The Quiet Before, page 14
Natasha, because she was still nursing an infant, was almost immediately released. A few days later she wrote a letter that appeared in The New York Times, among other publications. As the only participant “still at liberty,” Natasha described what happened in Red Square and expressed pride that, as she put it, “we were able even if briefly to break through the sludge of unbridled lies and cowardly silence and thereby demonstrate that not all citizens of our country are in agreement with the violence carried out in the name of the Soviet people.”
With her closest collaborators, Litvinov and Bogoraz, now jailed and soon sentenced to Siberian exile, Natasha felt increasingly alone. She was ordered to present herself at the Serbsky Institute for Psychiatric Medicine, where a committee of psychiatrists and KGB officers deemed her “non-responsible for her actions—the possibility of low-profile schizophrenia is not excluded.” The committee recommended that “she be declared insane and lodged in a penal category psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment.” But the state prosecutor simply ordered the case closed and appointed her mother as her official guardian. Natasha threw herself back into the Chronicle work, not knowing how long she had.
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BY THE END OF 1968, the Chronicle was a fixture in the Soviet Union, a regularly appearing samizdat publication that told a continuing and highly detailed story of repression. In the way a small local newspaper can endow meaning to a group, much as The African Morning Post did, the Chronicle helped the dissidents see themselves fully as a community at war with their own state. The harassment and nighttime searches and exiles and long prison terms gained new significance in those typewritten pages. By recounting it all there, as evidence, the dissidents came to feel part of a single narrative in which they alone were demanding accountability. And, by the fifth issue, the circle of readers had greatly expanded, so much so that most did not know of the existence of the small, harried single mother of two who was pulling it all together.
It was in Issue No. 5 that Natasha addressed her readers as a distinct audience for the first time. The “Year of Human Rights,” 1968, was coming to an end, and she wanted to explain that the journal would persist: “From the five issues of the Chronicle to date, one may form at least a partial impression of how the suppression of human rights and the movement for them has been taking place in the Soviet Union. Not one participant in this movement can feel his task is ended with the end of human rights year. The general aim of democratization, and the more particular aim pursued by the Chronicle, are still to be achieved. The Chronicle will continue to come out in 1969.”
Natasha began receiving the most unexpected kind of positive feedback. The publication she had created was as neutral and open as a bulletin board, and soon strangers were pinning up their own items. The crumpled pieces of paper started arriving almost as soon as the first issue was released, containing details large and small of offenses individuals had witnessed or experienced themselves. If they seemed credible, Natasha included them in the “News in Brief” section. Soon, the pieces of paper were feeding the Chronicle with much of its content. The notes were passed down a chain, hand to hand, much the way the Chronicle itself was disseminated. And based on what was getting to her, the chain was lengthening, with news arriving from cities like Kiev, Kharkov, and far-off Perm, long train rides away from the capital.
Every link in the chain knew only the two other links to which it was attached. Natasha wanted to keep it that way. In that same Issue No. 5, she made explicit what had already become practice. Anyone who is interested “in seeing that the Soviet public is informed about what goes on in the country may easily pass on information to the editors of the Chronicle,” she wrote. “Simply tell it to the person from whom you received the Chronicle, and he will tell the person from whom he received the Chronicle, and so on. But do not try to trace back the whole chain of communication yourself, or else you will be taken for a police informer.”
This system’s only downside was that it had the taint of being secretive and conspiratorial, and that was not a message Natasha wanted to convey. She didn’t see the Chronicle as an illegal enterprise. Its entire modus operandi was transparency—“glasnost” in Russian—uncovering the inner workings of the Soviet Union for the benefit of vigilant citizens. The concept of an underground newspaper had a major archetype in Lenin’s own prerevolutionary propaganda organ, Iskra, printed abroad and smuggled into tsarist Russia, where it had to be hidden and spoken about in hushed tones. The Chronicle was fueled by a different impulse, not building up a shadow revolutionary army, but rather exposing to light, one abuse at a time, the repressive quality of the Soviet state. If a revolution of sorts was envisioned as a result of this process, it was to come from this slow peeling away of obfuscation and illusion that the state used so adeptly to hide its repression.
Natasha wanted the reporting to strive for total accuracy. In Lenin’s view, articulated in 1901, the press was “not only a collective propagandist and collective agitator, but also a collective organizer.” The dissidents weren’t looking to propagandize or agitate or organize. They were interested in shattering the distinctly Soviet feeling of having two selves—one that whispered truths in private and another that was regularly called on to deny reality out loud. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who by 1969 was retyping issues and also providing information from her contacts in Ukraine, described working on the Chronicle as pledging oneself “to be faithful to the truth.” It was almost a religious feeling: “The effect of the Chronicle is irreversible. Each one of us went through this alone, but each of us knows others who went through this moral rebirth. This creates among people who scarcely know one another, but who were connected with the Chronicle, very strong spiritual ties, the kind that probably existed among early Christians.”
For Natasha this faith took the form of being fastidious about corrections. As early as Issue No. 2, there was a section for pointing out misspellings of names or wrong dates in previous issues. Natasha kept this up. And she also wanted her reader-contributors to understand that accuracy was a critical aspect of their work. Natasha was frequently shocked to see fifth- or sixth-generation recopied editions of the Chronicle with mangled names and figures. This was inevitable with samizdat, which could be like a written version of the game telephone. “In those instances when it is not absolutely certain that some event has taken place,” Natasha told her readers in Issue No. 7, “the Chronicle indicates that the piece of information is based on rumor. But at the same time, the Chronicle requests its readers to be careful and accurate in the information they provide for publication.”
These were essentially journalistic ethics that were most adhered to and respected in the West and not at all part of how Soviet media functioned. In its insistence on transparency, the Chronicle was shaping sensibilities. When readers reported some mistreatment they had witnessed—a colleague being unfairly fired or a KGB search of a neighbor’s apartment—they joined this shadow fellowship of truth, what in other countries might simply be called civil society. The act of jotting down this news on a piece of paper in the pared-down, legalistic language of the Chronicle and then moving it along the chain of like-minded Chronicle readers connected each of these individuals to a network that was trying to live by different values.
Into 1969, the size and breadth of the issues grew. Now at least thirty pages of tightly packed news, the journal was covering occurrences that spanned the Soviet Empire. The initial items of Issue No. 7 (dated April 30, 1969) were the accounts of trials, the first in the southern Crimean city of Simferopol of a Tatar, Gomer Bayev, who was accused of distributing “deliberate fabrications defaming the Soviet State and social order,” and the second in Jurmala, on the Latvian coast, of Ivan Yakhimovich, who was arrested after he wrote a letter protesting a political trial. There was also a piece on the persecution of Greek Orthodox priests. The “News in Brief” section included eighteen short items, reports from readers drawing on the local experiences of various marginalized communities—Tatars, Soviet Jews, Russian Orthodox priests, and Ukrainian nationalists.
Natasha was still at the center, quilting every issue together, a careful assembler of a pastiche of reports, large and small, making their way to her in Moscow. She depended on her mother to watch Yasik and Osya. The Chronicle took up nearly all of her time. She was often lugging her twenty-pound typewriter in its case through the Moscow metro and down the wide snow-covered boulevards and up stairways to the empty apartments she borrowed for her work. Hitting the keys hard enough to make an impression that would show up through six pages made considerable noise. She already stood out as suspicious and didn’t need the sound of banging keys through thin walls to further implicate her. So she had to keep moving. The number of pieces of paper she dealt with had also grown by 1969. Holding on to them for too long put her and the writer in danger.
The Chronicle was demanding more and more of a sacrifice from her, but this was also because it was becoming more important. She felt this acutely when the mother of a political prisoner just off the train from having visited her son rushed to meet her in secret so she could unload all she had learned. Natasha would take notes about who was having their food ration cut in that camp, who had been injured recently while carrying wood, who was sick and not receiving medical care. It all went into the next issue’s section on news “from the camps.”
Or there were the trials, another major target of the Chronicle’s attention. The inside of a courtroom, especially in a political trial, was a cordoned-off space in the Soviet Union. Like the prison camps, it was where the crushing machinery of the state was on full display. Natasha would debrief individuals who had managed to sneak in and take notes, sometimes making audio recordings, but more often than not, committing entire bits of testimony to memory. She copied down all these details—of arbitrary rulings, invented laws, and defense counsels never allowed to present evidence—and then put them in the Chronicle. Sometimes the journal even reconstructed the entire proceedings of a political trial.
Readers were able to see how the courts functioned. Issue No. 6 revealed, for example, the way in which the authorities constructed a fake “public” for ostensibly open trials, busing in pliant individuals to attend them and keeping out the friends and families of dissidents: “All those chosen to represent ‘the public’ at the trial turned up at the Proletarsky District’s party committee building at 8 a.m. on October 9th; there they were informed that they would be present at a trial of ‘anti-Sovietists.’ Then they were taken to the court in a bus which drove straight into the yard and they entered the building by the back door.” The Chronicle further reported that the source of this information, one of those planted audience members, “felt embarrassed when in the course of the trial he recognized the falsehood of the information he had been given, and ashamed when, with the rest of the audience, he walked through the saddened crowd—which sympathized with the defendants—after the verdict.”
Natasha now relentlessly searched out new information. It made her less than completely careful at times. In an episode from the summer of 1969 that would soon reverberate off the red marble walls of a Moscow courtroom, an ex-convict named Vilko Forsel met Natasha at an apartment of friends while she was vacationing with her older son in the Estonian city of Tartu.
As soon as she heard that the man had spent ten years in Vladimir prison, she perked up and began peppering him with questions about the conditions, particularly about the well-being of the political prisoners: How many were there? Were they housed together? What kind of food were they eating? Were the guards more aggressive with them? Then she turned to the case of a Tartu schoolboy who had recently been beaten for passing out leaflets connected to the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Did he know anyone with more information about this? Forsel, a little tipsy from his afternoon of vodka and pickled mushrooms, didn’t know what to make of this tiny and slightly disheveled Muscovite lady. Then she pulled out a few issues of the Chronicle and handed him the most recent. He leafed through them and stopped when he saw an article about the Crimean Tatars and their struggle to “return to their native land.” Forsel wasn’t too drunk to understand the danger, and he angrily shoved the issues back at Natasha. “I didn’t like the way a man who had just come out of prison was being drawn into some risky enterprise, being hindered from living in peace,” he later told the court. He was asked whether he reported the exchange to anyone. Yes, he said, I went and told the KGB.
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NATASHA HAD ALWAYS FIGURED it was a matter of time. With every added Chronicle reader, her chance of arrest increased. After ten issues, the KGB and its head, Yuri Andropov, had upgraded the threat level of the journal. And then there was the matter of the BBC and Voice of America, which would broadcast readings of entire issues. The stations saw the journal’s reporting as a reliable news source, a contrast to the Potemkin paradise presented in the pages of Pravda and Izvestia. Their frequencies were jammed from transmitting into Soviet territory, but they still managed to reach wily Soviet citizens with shortwave radios.
When her apartment was searched in late October 1969, Natasha knew she had to pass off her editorial duties to someone else, and quickly. It was difficult to give it up, but she had also come to see herself as a conduit for a collective voice. Someone less compromised could now perform that role. The essential thing was to keep the journal going.
Her first successor had an eventful start to her editorship. Galina Gabai, the wife of a political prisoner, had taken over the work of Issue No. 10 and had already collected much of the material for the following issue when the KGB arrived early one morning. Before opening the door, she had the good sense to stuff a handful of the most sensitive notes inside her bathrobe. And then, as ten KGB agents, some undercover in sweat suits and others in dark ties, filled her small apartment, she edged into the kitchen and toward a large steaming pot of borscht cooking on the stove, dropping the pages into the bubbling red soup before they could see. After that close call she decided to relinquish her responsibilities.
So on the freezing morning of December 24, Natasha herself had in her apartment the scraps of paper and longer reports that would make up Issue No. 11, including a long piece about Vladimir prison, incorporating the bits of intelligence she’d gleaned from the stranger she’d met in Estonia, Vilko Forsel. That’s when the knock came. She had an envelope crammed with handwritten notes that was in the center drawer of her desk, and a few other crumpled pages stuffed in the pocket of her coat hanging by the door; the KGB would pounce on any handwriting to try to track down contributors. She watched the agents shake out books, hammer their fists against the floors and walls to find possible hollow hiding spaces, cut through cushions, and pour her kitchen utensils out of their drawers.
At one point, as Natasha sat at her desk trying to calmly sharpen a pencil with a safety razor, one of the agents started flipping through what was perhaps her most treasured possession: a manuscript copy of Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem with a personal inscription by the poet herself. She leaped up to grab it from the agent’s hands, forgetting she was holding a razor, and cut a deep gash across his fingers. Blood began dripping down to the floor. Natasha immediately apologized, but it seemed a particularly bad omen.
By the time the search was done, the agents had gathered a pile of paper a foot thick and dozens of books. Only then did they let Natasha know that she was under arrest. Three friends had stopped by during the search, and still concerned about leaving any incriminating papers and not sure if the KGB had found them, she whispered, “Go through the desk,” before she was taken away. She also grabbed a light coat and left the one she hoped still had the scraps in its pocket, though she felt the painful chill of December slap her in the face as soon as she walked outside and was shoved into the waiting black Volga.
What she’d feared most was that the authorities would once again simply declare her insane. Having already been confined to a mental hospital and then diagnosed again following the Red Square demonstration, she knew there was an obvious solution for dealing with her. Other dissidents had suffered a similar fate, like her friend Pyotr Grigorenko, the major general turned activist who was at that moment locked in a psychiatric ward. The KGB officers brought her to Butyrka prison, where she was charged with slander of the Soviet system under Article 190-1, as well as resisting arrest for the incident with the razor blade.
In April, after three months in prison, she was taken to the Serbsky Institute as she had suspected and examined by a commission of psychiatrists including Professor Daniil Lunts, who had become infamous for liberally diagnosing dissidents with “sluggish schizophrenia,” a mental illness newly invented by Soviet doctors. Lunts joined in the conclusion that Natasha had a “slow progressive” case of this schizophrenia. Though she was described as being completely normal—“converses willingly, calm bearing, a smile on her face”—her unwillingness to perceive her behavior as wrong was proof of pathology: “Does not renounce her actions, but thinks she has done nothing illegal. Unshakably convinced of the rightness of her actions, she moralizes a great deal, in particular saying that she acted thus ‘so as not to be ashamed in the future before her children.’ ”
