Sunday, January 23, 1977.
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
Page Five
Sunday, January 23, 1977 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five
3UNDAY MAGAZINE
~PROF ILES..
hlioo
Amalri
has
the
Soviet
AlIIo
form of samizdat (undergroundt
self-publication).
Both, however, reached the
West and went into print in'
1970. For this, Amalrik was con-
victed on charges of "slander-l
ing the Soviet state" and sen-
tenced to three years in an East
Asian labor camp.
After that experience, Ann
Arbor's recent cold snap didn'ti
faze him in the least:l
"In Magadan, the tempera-1
ture would get down to -60 de-l
grees (-76° Fahrenheit), al-1
though," he quickly added, "it
only averaged -30 (-22° Fahren-
heit) in the winter.",
In 1984, Amalrik charged,a
"Self government, equality be-
fore the law, and personal free-
dom . .. are completely foreign,
to the Russian people."
He described the Soviet Com-
munist regime as the directa
continuation of tha Tsarist Rus-;
sian Empire, saying, "I hope toI
be a witness to the end of that
state."
Amalrik went on to outline,
factors pointing to the USSR's
inevitable destruction, among
which were:
* that liberalization of Soviet
society as a result of internal
forces was "unlikely;"
r that "declining r e g i m e s
(like the Soviet government)
have historically produced ag-
gressive foreign policies;"
f that China was also under-
going strong pressures to ex=
pand, and would likely direct its
aggression towards the USSR.
He said this war would break
out as soon as China achieved
military readiness in the early
1980's;
O that this war would unleash
pent up national discontents
among Eastern Europeantand
minority Soviet peoples, leading
to the dissolution of the Soviet,
"empire."x
During his speech, Amalrik
observed, "The tendencies that
I noted in my book have turned
out to be true., Apparently, I un-
derestimated the flexibility of
Soviet production and bureauc-
racy. And, on the other hand,
I overestimated the ability of:
China to produce arms.
This .breakdown of Soviet so-
ciety will happen later than I
had anticipated."
rPHE SOVIET dissident move-
ment includes people with
diverse and conflicting political
beliefs. These range from those
like Roy and Zhores Medvedev,
who advocate "the restoration
of true Marxism-Leninism" to!
others like Aleksandr Solzhenit-
syn, who call for a return to
"Christian morality."
Amalrik was reluctant to put
himself in such a category,
however.
"I am one of the writers, and
as a writer, I'm not in one of
those types of intellectuals. But
if I were to say what kinds of'
political viewpoints I'm closest
to, I would say I'm part of the
liberal democratic viewpoint,
that is, the middle group.
"I believe in the co-existence
of various viewpoints within so-
ciety. Within the so-called Chris-
tian type of ideology, there is a
strong tendency to move to-
wards totalitarianism, that is,
complete answers on all ques-
tions, and this is also shown to
be true in Marxism. Marxism
on one hand, the Christian move-
ment on the other, both have
these tendencies."
Amalrik said he has seen a
change in how the Soviet gov-
ernment handled the dissident,
movement in r e c e n t years.
When the movement first arose
about 1968, the government at-
tempted to wipe it out, but this
tactic failed, he said.
"The Soviet government has
now realized that, it can't de-
stroy the dissident movement,
but (instead) it has tried to
limit it," that is, keep it con-
fined to certain large cities and
away from the countryside.
Widespread discontent among
Russian J e w s has received
much publicity in the U.S. What
accounts for this dissatisfaction?
Amalrik explained it this way:
"Russian tradition is a mes-
sianic tradition. Marxist tradi-
tion is a messianic tradition.
And Jewish tradition is also a
messianic tradition. What this
means is that the Russian and.
the Marxist traditions get to-
gether and they don't make any
room for the Jewish tradition
...and, consequently, it gets
pushed out of the way.
"Jews within Soviet society
just don't have a place there,
really," he continued. "They al-
ways feel themselves a little bit
of an outsider, somehow foreign
to the whole system."
At Rackhan that night, much
of the audience understood Rus-
sian, and Amalrik's jokes got as
many laughs before translation
as after. He employed irony,
vivid metaphor and many sharp
jabs to attack current American
policies on the Soviet Union.
"The strangest thing about
U.S. policy," he remarked, "has
been that the U.S. supported
Communism in countries whose
people didn't want it, and then
fought it where they did want
it." A m a l r i k put Eastern
Europe in the first category and
Vietnam in the second.
He continually returned to his
central theme that U.S. security
and Soviet liberalization are di-
rectly tied to one another.
"While the USSR is a closed
totalitarian society, the U.S. will
See SOVIET, Page 4
UNIVERSITY
SHOWCASE
PRODUCTION
-"When You Commn'
Back, Red Ryder?"
an adult drama
by
MARK MEDOFF
JANUARY 26-29
ARENA THEATER
(located in Frieze Bldg')
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PTP Box Office
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Let the Sun Shine In
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February 17 thru 20, 1977
Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre, Ann Arbor
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By DAVID GOODMAN
W HY DID ANDREI AmairixK
rebel?
What induced him first to
question, then to reject, and fi-
nally to take up battle against
all the basic assumptions of So-
viet society?
Why did he revolt, when every
social pressure told him, "Go
along, don't make waves."?
"If a person grew up in a
period when so c iety never
changes, then unconsciously he
would get the idea that it could
never change. But that's not
what happened in my case,"
Amalrik explained.
For the past 11 of his 38 years,
the Moscow-born Russian his-
torian has been 'engaged in a
continuous struggle with the So-
viet establishment for the right
to freely express his views.
Views which are highly critical
of. that regime.
Last Monday, Amalrik carried
his private war to Ann Arbor,
telling 400 people at Rackham
Auditorium that the U.S. gov-
ernment should use political and
economic muscle to force liberal
reforms on the Soviet govern-
ment.
Amalrik looks as though he
could be anywhere from 20 to
60 years old. His clean-shaven
face stares out from behind
thick horn-rimmed glasses. He
stands about five and a half
feet tall, and his short brown
hair is cropped just slightly
longer than your average 1956-
style crew cut.
He was wearing a conserva-
tive white linen shirt, but his
grey pin-stripe suit was cut in a
mod style, and his chunky-
heeled shoes looked like some-
thing out of the disco scene.
Amalrik was born in 1938, in
the middle of Joseph Stalin's
rule. The dissident referred to
his childhood as "a very, very
gloomy period."
"It was a society of isolation,
a society of great represison
and great poverty. It wasn't just
gloomy within, it was gloomy
without. People would wear
clothing that was very black
and )depressing." Several mem-
bers of Amalrik's own family
died in Stalin's purges.
"But during my youth," he
continued, "began my period of
hope and seeing that change
was possible. Why? Well, be-
cause when I was about 18,
that's when de-Stalinization hap-
pened, see? And so I could see
that change was posible in this
world."
EThis marked the 'birth of
Amalrik the optimist aid Armal-
rik the rebel.
tWH A T ARE Andrei Amalrik's
views that so threatened'
the Soviet establishment that it
sought to suppress them by exil-
ing him to Siberia, throwing him
in prison, and finally expelling
him last April?
His first clash with authori-
ties came in 1965 over a thesis
written for the History Depart
ment at Moscow State Univer-
sity. In that paper, Amalrik ad-
vanced the heretical proposition
'that the Kiev Rus, the medieval
state which was the precursor
of modern Russia, had strong
1 Norse cultural influences.
This contradicted the accepted
dogma that Russian civilization
developed autonomously. When
he refused to retract the offend-
ing document, Amalrik was ex-
Spelled.
His wide-ranging and funda-
mental critique of Soviet society
seems to have crystalized dur-
ing a one year stint on a col-
lective farm in Siberia. He was
sent there after a court con-
victed him in 1965 of "economic
parasitism"-or failure to hold
a "normal" job.
During that exile in the small
farming village of Krivosheino,
Amalrik wrote Involuntary Jourd
ney to Siberia, which contained
a scathing attack on the Soviet
legal and scollective farm sys-
tems.
Soon after his return to Mos-
cow, Amalrik wrote the work
which stands out as one of the
1 a n d m a r k s of the dissident
movement in the USSR, Will the
Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?
Neither book was published in
the Soviet Union except in the
[~o Cover Toxte]
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mms
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