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The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol 'pin and the Idea of Rights under “Developed Socialism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Benjamin Nathans
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Abstract

The Soviet mathematical logician Aleksandr Vol'pin is often credited with introducing the post-Stalin dissident strategy of attempting to hold the Soviet government to its own laws. In this article, Benjamin Nathans asks how Vol'pin himself arrived at the deceptively familiar rhetoric of civil rights and rule of law and how that rhetoric functioned in emerging dissident circles in the 1960s. Rather than approaching rights through classic liberal notions of social contract and self-interest, Vol'pin drew on the strikingly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary ferment of Soviet intellectual life during the thaw years, putting logic, philosophy of language, and the burgeoning field of cybernetics to unexpected purposes. The result, Nathans suggests, was a counterintuitive blend of idealism and literalism that became an indispensable element of dissident thought and practice within late Soviet culture.

Type
Genealogies of Soviet Dissent
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 66 , Issue 4 , Winter 2007 , pp. 630 - 663
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2007

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References

I would like to thank the following people for their generous comments on drafts of this article: Olga Borovaya, Laura Engelstein, Gregory Freidin, Slava Gerovitch, Alexander Gribanov, Igal Halfin, Edward Kline, Ann Komaromi, Kevin Piatt, John Randolph, Peter Reddaway, Jonathan Steinberg, Mark Steinberg, Paul Tylkin, Maxim Waldstein, Barbara Walker, Lowry Wyman, the two anonymous readers for Slavic Review, and Aleksandr Sergeevich Esenin-Vol'pin.

1. Madden, Edward, “Civil Disobedience,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York, 1973), 1: 435 Google Scholar.

2. Throughout this article I refer to its protagonist, for purposes of readability, as “Vol'pin,” although he occasionally used a hyphenated last name, Esenin-Vol'pin, combining the last names of his father and mother.

3. Amal'rik, Andrei, Zapiski dissidenta (Ann Arbor, 1982), 42 Google Scholar.

4. Bukovskii, Vladimir, “I vozwashchaetsia veter…” (New York, 1979), 144 Google Scholar. In his 2004 nomination of Vol'pin for the Sakharov Prize in Human Rights, bestowed by the European Parliament, Bukovskii described Vol'pin as the “spiritual father” of the Soviet human rights movement. Bukovskii, e-mail communication, 13 May 2004.

5. Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights (Middletown, 1985), 275 Google Scholar; Alexeyeva, Ludmilla and Goldberg, Paul, The Thaw Generation (Pittsburgh, 1990), 108 Google Scholar. For additional descriptions of Vol'pin's influence, see Sakharov, Andrei, Memoirs (New York, 1990), 273, 314Google Scholar; and Chalidze, Valery, To Defend These Rights: Human Rights and the Soviet Union (New York, 1974), 56 Google Scholar.

6. lurii Aikhenval'd in Literaturnaia gazeta, 16 November 1994, 5; reprinted in Aleksandr Sergeevich Esenin-Vol'pin, Filosofiia. Logika. Poeziia. Zashchita prav cheloveka: Izbrannoe, comp. A. Iu. Daniel’ et al. (Moscow, 1999), 243-45 (hereafter cited as Izbrannoe).

7. On the idea of “apostle,” see Alexeyeva, and Goldberg, , The Thaw Generation, 121 Google Scholar.

8. Yurchak, Aiexei, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 5 Google Scholar. See also Serguei Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,“ Public Culture\?>, no. 2 (2001): 191-214. From a different perspective, Philip Boobbyer has analyzed shared conceptions of conscience and moral regeneration among dissidents, on the one hand, and reformers within the Communist Party, on the other; see Boobbyer, , Conscience, Dissent, and Reform in Soviet Russia (London, 2005)Google Scholar. I plan to review recent scholarship on dissidents and late Soviet culture in a separate essay.

9. The tendency to naturalize Soviet dissidents’ invocation of rights is evident in otherwise valuable books by Rothberg, Abraham, The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime, 1953-1970 (Ithaca, 1972)Google Scholar; and Rubenstein, Joshua, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, 3d ed. (Boston, 1985)Google Scholar.

10. Alexeyeva, and Goldberg, , The Thaw Generation, 4–5 Google Scholar. Alexeyeva's Soviet Dissent is still the most comprehensive study of the phenomenon to date.

11. Berdiaev, Nikolai, Istoki i smyslrusskogo kommunizma (1937; Paris, 1955), 93 Google Scholar.

12. See, for example, Shatz, Marshall, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Friedgut, Theodore, “The Democratic Movement: Dimensions and Perspectives,” in Tökés, Rudolf L., ed., Dissent in the USSR: Politics, Ideology, and People (Baltimore, 1975), 116-36Google Scholar.

13. See Bergman, Jay, “Soviet Dissidents on the Russian Intelligentsia, 1956-1985: The Search for a Usable Past,” Russian Review 51, no. 1 (January 1992): 16–35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Here I follow the argument of Aleksandr Daniel', another participant in the dissident movement and currently one of its subtlest historians, in his “Wie freie Menschen: Ursprung und Wurzeln des Dissens in der Sowjetunion,” in Wolfgang Eichwede, ed., Samizdat. Alternative Kultur in Zentral- und Osteuropa: Die 60er bis 80erjahre (Bremen, 2000), 39. For an earlier statement of this position, see Siniavskii, Andrei, “Dissidenstvo kak lichnyi opyt,” Sintaksis, no. 15 (1985): 131-47Google Scholar.

15. Amal'rik, text of a speech made on receiving the International League for Human Rights 1976 Human Rights Award, reprinted in Amal'rik, Andrei, Will the Soviet Union Surviveuntil 1984?exp. ed. (New York, 1981), 195 Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

16. Beyrau, Dietrich, Intelligenz und Dissens: Die russischen Bildungschichten in der Sowjetunion 1917 bis 1985 (Göttingen, 1993)Google Scholar; Bezborodov, A. B., Fenomen akademicheskogo dissidentstva v SSSR (Moscow, 1998)Google Scholar.

17. See the discussion in Maxim Waldstein [Kupovykh], “The Soviet Empire of Signs: A Social and Intellectual History of the Tartu School of Semiotics” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2005), 51.

18. Which is not to argue that interdisciplinarity per se tended to foster dissent. The majority of those Soviet intellectuals who crossed disciplinary lines in the 1950s and 1960s did not engage in open criticism of the Soviet system. It is possible, moreover, that interdisciplinarity and dissenting behavior originated in a common source, namely a lack of social adaptability—both to one's discipline and to the norms of accepted Soviet behavior. I am grateful to Slava Gerovitch for sharing this idea with me.

19. See the excerpts from the diary of Vol'pin's mother, Nadezhda Vol'pina, in Esenin-Vol'pin, , Izbrannoe, 413-15Google Scholar.

20. Vol'pin, , “Ot ottsa rodnogo li rozhden,” A Leaf of Spring [Vesennii list] (New York, 1961), 44 (poem dated January 1946)Google Scholar. I have on occasion slighdy altered the English translation given in this bilingual edition. Vol'pin's poems, whose quality I do not pretend to judge, contain frequent autobiographical reference points.

21. Archive of the Memorial Society (Moscow), f. 120, korobka 1, papka 1, d. 41,1. 5. As of 2007, Vol'pin's papers have yet to be catalogued, hence the nonstandard form of citation and the absence, in most cases, of dela titles. I am deeply grateful to Gennadii Kuzovkin and Tatiana Bakhmina for making it possible for me to work with Vol'pin's papers.

22. Ibid., 1. 4.

23. Ibid., 1. 13.

24. Ibid., 11. 8-9; see also Vol'pin's poems “Ne igral ia rebenkom s det'mi” and “Ot ottsa rodnogo li rozhden,” the latter of which contains the line “I turned my back on children's play,” in A Leaf of Spring [Vesennii list], 44, 74. By the late 1940s Vol'pin had devised an elaborate calendrical system for dating entries in his diary, in which 12 May 1925 (his date of birth) became 1 “quasi“-January of the year zero. Entries were dated according to this calendar as well as by the exact number of days (reaching into the tens of thousands) that had passed since his date of birth.

25. On the divorce, see Vol'pin, , interview, 1 March 2003 (my interviews with Vol'pin were all conducted in Revere, Massachusetts)Google Scholar.

26. Memorial, f. 120, korobka 1, papka 1, d. 41,1. 12. Before Vol'pin fashioned a detailed written account of this episode on its tenth anniversary (April 1949), he alluded to it in his poem “Ot ottsa rodnogo li rozhden” (January 1946): “I disciplined my thinking at fifteen …“

27. See Vol'pin's, interview with fellow émigré dissident Valerii Chalidze in Chalidze, Otvetstvennost’ pokoleniia: Interv'iu Valeriia Chalidze (New York, 1981), 138 Google Scholar.

28. Memorial, f. 120, korobka 1, papka 1, d. 1 (anketadated 12 July 1953).

29. Memorial, f. 120, korobka 1, papka 5, d. 2 (“Rossiia i la“), 11. 37-38.

30. Sakharov, , Memoirs, 42–49 Google Scholar.

31. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus logico-phibsophicus (1921; London, 1966), 36–37 Google Scholar, entry no. 4.003.1 have slightly altered the English translation given in this bilingual edition.

32. See the poems “P'ianitsa” (March 1944), “Morfin” (July 1944), and “Goreval ia na chuzhbine” (October 1944), in Vol’pin, , A Leaf of Spring [Vesennii list], 32–34, 44Google Scholar.

33. Chalidze, , Otvetstvennost’ pokoleniia, 139 Google Scholar.

34. Alexeyeva, and Goldberg, , The Thaw Generation, 107 Google Scholar.

35. Ibid. Vol'pin, it should be noted, claimed that neither of the preceding stories was accurate. Interview, 30 April 2004. On Vol'pin's nonmembership in the Komsomol, see his 1953 anketa'm Memorial, f. 120, korobka 1, papka 1, d. 1,1. 1, as well as his interview with Chalidze, , Otvetstuennost’ pokoleniia, 137 Google Scholar, where he states that he was a Pioneer for two years and then quit.

36. Alexeyeva, and Goldberg, , The Thaw Generation, 107 Google Scholar, relates this episode from a third, unnamed source.

37. Chalidze, , Otvetstvennost’ pokoleniia, 137-40Google Scholar.

38. Ibid., 137 and 141.

39. Ibid., 140.

40. Vol'pin proposed this latter explanation. Interview, 1 March 2003.

41. Memorial, f. 120, korobka 1, papka 6, d. 1,1. 62.

42. From “la vchera eshche rezvilsia na polianke” (July 1949-March 1951), Vol'pin, , A Leaf of Spring [Vesennii list], 72–74 Google Scholar.

43. Kirk, Irina, Profiles in Russian Resistance (New York, 1975), 119-21 (interview with Vol'pin)Google Scholar.

44. Although the March 1953 amnesty reduced the Soviet prison population by nearly half, it did not apply to individuals sentenced for “counterrevolutionary” crimes and excluded most odier “political” prisoners as well. See Adler, Nanci, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, N.J., 2003), 78 Google Scholar.

45. “Fronda,” Vol'pin, A Leaf of Spring [Vesennii list], 62. In French a “fronde” is a sling or, figuratively, a hostile militant minority. “Fronder” can mean to criticize irreverently.

46. Memorial, f. 120, korobka 1, papka 6, d. 1,1. 61.

47. Gerovitch, Slava, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 1–2 Google Scholar.

48. The first systematic presentation appeared in Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, or, Controland Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass., 1948). Before becoming a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Wiener had studied symbolic logic with Russell at Cambridge University.

49. Insofar as cybernetics took part in the larger tide of postwar structuralism, another distinctive feature of the Soviet setting lies in the fact that cybernetics there was never seriously challenged by anything equivalent to western poststructuralism.

50. Quoted in Gerovitch, , From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, 121 Google Scholar.

51. Ivanov, V V, “Goluboi zver’ (Vospominaniia),” Zvezda, 1995, no. 3:166-67Google Scholar, quoted in Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, 155.

52. Quoted in Gerovitch, , From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, 232 Google Scholar.

53. For the short-lived attempt to apply cybernetics to jurisprudence, see Slava Gerovitch, “Speaking Cybernetically: The Soviet Remaking of an American Science“ (Ph.D. diss., Program in Science, Technology and Society, MIT, 1999), 104. I am grateful to Gerovitch for making this work available to me. On economic planning, see Gerovitch, , From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, chap. 6 Google Scholar.

54. On the Tartu school as “parallel academic sphere,” see Waldstein, , “The Soviet Empire of Signs,” esp. chap. 2 Google Scholar.

55. Vol'pin, private letter to Aleksandr Leonidovich Chizhevskii and Nina Vadimovna Chizhevskaia, date of receipt 4 September 1957, in Arkhiv Akademii Nauk Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow), f. 1703, op. 1, d. 478, 1. 6ob. My thanks to Alexei Kojevnikov and Aleksandr Lokshin for their help in procuring these materials.

56. Ibid.,1. 7.

57. Belfrage, Sally, A Room in Moscow (New York, 1958), 152-59Google Scholar. Belfrage was the daughter of blacklisted Hollywood writers Cedric Belfrage and Mary Beatrice Pigott. A Room in Moscow is her account of her experience at the Youth Festival and the year thereafter, including a series of meetings with Vol'pin beginning in December 1957. Vol'pin appears in the book under the pseudonym “Tolya,” a fact that became known to Soviet officials soon after the book's publication (and was confirmed by Vol'pin in an interview on 1 March 2003). Translated into nine languages, A Room in Moscow stirred controversy on both sides of the Iron Curtain. See the evaluation of the book's “anti-Soviet slander” by the Council of Ministers in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii, f. 5, op. 33, d. 121, rolik 4798,11. 1-12. Vol'pin'sJewishness (on his mother's side, and registered as his official nationality in various documents over the years) rarely surfaces in his diaries and notes, though it is prominent in Belfrage's descriptions of her conversations with him. Vol'pin's personal papers from the 1950s confirm his desire to escape from what he called his “captivity” in the Soviet Union.

58. Russell, Bertrand, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (New York, 1957)Google ScholarPubMed.

59. On the smuggling, see Kline, Edward, interview, New York, 30 April 2004 Google Scholar.

60. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Logiko-jilosofskii traktat (Moscow, 1958)Google Scholar. I have found no evidence that Vol'pin was familiar with the later (and significandy different) Wittgenstein, in particular with the idea of “language games” developed in his Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in the west in 1953). One possible reason for the nominal switch from Russell to Wittgenstein was Russell's controversial call in the mid-1940s for the United States to use its monopoly on nuclear weapons to create a world government whose mission would include die destruction of any country that tried to create nuclear weapons of its own. For this Russell was repeatedly denounced as a warmonger in the Soviet press. See Ryan, Alan, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (New York, 1988), 177 Google Scholar.

61. For representative passages, see Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, en tines 1.1-1.2 and 6.4-6.41 (on fact/value distinctions) and 4.121-4.1213 (on saying versus showing).

62. Quoted in Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York, 1990), 156 Google Scholar.

63. Vol'pin, “Svobodnyi filosofskii traktat, ili Mnogovennoe izlozhenie moikh filosofskikh vzgliadov,” in Vol'pin, A Leaf of Spring [Vesennii list], 170.

64. Ibid., 126, 112.

65. Copies of the 1961 (New York) edition also circulated in samizdat widiin the Soviet Union; one was found on 14 May 1964 in a search of Aleksandr Ginzburg's apartment in Moscow. See Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, f. 8131 (1961 g.), op. 31, d. 89189a, 1. 52, where it is listed as Vesennii listok. The Russian text is also reprinted in Sobranie dokumentov samizdata, comp. Albert Boitar (New York, 1972), 3:document 234.

66. “Actually,” Vol'pin continues, “Columbus was not a great man.” Vol'pin, A Leaf of Spring [Vesennii list], 170-72.

67. Emphasis in the original. “One of the most interesting things about Vol'pin,“ Conquest goes on to say, “is that he shows how impossible it is for even the most efficient system of thought-control to prevent the spontaneous arising of the old questions and aspirations.“ Conquest's review is reproduced in his Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques from the Struggle for Truth (Lexington, Mass., 1989), 79-81. The review's original venue of publication is not given.

68. Vol'pin, , A Leaf of Spring [Vesennii list], 140-42, 128-30Google Scholar. The phrase “freedom is the recognition of necessity” comes from Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Diihring (1878), where it is attributed to Hegel.

69. Vol'pin, , A Leaf of Spring [Vesennii list], 136 Google Scholar.

70. Ibid., 120,160-62.

71. Ibid., 114-16, 156.

72. Vol'pin acknowledged that certain aspects of his thought were “removed from reality.“ He followed this with the memorable comment: “Nu, tern khuzhe dlia deistvitel'nosti“ (Well, too bad for reality). Interview, 1 March 2003.

73. Vol'pin, , A Leaf of Spring [Vesennii list], 144, 156Google Scholar.

74. Ibid., 134-36.

75. Ibid., 114.

76. Clark, Katerina, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 201-23Google Scholar; see also Gorham, Michael, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2003), 8–10 Google Scholar. I have searched in vain for explicit references in Vol'pin's published and unpublished writings to any of the “Promethean” linguists, or to Stalin's well-known 1950 attack on the linguistic theories of the ethnographer Nikolai Marr. It is worth noting, moreover, that Vol'pin's imagined scientifically reformed Russian language differs substantially from the futurist Velimir Khlebnikov's antiscientific zaumnyi iazyk (transrational language, or zaum) and from Marr's universalizing edinyi iazyk (unified language).

77. Such, at any rate, was the impression Vol'pin gave in conversations with psychiatrists at Moscow's Serbskii Institute, where he was involuntarily confined for several weeks in 1959. See Memorial, f. 120, korobka 1, papka 1, d. 28,11. 1-7.

78. Ivanov, “Goluboi zver’ (Vospominaniia),” 166, quoted in Gerovitch, , From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, 235 Google Scholar.

79. As Alexeyeva writes in her memoir, “I subscribed to the truth ethic of Alek Esenin- Vol'pin with one exception: lies concocted for the KGB. I saw nothing improper in attempting to deceive that organization.” Alexeyeva, and Goldberg, , The Thaw Generation, 158 Google Scholar.

80. Memorial, f. 120, korobka 3, papka 1, d. 28,1. 3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Zhit’ ne polzhi (Paris, 1975).

81. Esenin-Vol'pin, , Izbrannoe, 338 and 405-47Google Scholar.

82. Memorial, f. 120, korobka 3, papka 6, d. 1,1. 64.

83. Il'ichev, L. F., Iskusstvoprinadlezh.it narodu (Moscow, 1963), 11–12 Google Scholar.

84. “Iz stenogrammy zasedaniia Ideologicheskoi komissii TsK KPSS s uchastiem molodykh pisatelei, khudozhnikov, kompozitorov, tvorcheskikh rabotnikov kino i teatrov Moskvy” (24 December 1962), in Afanas'eva, E. S., Afiani, V. Iu. et al., eds., Ideologicheskie komissii TsK KPSS 1958-1964: Dokumenty (Moscow, 2000), 310 Google Scholar.

85. Article: Pravda, 22 December 1962; letters to the editor: Pravda, 27 December 1962.

86. Shatunovskii, I., “Iz biografii podletsa,” Ogonek, January 1963, 28 Google Scholar.

87. From Vol'pin's 1972 testimony to the U.S. Senate. For the transcript, see Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abuse of Psychiatry for Political Repression in tlie Soviet Union: Hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee of the Judiciary, 92d Cong., 2d sess., 26 September 1972 (Washington, D.C., 1972), 15. Vol'pin had arrived in the United States ten days earlier.

88. Vol'pin's simultaneous endorsement of “anarchy” and “rule of law” is puzzling. He once defined anarchy as the “absence of power” (bezvlastie), which could in theory leave room for law. Memorial, f. 120, korobka 1, papka 2, d. 3,1. 2. When I asked him about his use of the term anarchy, he replied, “If we had had the term libertarianism, I would have used that.” Interview, 30 April 2004.

89. Memorial, f. 120, korobka 1, papka 2, d. 10,11. 2-4.

90. Until historians gain fuller access to the relevant archives, we can only speculate as to why Vol'pin was not arrested and tried for the crimes described in the article in Ogonek. Such decisions, as a general matter, were characterized by a high degree of caprice, fueling endless speculation among dissidents and observers of the Soviet Union as to why certain dissidents were arrested and others not, why some were put on trial and others not, why some were allowed (or forced) to emigrate and others not. In Vol'pin's case, his biological father's posthumous fame may have made the regime reluctant to pursue him publicly, especially after the international scandal that resulted from the savaging of Pasternak. Lack of evidence could hardly have acted as an impediment in Vol'pin's case: A Leaf of Spring, and especially the “Free Philosophical Tractate,” fit the regime's understanding of “anti-Soviet agitadon” as much or more than the works of Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel', whose 1966 trial I discuss in the pages that follow. It is also possible that, at the time, the KGB considered Vol'pin's work so obscure as to be harmless.

91. Memorial, f. 120, korobkal, papka 5, d. 2,1.10. In his breezy memoirs, Shatunovskii makes no mention of Vol'pin's lawsuit. He does note, however, that over the course of his (Shatunovskii's) career he was brought to court thirty-four times for unspecified journalistic infractions. Shatunovskii, Il'ia M., Zapiski strelianogo vorob'ia (Moscow, 2003), 207 Google Scholar.

92. Memorial, f. 120, korobka 2, papka 4, d. 21,1. 47.

93. Bukovskii, “I vozvrashchaetsia veter... “212 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original. I have borrowed wording from Michael Scammell's English translation of Bukovskii's memoirs: Bukovsky, Vladimir, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter (New York, 1979), 238 Google Scholar.

94. Quoted in Taubman, William, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003), 620 Google Scholar.

95. Vol'pin, , “On the Constitution of the USSR: Report to the Moscow Human Rights Committee,” reprinted in Chalidze, Valery and Lipson, Leon, eds., Papers on Soviet Law (New York, 1977), 1:66 Google Scholar. See also the interview with Vol'pin in Kirk, Profiles in Russian Resistance, 115.

96. Vol'pin, unpublished memoir (typescript, no title, no date, but composed sometime after 1990), 45. My deep gratitude to Lowry Wyman for making this document available to me. Vol'pin favored a law-based approach in his private life as well: before entering his second marriage in 1962, he presented his wife-to-be with what amounted to an elaborate prenuptial agreement, spelling out each party's rights and obligations vis-a-vis the other. See Memorial, f. 120, korobka 2, d. 7 (“Dogovor o sovmestnoi zhizni“).

97. Daniel’, A. Iu. and Roginskii, A. B., eds., Piatoe dekabria 1965 goda v vospominaniiakh uchastnikov sobytii, materialakh Samizdata, dokumentakh partiinykh i komsomol’ skikh organizatsii i v zapiskakh Komiteta gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti v TsKKPSS (Moscow, 1995), 25 Google Scholar. See also Ann Komaromi's article in die present issue of Slavic Review.

98. Daniel’, and Roginskii, , eds., Piatoe dekabria, 11, 19, 23Google Scholar.

99. See, for example, Alexeyeva's account of her own reaction, in Alexeyeva, and Goldberg, , The Thaw Generation, 113 Google Scholar, and that of others as described in Daniel’, and Roginskii, , eds., Piatoe dekabria, 23–24 Google Scholar.

100. Vol'pin, unpublished memoir, 12. A decade earlier, published letters from ordinary Soviet citizens who endorsed the government's campaign against Boris Pasternak— even as they admitted to not having read his work—provoked widespread scorn among intellectuals. Vol'pin's intentional ignorance of works by Terts and Arzhak followed a different logic. On the anti-Pasternak letters, see Kozlov, Denis, ‘“I Have Not Read, But I Will Say': Soviet Literary Audiences and Changing Ideas of Social Membership, 1958-66,“ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 557-97CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

101. Daniel’, and Roginskii, , eds., Piatoe dekabria, 27 Google Scholar.

102. Complete Russian texts of all the Soviet Constitutions, including drafts and amendments, can be accessed at http://constitution.garant.ru/DOC_8003.htm (last consulted 6 August 2007).

103. Daniel’, and Roginskii, , eds., Piatoe dekabria, 18, 27Google Scholar.

104. Quoted in Vol'pin, unpublished memoir, 8.

105. Ibid., 16.

106. Ibid., 16. In a brief statement included in Aleksandr Ginzburg's samizdat compilation of documents relating to the trial of Siniavskii and Daniel', Vol'pin wrote of Tarsis (who had just been permitted to emigrate from the USSR): “He is too emotional, and elevates to the level of a cult his incapacity for (or extreme hostility to) systematic thought.” Ginzburg, , Belaia kniga: Sbornik dokumentov po delu A. Siniavskogo i Iu. Danielia (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), 402 Google Scholar.

107. SMOG is an acronym for both “Boldness, Thought, Form, Depdi” and “The Youngest Society of Geniuses.” For the slogans, see Daniel’, and Roginskii, , eds., Piatoe dekabria, 14 Google Scholar.

108. The generational argument is elaborated in ibid., 12-14.

109. Esenin-Vol'pin, , Izbrannoe, 313 Google Scholar.

110. On the emotionality of “respect,” see Vol'pin, unpublished memoir, 2.

111. Daniel’, and Roginskii, , eds., Piatoedekabria, 33–35 Google Scholar.

112. Ibid., 40-41.

113. Rubin, Vitalii, Dnevniki—Pis’ ma (Jerusalem, 1989), 1:69 Google Scholar.

114. Alexeyeva, and Goldberg, , The Thaw Generation, 124 Google Scholar.

115. Vol'pin, unpublished memoir, 29-30. Western media coverage, which was not extensive, described the event as a demonstration in defense of the arrested writers and emphasized the symbolism of staging it at the monument to the great poet Aleksandr Pushkin. “They didn't have time,” Vol'pin lamented, “to include the words ‘open trial.'“ Vol'pin, unpublished memoir, 30.

116. Kozlov, Denis, “The Readers of Novyi Mir, 1945-1970: Twentieth-Century Experience and Soviet Historical Consciousness” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2005), chap. 8 Google Scholar. Kozlov speculates on whether the reference to Esenin signified the famous poet or his son (Vol'pin). Given diat Sergei Esenin died in 1925 (and was, to the best of my knowledge, never arrested) and that in the anecdote told by Nikolai Williams, Vol'pin was referred to as the son of Esenin, it seems clear that the anonymous “Worker” had Vol'pin, not his father, in mind.

117. Vol'pin presents this scenario as a hypothesis, reinforced by a second similar episode two years later. Vol'pin, unpublished memoir, 31-32. No other evidence concerning this claim has yet been found. At the time, western media mistakenly reported that Vol'pin had been arrested.

118. For a transcript of the trial, see Ginzburg, Belaia kniga; additional documents related to the trial are collected in Eremina, L. S., ed., Tsena metafory, Hi, prestuplenie i nakazanie Siniavskogo i Danielia (Moscow, 1989)Google Scholar. For recent analyses, see Nepomnyashchy, Catharine Theimer, Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime (New Haven, 1995)Google Scholar; and Murav, Harriet, Russia's Legal Fictions (Ann Arbor, 1998), chap. 6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

119. See, for example, “Pis'mo 62 pisatelei” (undated; not later than March 1966), among whose signatories were Bela Akhmadulina, Kornei Chukovskii, Lidiia Chukovskaia, Il'ia Erenburg, Veniamin Kaverin, Lev Kopelev, Bulat Okudzhava, Raisa Orlova, David Samoilov, Viktor Shklovskii, and Vladimir Voinovich; reproduced in Eremina, , ed., Tsena metafory, 499–500 Google Scholar. See also Alekseev, Gennadii, “Otkrytoe pis'mo grazhdanam sovetskogo soiuza [22 October 1968],” Sobranie dokumentov samizdata (New York, 1972), 1: document 80 Google Scholar. For an excellent analysis of letters about the trial sent to (but never published by) the journal Novyi mir, see Kozlov, , “The Readers of Novyi mir,” chap. 8 Google Scholar.

120. Paraphrased from Nepomnyashchy, , Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime, 18–19 Google Scholar

121. See ibid, and Murav, , Russia's Legal Fictions, chap. 6 Google Scholar.

122. Bukovskii, likening Vol'pin's literalism to the artificial intelligence of a computer, imagined an encounter between Vol'pin and the Soviet security apparatus as follows: “On the one hand, it's impossible to intimidate or confuse a computer, to pressure it into a compromise, a false confession or even a partial lie. On the other hand, the computer will simply not grasp the ambiguous language of interrogators’ questions, of Soviet laws.” Bukovskii, , “I vozvrashchaetsia veter... “ 210 Google Scholar.

123. Esenin-Vol'pin, hbrannoe, 321 (originally published in Ginzburg's Belaia kniga). In his March 1966 speech to the Twenty-Third Party Congress, the writer Mikhail Sholokhov drew a similar contrast, though with the opposite evaluation: “If these fine fellows with their black consciences had turned up in the memorable 1920s, when trials were conducted, not on the basis of rigorously circumscribed articles of the Criminal Code, but 'guided by revolutionary justice’ [applause], oh, these turncoats would have received a very different measure of punishment.” Ginzburg, , Belaia kniga, 387 Google Scholar.

124. Such views appear among the unpublished letters to Novyi mir concerning the Siniavskii-Daniel’ trial, as analyzed by Kozlov, “The Readers of Novyi Mir” chap. 8. One such letter was sent by Ernst Semenovich Orlovskii, a Leningrad lawyer, mathematical logician, and acquaintance of Vol'pin. Vol'pin, unpublished memoir, 43.

125. In 1967, Ginzburg's Belaia kniga appeared in German, French, and English translations.

126. The didactic purpose of spreading legal consciousness, it seems to me, was related but not identical to the official Soviet notion of the “educational role of law” (vospitatel'naia rot prava). According to the latter, law was an instrument for fostering certain kinds of thinking and behavior, part of the larger project of fashioning the new Soviet person. Vol'pin's strategy also aimed at new ways of thinking and behaving, but primarily in order to teach citizens to use the law as a device for regulating the behavior of the state. See Berman, Harold J., “The Educational Role of Soviet Criminal Law and Civil Procedure,“ in Barry, Donald D., Buder, William E., and Ginsburgs, George, eds., Contemporary Soviet Law: Essays in Honor of John N. Hazard (The Hague, 1974), 1–16 Google Scholar.

127. The USSR and other countries of the Soviet bloc had abstained from voting on the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, citing its “overly juridical” character as well as the infringements on national sovereignty that it might enable. See Glendon, Mary Ann, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 2001), 167-69Google Scholar.

128. Thomas, Daniel, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar; quotation from Khronika tekushchikh sobytii, no. 40 (20 May 1976) at http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/chr/index.htm (last consulted 8 August 2007).

129. Quoted in Esenin-Vol'pin, , hbrannoe, 11 Google Scholar.

130. Quoted in Kadarkay, Arpad, Human Rights in American and Russian Political Thought (Washington, D.C., 1982), 109 Google Scholar.

131. On the persistence of “Leninism” as a rallying cry in workers’ strikes and other popular disturbances, see Kozlov, V. A., Massovye besporiadki v SSSRpri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve: 1953-nachalo 1980-kh gg. (Novosibirsk, 1999)Google Scholar; Kozlov, V. A. and Mironenko, S. V., eds., Kramola: Inakomyslie v SSSRpri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve 1953-1982gg. Rassekrechennye dokumenty Verkhovnogo suda i Prokuratury SSSR (Moscow, 2005), 37, 60Google Scholar.

132. A. Mikhailov [A. A. Malinovskii], “Soobrazheniia po povodu liberal'noi kampanii 1968 goda,” Memorial, f. 156, pap. “Mikhailov.” My thanks to Gennadii Kuzovkin for making this document available to me.

133. Acton, Edward, “Revolutionaries and Dissidents: The Role of the Russian Intellectual in the Downfall of Tsarism and Communism,” in Jennings, Jeremy and Kemp-Welch, Anthony, eds., Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie (New York, 1997), 149-68Google Scholar; Oushakine, , “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,” 195-96Google Scholar.

134. Szacki, Jerzy, Liberalism after Communism (New York, 1995), 210. Emphasis in the originalGoogle Scholar.

135. Except perhaps in his mathematical work, which is beyond my ability to comprehend, much less interpret.

136. Aikhenval'd, Iurii, Don Kikhot na russkoi pochve (New York, 1982), 1:17 Google Scholar.

137. On the slippers, see Alexeyeva, and Goldberg, , The Thaw Generation, 107 Google Scholar.