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Forming a Transnational Moral Community between Soviet Dissidents and Ex-Communist Western Supporters: The Case of Pavel Litvinov, Karel van het Reve and Stephen Spender

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2019

Yasuhiro Matsui
Yasuhiro Matsui*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka Nishi-ku Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan
*
matsui@scs.kyushu-u.ac.jp
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Abstract

The Soviet dissident and human rights movement, emerging publicly in the mid-1960s, became known globally through various supportive actions of Moscow foreign correspondents and Western intellectuals. For instance, Pavel Litvinov, a well-known dissident, had close relationships with foreigners, especially Karel van het Reve, a Dutch correspondent in Moscow, and Stephen Spender, a British poet, both formerly communists. This article attempts to elucidate aspects of the personal and ethical interactions among these three figures, focusing on van het Reve's and Spender's support activities and projects, particularly the Alexander Herzen Foundation and Writers and Scholars International, founded in 1969 and 1971, respectively, to understand how a transnational moral community was formed.

Type
Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 77 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 For example, see Ferguson, Niall, ‘Introduction: Crisis, What Crisis? The 1970s and the Shock of the Global’, in Ferguson, Niall, Maier, Charles S., Manela, Erez and Sargent, Daniel J., eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Moyn, Samuel, ‘The Return of the Prodigal: The 1970s as a Turning Point in Human Rights History’, in Eckel, Jan and Moyn, Samuel, eds., The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 3Google Scholar.

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6 Gorbanevskaia, Polden’ (2017), 215. For a comprehensive study of the ethical and moral dimension of Soviet dissidents and party reformers, see Boobbyer, Philip, Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar. As Pavel Litvinov realised, moral appeal ‘was political in the sense that it threatened the foundations of Soviet Power’. See Moyn, Last Utopia, 136.

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12 Bogoraz may possibly have been recalling a conversation with van het Reve, although the two became acquainted with each other in 1967–8.

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16 Litvinov's statement at the International Sakharov Conference, 10.

17 On this embryonic Soviet and transnational public sphere, see Matsui, Yasuhiro, ‘Obshchestvennost’ across Borders: Soviet Dissidents as a Hub of Transnational Agency’, in Matsui, Yasuhiro, ed., Obshchestvennost’ and Civic Agency in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia: Interface between State and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 198–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 See Litvinov's statement at the International Sakharov Conference, 10.

19 Letters and Telegrams to Pavel M. Litvinov, December 1967–May 1968, edited and annotated by Karel van het Reve (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1969).

20 Takashi Oka, ‘Funnel for Soviet Dissent’, The Christian Science Monitor, 4 Apr. 1972, 1. Some information on media coverage on van het Reve and his Herzen Foundation was acquired from Archief Alexander Herzen Foundation housed at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (hereafter, AAHF), no. 272. This article from the Christian Science Monitor notes an ‘ironic coincidence’, stating that ‘the house at 268 Amstel where Professor van het Reve lives with his wife . . . and where the Herzen Foundation is housed used to be the headquarters of the Dutch Communist Party in the years before World War II’.

21 Karel van het Reve, ‘In perspective’, Newsweek, 2 Feb. 1970, 5.

22 Karel van het Reve, Verzameld Werk 5 (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij G.A. van Oorschot, 2010), 283; Pavel Litvinov, ‘Ia s gordost'iu nazovu sebia liberalom’, available at https://www.colta.ru/articles/dissidents/7332-pavel-litvinov-ya-s-gordostyu-nazovu-sebya-liberalom (last visited 29 Apr. 2018).

23 van het Reve, Karel, ‘Introduction’, in Litvinov, Pavel, The Demonstration in Pushkin Square, translated by Harari, Manya (London: Harvill Press, 1969), 11Google Scholar.

24 Crossman, Richard, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949)Google Scholar.

25 To distinguish the term ‘ex-communist’ with Deutscher's implication from its common usage, this article writes ‘ex-Communist’ when Deutscher's understanding is intended, except when it appears in quoted text.

26 Deutscher, Isaac, ‘The Ex-Communist's Conscience’, in Deutscher, Isaac, Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades, edited and introduced by Deutscher, Tamara (London: Verso, 1984), 50Google Scholar.

27 Deutscher, ‘Ex-Communist's Conscience’, 53–4.

28 Crossman, God, 2, 113

29 Deutscher, ‘Ex-Communist's Conscience’, 57–8.

30 Crossman, God, 272.

31 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Ex-Communists’, The Commonweal, 20 Mar. 1953, 595.

32 Ibid., 595.

33 Ibid., 598.

34 Ibid., 596.

35 Crossman, God, 233, 272–3.

36 Sutherland, John, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 438–55Google Scholar.

37 Oka, ‘Funnel for Soviet Dissent’, 1. And see also Iu. Karelin, ‘Obshchestvo zlopykhatelei’, Pravda, 15 Jan. 1970, 5.

38 Oka, ‘Funnel for Soviet Dissent’, 1.

39 Crossman, God, 221.

40 Oka, ‘Funnel for Soviet Dissent’, 3.

41 Litvinov's statement at the International Sakharov Conference, 10; Pavel Litvinov, interview with Yasuhiro Matsui through Skype, 26 Jan. 2015 in New York (27 Jan. in Japan).

42 The Times, 13 Jan. 1968, 8.

43 Index on Censorship, 4, 1 (1975), 8.

44 Pavel Mikhailovich Litvinov Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, box 4–2: Index on Censorship, 1997.

45 Stephen Spender Archive, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Spender 62: correspondence with Reve, Karel van het, 1968.

46 Index on Censorship, 4, 1 (1975), 8–9. Litvinov's original letter, typed in Russian and accompanied by his written signature, is contained in the AAHF, no. 56: Typoscript van brief van Pavel Litvinov aan Stephen Spender. 1968. The English version issued in Index on Censorship omitted several paragraphs, including Litvinov's gratitude to van het Reve and a postscript from the original. In his postscript, Litvinov mentioned that Anatoly Marchenko, who had been confined in a labour camp under Khrushchev from 1960 to 1966 and had written a Samizdat essay entitled Moi pokazaniia after his release, had been arrested on 29 July 1968, and asked Spender to help Marchenko by drawing international attention to his plight, for example by publishing his essays in the West.

47 Litvinov was permitted to return to Moscow in 1972 after spending four years in exile.

48 AAHF, no. 40: Kopie van de beginselverklaring van de Alexander Herzen Stichting en stukken betreffende oprichting en geldwerving. 1969, 1971 en z.j.

49 AAHF, no. 40.

50 Litvinov, Pavel, ‘Natasha skazala: ia napishu tvoi lozung’, in Ulitskaia, Liudmila, Poetka: Kniga o pamiati: Natal'ia Gorbanevskaia (Moscow: AST, 2014), 293–4Google Scholar.

51 Natal'ia Gorbanevskaia, ‘Chto ia pomniu o demonstratsii’, in Ulitskaia, Poetka, 289–90. Liudmilra Alekseeva, another celebrated dissident, also observed, ‘I don't like slogans. They rob political thought of its inherent complexity. “To Your Freedom and Ours!” may be the only exception’. See Alexeyeva and Goldberg, Thaw Generation, 220.

52 AAHF, no. 24: Brieven van Andrej Amal'rik aan Karel Van het Reve en concepten van antwoorden en bijlagen. 1968–1971, 1975–1979 en z.j.

53 AAHF, no. 8: ‘Financiele correspondentie’, dwz doorslagen van brieven van Elisabeth Fisher aan J. en K. van het Reve (en Bezemer) en staten van baten en lasten betr. de verschillende publikaties (vnl. Amalrik, Marčenko), 1969–1976.

54 AAHF, no. 8.

55 AAHF, no. 8.

56 Although it is unclear whether the foundation's work had some influence on the Dutch government, the Netherlands played a leading role in ensuring the insertion of a human rights clause during the negotiation process leading to the Helsinki Final Act signed in 1975. See Baudet, Floribert, ‘“It was Cold War and We Wanted to Win”: Human Rights, “détente”, and the CSCE’, in Wenger, Andreas, Mastny, Vojtech and Nuenlist, Christian, eds., Origins of the European Security System: The Helsinki Process Revisited, 1965–1975 (London: Routledge, 2008), 183–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 See Litvinov's statement at the International Sakharov Conference, 10.

58 van het Reve, Karel, Verzameld Werk 6 (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij G.A. van Oorschot, 2011), 270Google Scholar. A copy of this ‘diploma’ dated 15 August 1968 and signed by Amalrik, Litvinov and Bogoraz was found in AAHF, no. 267.

59 Stephen Spender, ‘Writers and Scholars International’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 Oct. 1971, 1270; Spender, Stephen, ‘With Concern for Those Not Free’, Index on Censorship, 1, 1 (1972), 11–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Spender, ‘With Concern for Those Not Free’, 11.

61 Ibid., 12–3.

62 Ibid., 13.

63 Index on Censorship, 1, 1 (1972), 81–92.

64 Spender, ‘With Concern for Those Not Free’, 14.

65 A collaborative relationship was established with Amnesty International, an organisation that focuses on rescuing ‘prisoners of conscience’ internationally, through Zbynek Zeman, Research Director of Amnesty International, who served as a founding WSI trustee. Scammell claims that WSI focused on publishing Index as a division of roles between them. See Scammell, Michael, ‘How Index on Censorship started’, Index on Censorship, 10, 6 (1981), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Scammell, Michael, ‘Freedom is Not a Luxury’, Index on Censorship, 39, 1 (2010), 156, 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Moyn, Last Utopia.

68 Ibid., 167–8.

69 The discussion here is mostly based on Benjamin Nathans ‘The Disenchantment of Socialism: Soviet Dissidents, Human Rights, and the New Global Morality’, in Eckel and Moyn, The Breakthrough, 35–42. Detailed information can be obtained from Arkhiv samizdata: Sobranie dokumentov samizdata (Munich: Samizdat Archive Association, 1972–1978), 24, 126, 448, 571, 1015, 1433, 1501, passim (quoted from Microfiche).

70 On human rights activism after the Helsinki Final Act, see Sarah B. Snyder, Human rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).