare continued with the clothing: “Another way of crushing and humiliating one. Knickers (knitted ones) down to the knees, stockings without elastic which keep falling down…So we all go around looking uniformly awful, scarcely human in appearance, let alone feminine.” Most of the women were indeed mentally ill: “There’s a recreation room here, with a television and a radiogram. I glanced in, thinking I might pass the time watching television. The television was not yet switched on, and two couples were moving round to the radiogram, to the sound of some post-war tango: poor, miserable women, in frightful gowns, twined together, languorously swaying their hips.”
This was the KGB’s way of punishing her. Only the pregnancy had dictated she land here and not in a prison camp. She tried to be strong. “If they did want to frighten me, to throw me off the rails, to traumatise me, they did not succeed,” she wrote in her last note. “I am waiting for the birth of my child quite calmly, and neither my pregnancy nor his birth will prevent me from doing what I wish—which includes participating in every protest against any act of tyranny.” After nearly two weeks, she was suddenly and without explanation sent home.
It was in the days following her release, regrouping with friends, and still very pregnant, that she began imagining some further use of samizdat, extending its role of documentation, creating one central place to compile a detailed list of wrongs committed by the Soviet Union.
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NATASHA LIKED THE TONE captured in the protest letters written collectively by dissident friends—cold as ice, precise, almost legalistic, placing state actions alongside citations of law. She had a love of objectivity, as she later put it. She wanted to use this approach in the creation of a samizdat “journal,” one that would capture the way her community was, by 1968, being regularly battered. Even though some news of the arrests and trials was making it out to the West, and sometimes even being broadcast back into the Soviet Union on the BBC or Voice of America’s shortwave frequencies, these were only the most well-known cases. Natasha wanted to gather everything that was happening, the full experience of living through what they were beginning to think of as a neo-Stalinist moment. It was easy to lose track of the many injustices in the day-to-day reality of their persecution, to feel many darts landing but not know how to move beyond an emotional response, or do more than gird themselves. This journal would help them focus—allow them to pick up the scattered pieces and put them together, fixing their attention on the construction of an ongoing argument. It would also allow them to bring together the various strands of dissidence throughout the empire—those persecuted for their religion, those treated with suspicion for their allegiance to their national or ethnic group, and, of course, the political outcasts, some beaten down simply for insisting on truthfulness, others just for being slightly out of step with the unitary vision of the Communist Party. Each saw their plight as unique. Now they would literally be on the same page.
In this journal, Natasha and her friends resolved, they would excise all personal opinion and let the facts speak. Western journalists would take them more seriously as a result, but this decision about style was also a form of resistance. For a regime that, going back to Lenin, valued the press primarily for its propaganda potential, a neutral news source like the one she was envisioning, committed to a clinical, dry recitation of information, was subversive.
Natasha had time on her hands; her due date fast approaching, she was on leave from her job as a translator at Moscow’s State Institute of Experimental Design and Technical Research. She also had editorial skills from years of producing samizdat, and she was a quick typist. There were other intellectuals who had more standing among the dissidents, but they saw the job of compiling and retyping as menial. Natasha was not afraid of work, and she was eager to do something. And so that spring of 1968, at the end of March, feeling her child move inside her, Natasha slipped one of the pages of carbon paper into her Olympia and started to type.
At the top of Issue No. 1, Natasha had given the journal a title, half-ironic and half in earnest: Human Rights Year in the Soviet Union. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (not exactly commemorated in the Soviet Union) had been signed twenty years earlier. For good measure she added Article 19 as an epigraph: “Everyone has the right of freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.” The name that stuck was the one she used as a subtitle, Chronicle of Current Events, after a BBC Russian-language news roundup. It would become known simply as the Chronicle.
Natasha composed the first issue in her apartment on her typewriter, though she had paid someone on the black market to alter the keys on her Olympia to keep the authorities from connecting her political samizdat to her poetry samizdat. It was twenty tightly spaced pages, with seven carbon copies. She finished by the end of April and gave it an issue date of April 30, 1968 (from then on, issues would appear every other month on the last day of the month). Six of the copies were spread among friends to be retyped in turn, and one was given to a Western correspondent. The scribbled notes containing all the information that went into the issue were immediately burned.
From that first edition, Natasha and her friends used the Chronicle to unload the burden of all the harm that had been done to them. In that sense it was fairly parochial. All the events described at first concerned the small circle of intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad, starting with an account of the trial of four among them who had been prosecuted for creating samizdat. Even Natasha’s recent ordeal made it in: “Without any warning and without her relations’ knowledge, Gorbanevskaya was transferred on 15 February from maternity clinic No. 27, where she was being kept with a threatened miscarriage, to ward 27 of the Kashchenko Hospital.”
The journal felt new. It presented itself as a value-free receptacle. The sparse writing was refreshing, almost elegant. Later, Ludmila Alexeyeva, one of the dissidents who most helped with the typing of the Chronicle, described what she called the “wooden, impersonal style” this way: “It would offer no commentary, no belles lettres, no verbal somersaults; just basic information.” The absence of embellishment felt to Natasha like a creative act. Not the experience she had writing poetry, which, she often said, felt to her as natural and necessary as breathing, but a willed sort of chiseling away at emotion that was satisfying in a different way—that sharpened the focus.
Two weeks after disseminating the first issue, she decided to do another press run, which meant sitting down and typing it all out again. Her friend Pavel Litvinov, grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, had become a prominent dissident who had contributed a lot of the information for the first issue. He let Natasha use his family’s apartment during the day as a place to type, mostly to keep the project away from Natasha’s mother. While working there on the afternoon of May 13, she felt the first contractions of her labor. She kept at it a bit longer, but when the pain became too much, she simply left the page in the typewriter and a note for Litvinov to finish the work. She took herself to the hospital, where she gave birth to her second son at 1:30 in the morning. Weeks later when she recovered and went to visit Litvinov, she found the page in the typewriter exactly where she had left it. It was her project, her initiative, appreciated perhaps by the other dissidents, but not yet deemed essential. She would have to prove its importance to them. She finished retyping Issue No. 1 and started on Issue No. 2, which would be dated June 30, 1968.
By the second issue, Natasha began to innovate, adding more features to the journal. The most important was “News in Brief,” a kind of catchall for violations of every sort and updates on the various cases and prisoners. The first item in Issue No. 2, for example, read, “A lathe tore fingers from the hand of Vadim Gaenko in Camp No. 11 in Mordovia. Gaenko from Leningrad is serving four years under Articles 70 and 72 of the RSFSR Criminal Code for taking part in an illegal Marxist circle and issuing The Bell periodical.” She also included a long list of “extra-judicial political repression,” with the names of ninety-one individuals who had been expelled from their workplaces or kicked out of the party for various perceived offenses like signing protest letters or teaching outlawed books.
Most of the material came from friends who wrote what they knew on slips of paper or committed it to memory and then told it to Natasha, whose identity as the editor was an open secret. With this second issue, Natasha also moved outside the urban centers, with a letter from a group of Crimean Tatars who described the lingering psychic pain from the forced and brutal Stalin-era expulsion from their land. For the Chronicle to convincingly act as a legal brief for the aggrieved Soviet citizen, for it to focus dissent, it had to extend beyond the concerns of Moscow and Leningrad’s intelligentsia.
Natasha was now devoting most of her time to the journal, running around the city collecting material, meeting with relatives of prisoners to debrief them after visits to the camps in the east, and then scrambling to type it all out in the Chronicle’s accumulating pages. It was arduous, secretive work. Her one consolation was that at the time she did not believe the KGB cared much about the Chronicle.
Just as she became comfortable in her identity as the hidden editor, furtively typing alone in borrowed apartments, Natasha felt called to take part in a more physical form of protest. On August 21, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. She still felt guilty about the way she had turned on her friends in the wake of the Hungarian revolution. This was her chance to redeem herself. She had to show solidarity with the people of Czechoslovakia and the liberalizing moves of the country’s new leader, Alexander Dubček.
Natasha and a group of her friends, including Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz, the wife of the imprisoned writer Yuli Daniel, decided they would stage a sit-down protest in Red Square. An act of such flagrantly public dissent had never been attempted on what was essentially sacred ground, mere feet from Lenin’s mummified body. They prepared by making Czech flags and banners with slogans like “For Your Freedom and Ours,” which she then folded up and placed beneath the mattress in her three-month-old son’s pram. Just before the appointed time at noon on August 25, she rolled sleeping baby Osya toward Red Square, an extra pair of cloth diapers and pants at his feet.
They met at Lobnoye Mesto, the stagelike raised circular stone platform in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral, where Ivan the Terrible was said to have carried out beheadings. And when the bell struck noon, the seven friends took out their banners and flags and sat in silence in the middle of the bustling square. Within minutes they were shut down. Natasha recorded her memories right away for inclusion in the next issue of the Chronicle: “People had hardly begun to gather round us when those who were intent on undoing our demonstration came racing towards us, beating the nearest onlookers to it. They leapt on us and tore down our banners without even sparing a glance for what was written on them. I shall never forget the sound of ripping cloth.”
A crowd organized by the KGB to rile up the mostly confused pedestrians began shouting at the protesters, “They’re all Jews!” and “Beat up the anti-Soviets!” Meanwhile, black Volgas, the cars of the KGB, sped through the square and police hopped out, roughly pulling the seated protesters off the ground and into the vehicles. Only Natasha was left, standing by her baby’s pram as strangers yelled at her. The screaming woke him up, and she quickly changed his diaper in the middle of the frenzied crowd. Then another Volga pulled up, and Natasha was lifted up and thrust into the car, her baby just barely pushed into her arms before the door slammed shut and two not-so-random bystanders joined them as witnesses. “I threw myself at the window, lowered it and shouted: ‘Long live free Czechoslovakia.’ Halfway through the sentence the witness took a swipe at my mouth. The man got in beside the driver and said: ‘To the 50th police station.’ I lowered the window again and tried to call out: ‘They’re taking me to the 50th police station.’ ” The witness seated next to her in the car then hit Natasha again, “which was both humiliating and painful.”
