Free at Last

But Soviet exiles remember

The dinner party given by the Association of American Publishers on the occasion of the last Moscow International Book Fair had been a literary highlight. It was 1979, and present at the plush Aragvi Restaurant in the Soviet capital was a pleiad of Russian writers and intellectuals, including Andrei Sakharov, the famed nuclear physicist, Dissident Author Anatoli Marchenko, Novelists Vasili Aksyonov and Vladimir Voinovich, and Critics Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova. But when the U.S. publishers got ready to give another such gala at the Moscow book fair this month, they knew the party would have to be smaller.

Since the last outing, the KGB has seized Sakharov and dispatched him to the city of Gorky, where he has been held incommunicado for the past 20 months. Marchenko has just been sentenced to ten years of hard labor and five of exile for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Aksyonov, Voinovich, Kopelev, Orlova and several others have been forced to live abroad. Even the erstwhile hosts have been made unwelcome. Four prominent American publishers were refused visas to the Soviet Union, and Random House Chairman Robert L. Bernstein was the target of an anti-Semitic attack in Literaturnaya Gazeta.

The result was an A.A.P. boycott of the book fair in Moscow and a change of venue for the party. The survivors of the ill-fated 1979 gathering who were able to attend joined about 50 other Soviet exiles last week for a dinner of stuffed capon and salade russe in the Trustees Room of the 42nd Street public library in New York City. The publishers created a minifair of their own: a table laden with U.S.-published books by Russian writers who are banned in the U.S.S.R. Said Bernstein: "The pattern of intimidation, of fear, of harsh sentences arbitrarily meted out to Soviet writers, scientists and thinkers who dare speak their minds is unacceptable. We will not be a party to it by conducting business as usual."

Some of the exiled writers disputed the American decision to boycott the Soviet book fair. "Do not punish Soviet readers for the crimes of the Soviet government," pleaded the venerable German literature scholar Kopelev, 69, who had come from West Germany for the exiles' party. He recalled that people had lined up for miles to attend the foreign book exhibitions in Moscow in previous years. Novelist Yuz Aleshkovsky noted that eager readers had actually stolen many of the Western books that were shown at the Moscow fair. Said he: "When I think about the Soviet government and its wardens for whom all these fairs are merely another propaganda show, I am all for the boycott, but when I think about the people for whom this is the only opportunity to see, or maybe even to steal, say, the Bible, I cannot be purely pragmatic."

As the vodka flowed, customary Russian conviviality was mixed with concern over the fate of Marchenko, jailed because of his prison camp memoirs, and similar worries about a host of other victims of the latest squeeze of Soviet repression. Tatyana Yankelevich, Sakharov's stepdaughter, who immigrated to Boston in 1977, angrily denounced Soviet officials who are "demonstrating their power on the bones of the best citizens of Russia." Biologist Vladimir Bukovsky, 38, who had spent nine years in Soviet prisons and camps before he was exchanged for a Chilean Communist in 1976, listed some of the dissidents who have recently been dispatched to the Gulag, including Historian Arseni Roginsky, who was arrested last month on the charge of forging a library card. Said Bukovsky: "If all these writers, poets, editors and journalists were allowed to attend the present reception, this room would be too small to admit them. Only Soviet prisons are spacious enough for that purpose."

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