Protesting the Fig Leaf

Russia's intellectuals--and many of their colleagues in Eastern Europe--are squirming more restlessly than ever under the weight of Communist orthodoxy, but they see a subtle opportunity to lessen the burden in 1967. Because it is the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, they figure that Communist authorities will take pains to avoid an open clash with the intellectual community, and may even be moved to lift some restrictions on their freedom. Whether or not their hunch is right, the intellectuals have been making some unusually outspoken protests against repressive government policies, particularly in literature and the theater.

A growing number of Communist literary critics are pointing out publicly that the trouble with literature in their countries is not dearth of talent but too much party censorship. Most of them agree with Russian Poet Andrei Voznesensky that the people now want, and are ready for, "the naked truth, and not truth concealed beneath the fig leaf of censorship." Last week two critics were rebuked for writing in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist Youth League newspaper, that Soviet theater censors seem to find anathema every play that offers "a serious answer to the serious problems of life."

The critics, Fedor Burlatsky and Lev Karpinsky, had condemned Russian theater censors as "incompetent meddlers" who are afraid of "a fresh and sharp idea or an unexpected treatment of a subject." They deplored the habit of cultural commissars' dropping casually in on rehearsals of a new play and then later banning its opening, criticized the censors' prim hostility to such themes as religion. Frightened by the uproar the article caused among the young Communists, Komsomolskaya Pravda last week ran an editorial condemning not only the two critics but also its own editors for spreading "gross ideological error."

Clandestine Journals. Mindful of the purges of the past, most Russian authors don their own fig leaf and precensor their works before submitting them to the state-owned publishing houses. The more courageous writers have been smuggling their works out to the West, or publishing them in a growing number of crudely printed journals that circulate sub rosa and have an avid readership. Young Leningrad and Moscow writers organized a semisecret association called SMOG (an acronym for youth, courage, image and depth). They not only contribute to such clandestine publications as Phoenix, Sphinx, Kolokol (Bell) and Tetradi (Notebooks), but have secretly published whole works, among them Alexander Urusov's tale of labor camp horrors entitled "The Cry of Far Away Ants." These underground publications also bring the work of such officially disgraced writers as the imprisoned Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel to Russian readers. They rarely get to publish for more than a few issues before their source is discovered and suppressed, and their editors arrested.

Arrests are less frequent than they used to be for ideological transgressions, but Russian writers are well aware that they are still at the mercy of the Soviet bureaucracy. At the Fourth Congress of the Soviet Writers' Union last May, Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) circulated a statement charging that there were "more than 600 writers whom the Writers' Union obediently handed over to their fate in prisons and camps." Solzhenitsyn's letter was a daring diatribe against censorship that accused the censors of making Russian literature "something infinitely poorer, flatter and lower than it actually is." It was signed by 82 of the 500 delegates to the Congress and smuggled out to be published in the West, but no one was defiant enough to ask that it be read aloud during the proceedings.

End of Patience. The wave of protests in the U.S.S.R. also encourages rebellion in fellow Communist nations of Eastern Europe. Doubtless encouraged by Solzhenitsyn, Polish writers at their recent congress passed a resolution demanding that the censors fully explain every deletion in the future. Earlier this month, delegates to the Czechoslovak Writers' Union Congress were so stormy in their demands that the Politburo member assigned as the writers' watchdog, Jiri Hendrych, rose and sputtered: "I have finally reached the end of my patience with you people." Later Hendrych stomped out when all the delegates endorsed Solzhenitsyn's stand and resolved that they would never again allow their work to serve a strictly "propagandistic function."

None of this amounts to open revolt. Czech writers, whatever their new independence, are powerless to save from an almost certain prison sentence their colleague Jan Benes, who was on trial last week in Prague for smuggling his manuscripts abroad. Yet the rising tide of protest seems to be achieving a degree of success. There is speculation that Soviet censors may soon release for publication Solzhenitsyn's The Cancer Ward, a novel about Stalin's secret police that has been smothered in recent years for ideological reasons. Some prominent Russian writers are even predicting that the regime may soon go so far as to abolish all censorship except for that imposed on grounds of military security.

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