Tactical Retreat

As Aeroflot Flight No. SU 229 prepared to take off from Moscow to Amsterdam last week, Russian Writer Andrei Amalrik tucked his Siamese cat Disa under his arm while his artist wife Gyusel accepted a farewell bouquet of red peonies. KGB agents darted in and out of the small crowd assembled at Sheremetyevo Airport, snapping pictures of the couple taking leave of their desolate friends.

The scene marked the end of a historic decade of dissent in the Soviet Union. Since 1965 the KGB had conducted a campaign to fragment Russia's "democratic movement for human rights" by imprisoning or exiling its members. Amalrik, 38, was the last of his generation of celebrated protester-intellectuals to succumb. At Moscow airport, Physicist Valentin Turchin, a longtime Amalrik friend, explained that although a whole new group of lesser-known dissidents had sprung up to replace the old, "Andrei's departure is a pity for us; he is able to draw much attention to our movement."

Amalrik electrified Western readers with his 1969 book Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, which prophesied the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. as a result of internal upheaval and war with China. Over the past decade this and other writings published only in the West cost Amalrik two terms in concentration camps and two stretches of Siberian exile. After his return a year ago from eastern Siberia, he was offered the choice of publicly repudiating his book or exile. Refusing to do either, he was placed under constant KGB surveillance, frequently picked up, interrogated and threatened. Finally he agreed to go West. His departure, originally scheduled for late June, was delayed when he balked at demands by the Soviet Ministry of Culture that he pay a $5,400 export duty on various art objects, including paintings by his wife, whose work was officially unauthorized.

On his arrival in Amsterdam, Amalrik said he looked forward to a "normal life," planned to write a book on political terrorism and to lecture in Holland and the U.S. He also expressed fears for the new crop of dissidents he left behind. The KGB has begun to use "Mafia methods," he said, citing the recent fatal mugging of Poet Konstantin Boga-tyryov, the Russian translator of Rainer Maria Rilke who had protested against Soviet civil rights violations. While the scholar was dying of a fractured skull in the hospital, Amalrik went on, KGB agents ordered the doctors to "fix him so he will come out an idiot," then threatened the physicians when they refused to comply with their order. Still, Amalrik expressed hope that he could continue to struggle against repression. "My leaving the Soviet Union is not exactly a victory," he said. "I would call it a tactical retreat; I have retreated in order to strike back in the future."

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