Introduction
During the last ten years, several historians have proposed the periodisation of the ‘long 1970s’, whose point of origin is often considered the year 1968.Footnote 1 In the context of European history, the long 1970s could be characterised as the era of détente and the advance of transnational relations between the East and the West over the critical issue of human rights.Footnote 2 Transnational solidarity between Eastern and Western intellectuals, in particular the latter's human and moral actions to support Soviet dissidents, were one of the most significant projects that were observed during this long decade.
To illuminate several lesser known aspects of the personal and ethical interactions between Soviet dissidents and their Western supporters, this article focuses especially on three figures: Pavel Litvinov (1940–), a dissident best known as one of eight protesters who demonstrated in Moscow's Red Square on 25 August 1968 against Soviet military intervention to suppress the Prague Spring; Karel van het Reve (1921–99), a Dutch scholar and Moscow correspondent; and Stephen Spender (1909–95), a British poet and literary critic. The latter two supported Litvinov and responded to his appeals and requests with concrete initiatives.
Soviet dissidents became noticeable during the Siniavsky–Daniel case. Using pseudonyms, Andrei Siniavsky and Iuly Daniel published their works abroad, which led to their arrests in September 1965. At their February 1966 trial, they were sentenced to seven and five years in labour camps, respectively. During the pre-trial period, on 5 December 1965, a demonstration protesting against their arrests and demanding a fair and open trial was held in Moscow's Pushkin Square.Footnote 3 The case became a landmark, leading to the public emergence of a Soviet dissident movement based on human rights values, and to several further demonstrations in 1967 and 1968. In particular, a 1968 Red Square demonstration had a major impact on world opinion, as a symbolic event through which Soviet dissidents worldwide showed solidarity with Czechoslovak intellectuals and citizens, using slogans such as ‘for your freedom and ours’ (за вашу и нашу свободу).
This movement did not aim at any particular political goal, but rather a representation to the public of the dissidents’ moral beliefs.Footnote 4 A memoir and poem conveying the message of this demonstration, written by Natal'ia Gorbanevskaia, a participant in the Red Square demonstration, made clear the movement's moral imperative, with phrases such as ‘I am ashamed that our tanks are in Prague’ (from the memoir), and ‘when shame led them to the square’ (from the poem), exemplifying the utmost importance of moral beliefs as core motives for the dissidents’ actions.Footnote 5 In her final statement during the subsequent trial, Larisa Bogoraz, another of the demonstrators, emphasised her own individual responsibility in not approving of the Soviet government's behaviour.Footnote 6
A similar moral positioning also occurred among Western correspondents in Moscow who provided support to the dissidents. Many dissidents expressed gratitude to Western supporters for their indispensable assistance, which enabled dissident voices to reach the Soviet people through foreign Russian radio broadcasts and influence world opinion.Footnote 7 However, some criticism was also directed at what was claimed to be Western correspondents’ cowardly attitudes towards Soviet authorities. Andrei Amalrik, the dissident writer best known for his essay ‘Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?’, harshly accused certain Westerners of cowardice due to their fear of arrest and deportation, and of prioritising protecting their journalistic careers.Footnote 8 Regardless of certain responses, an active involvement in the dissident movement required courage and commitment.
Why, then, did Western supporters create personal relationships with dissident intellectuals and support their activities? This article attempts to address this question in part by focusing on those Western supporters who had formerly been communists. This viewpoint was inspired by the following retrospective remark made by Bogoraz in 1988, when she was asked by an interviewer why the dissidents appealed abroad:
So there are people abroad who are not indifferent to what is happening to us. One year, probably, in 1982, I became acquainted with one correspondent from Holland. I asked him: you have your own problems – why do you need ours? My heart was moved by his answer. He said to me: ‘I myself am a former participant in the Resistance and from a long line of socialists: my grandfather, my grandmother, my parents are all socialists. What is happening to you is also called socialism. So, I am also responsible for this.Footnote 9
Two points are worth considering here. The first is that Bogoraz was convinced that there existed moral supporters of the dissidents beyond national borders: in other words, she believed that there existed a transnational moral community composed of citizens sharing core moral values such as freedom and driven by their shared sense of responsibility and morality to help people in need beyond borders, and which is distinguished from mere charity, which is arbitrary.Footnote 10 The second is that, to underpin her conviction, she referred to a Dutch correspondent with a family history of commitment to socialism who accepted a responsibility to consider the Soviet phenomenon as requiring his involvement. Allowing that the logic underlying the Dutch correspondent's sense of responsibility is not perhaps readily discernible, if the terms socialist and communist can be considered as interchangeable here, this correspondent had a personal history similar to that of van het Reve, who came from a communist family and was involved with a resistance group under German occupation.Footnote 11 Given this context, the quoted remark might be interpreted as an insight into why a formerly committed communist like van het Reve demonstrated his preparedness to assume a moral responsibility to support those dissenters deprived of fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech, by an oppressive communist regime.Footnote 12
Western supporters of the dissidents were not limited to ex-communists. Edward Kline (1932–2017), an owner and president of a supermarket chain in the United States, had supported Soviet dissident activities over several decades from the 1960s, including those of Litvinov.Footnote 13 Mark Hurst, in focusing on British human rights organisations that supported Soviet dissidents, discusses campaigns addressing issues ranging from Soviet abuse of psychiatry to the plight of Jews, religious believers and prisoners of conscience, which reveal various motivations including a sense of mission, ethnic sympathy and religious beliefs driving supporters.Footnote 14
Nevertheless, a focus on ex-communist supporters may shed new light on what motivated some supporters to act, as indicated in the Dutch correspondent's remark. The communist, more properly Stalinist, past shared between Soviet dissidents and their Western supporters might have led to distinctive personal and ethical interactions between them. It is plausible to consider that a past sympathetic attitude towards the oppressed under capitalism or fascism among ex-communists might, in some instances, have transformed into support for the oppressed within the Soviet Union in terms of universal human rights values, since the latter assume a similar transnational focus on communism, and could perhaps become a new basis for mobilisation. Based on this hypothetical view, this article examines the moral actions of Litvinov and his ex-communist supporters Spender and van het Reve in terms of their personal and ethical interactions.
Apart from the Red Square demonstration in 1968, Litvinov engaged in numerous dissident activities. During 1967–8, with his friend Amalrik, Litvinov worked as one of the ‘“press officers” of the human rights movement’.Footnote 15 At that time, Litvinov became acquainted with Moscow's foreign correspondents, who came to the courts to gather information about dissident trials. Because of his acquaintances, Litvinov could transmit various Samizdat documents, especially to van het Reve.Footnote 16 He came to be known through his appeals to overseas media and citizens as well. In a letter dated 3 October 1967 and sent to Soviet and foreign communist-oriented newspapers, Litvinov disclosed a conversation in an interrogation room with an officer of the Soviet secret police (Комитет государственной безопасности: КГБ; KGB) who warned him not to disseminate the record of the trials of Vladimir Bukovsky and other dissidents, threatening him with arrest. Litvinov also issued an appeal jointly with Bogoraz addressed to the ‘World Public (мировая общественность)’ dated 11 January 1968 (hereafter, the Bogoraz-Litvinov appeal), protesting against the so-called ‘Trial of the Four’ (Ginzburg, Galanskov, Dobrovolsky and Lashkova). Both of these actions were announced to the Soviet population and to Westerners through foreign radio broadcasts in Russian and in Western newspapers, making Litvinov one of the most well-known dissidents, and he received numerous letters and telegrams expressing condemnation or support. Litvinov's letter and the appeal created a new type of transnational public sphere.Footnote 17
One correspondent was Spender, a British poet well known since the 1930s. Reading the Bogoraz-Litvinov appeal published in the Times on 13 January, Spender was immediately determined to provide support, calling on friends such as W. H. Auden, Bertrand Russell, Igor Stravinsky and others for help. Although Spender's telegram of support reached neither Litvinov nor Bogoraz first-hand, Litvinov responded with gratitude and requested Spender's support on hearing of the message through a radio broadcast. Spender, in turn, later established the organisation ‘Writers and Scholars International (WSI)’ in October 1971, including a periodical journal, Index on Censorship (Index).
Another supporter, van het Reve, a scholar at Leiden University in the Netherlands, became acquainted with Litvinov and Amalrik during his 1967–8 stay in Moscow as a foreign correspondent for the Dutch newspaper, Het Parool. Trusted by Litvinov and Amalrik, he received Samizdat documents from them, including Andrei Sakharov's famous essay ‘Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’ (1968). Van het Reve dictated the essay to his editors at Het Parool by telephone and in Dutch so as not to be readily understood by the KGB. Sakharov's essay was subsequently published by Het Parool and in the New York Times in English, causing a global sensation and making Sakharov the most famous dissident in the world.Footnote 18 After leaving the Soviet Union in August 1968, prior to the military intervention in Czechoslovakia, van het Reve played a major role in several initiatives from his base in Amsterdam. These included the publication of duplicated letters and telegrams addressed to Litvinov,Footnote 19 the establishment of the Alexander Herzen Foundation in 1969 that allowed van het Reve and his colleagues to independently publish Samizdat documents written in Russian and the provision of a link between Spender and Litvinov through undertaking a translation of Litvinov's reply to Spender and sending it to Spender with a Russian original on 22 August 1968, which brought the three men together in support of Soviet dissidents. Litvinov's reply, delivered to Spender in the wake of the Soviet military intervention, appears to have driven Spender to work on his project, as discussed below.
Van het Reve and Spender Between Ex-Communists and Former Communists: A Moral Background to their Support
Van het Reve's father had been a member of the Dutch Communist Party and worked for the party's publishing house for many years, until he was apparently expelled from the party in 1940.Footnote 20 In reminiscence, van het Reve commented: ‘I was brought up in a Communist family, taught to admire Stalin, to march behind the flag, to sing the International, etc., and got over it in later life’.Footnote 21 It is uncertain whether van het Reve himself was a party member, but there is little doubt that he was a true believer and later abandoned his belief. In another memoir, he recollects sharing various Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) songs with Litvinov, who had been a Komsomol member and a fervent admirer of Stalin.Footnote 22 An early belief in communism and Stalin linked the two men, described by van het Reve as follows:
Politically he grew up as a model citizen. As a boy he was a member of the ‘young pioneers’ and, as he once told me, would have gladly attacked any boy speaking ill of the Great and Beloved Leader – a remark which broke the ice between us, since I, too, had once been a member of this organisation and an admirer of the late Joseph Stalin.Footnote 23
By contrast, Spender became a communist in the specific political circumstances of the 1930s. As Nazism and fascism expanded across Europe, especially in the Spanish Civil War, Stalinist Russia emerged as a more attractive, anti-fascist alternative to countries like the United Kingdom and France for many Western intellectuals, and Spender joined the British Communist Party in 1936, although he was not a true believer. After witnessing the Red Terror conducted by communists under Soviet influence, Spender became disillusioned with the ideal of Soviet communism and left the party. In 1949, in the midst of the Cold War, Spender contributed an essay to an ex-communist manifesto, The God That Failed, initiated by Arthur Koestler, a prominent ex-communist intellectual who had also left the party because of events during the Spanish Civil War. In this manifesto, Spender and five other contributors explained in detail why they had been attracted to communism and why they had rejected it.Footnote 24 Spender later became engaged in the activities of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which was regarded as an anti-Soviet and anti-communist association of Western cultural intellectuals. Spender played a key role in establishing and editing one of its journals, Encounter.
On the issue of the political positionality of ex-communists in the context of the Cold War, the essays of two distinguished intellectuals, Isaac Deutscher and Hannah Arendt, are of note here. Deutscher's essay ‘The Ex-Communist's Conscience’ was released in April 1950 as a review article for The God That Failed. This essay sharply criticised ‘ex-Communist’Footnote 25 intellectuals who had not only forsaken their communist beliefs but also taken sides between the opposing two blocks, and had even denounced their former fellow comrades. Referring to ‘the[ir] original motives for joining’ the communist party such as the ‘experience of social injustice or degradation . . . , the miseries of the old capitalist order’,Footnote 26 Deutscher, as a critical socialist intellectual, argued as follows:
How far he [the ex-Communist] departs from his starting-point . . . depends on his inclinations and tastes – and stupid Stalinist heresy-hunting often drives the ex-communist to extremes. But whatever the shades of individual attitudes, as a rule the intellectual ex-communist ceases to oppose capitalism. . . He remains a sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colours are differently distributed.Footnote 27
Among the six ex-Communists discussed in the essay, Deutscher focused his criticism on Ignazio Silone, who had written that ‘the final struggle will be between the communists and the ex-communists’, and on Koestler, who had insisted that ‘we ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it's all about’.Footnote 28 Deutscher stressed that ‘the only honourable service the ex-communist intellectual can render’ was to ‘watch with detachment and alertness this heaving chaos of a world, to be on a sharp lookout for what is going to emerge from it, and to interpret it sine ira et studio’.Footnote 29 Apart from observing that ‘the reminiscences of Koestler and Spender, who joined in the 1930s, reveal the utter moral and intellectual sterility of the party's first impact on them’, Deutscher did not mention Spender, who himself reflected that ‘I was driven on by a sense of social and personal guilt which made me feel firstly that I must take sides’ and that ‘it is evident to me now that my duty is to state what I support without taking sides’.Footnote 30
Effectively adopting the notion of ex-Communist from Deutscher, Hannah Arendt drew attention to another type of Western intellectual who had also departed from the communist party or who had stopped being true believers, introducing her concept of ‘former Communists’ as distinct from ex-Communists. According to her definition, the decisive point that distinguishes former Communists from ex-Communists was that, for former Communists, ‘their communist past remained an important biographical fact, but did not become the nucleus of their new opinions, viewpoints, Weltanschauungen. They neither looked for a substitute for a lost faith nor did they concentrate all their efforts and talents on the fight against Communism.’Footnote 31 As an example, Arendt mentions Picasso, saying that ‘if Picasso were to leave the Party tomorrow, he would become a former Communist, not an ex-Communist’.Footnote 32 In her essay, her primary concern lay with ex-Communists, not former Communists, because ‘the dangers of the ex-Communists’ role in social and public life are clear and present’.Footnote 33 In like manner to Silone as cited by Deutscher, Arendt argued:
Like the Communists, the ex-Communists see the whole texture of our time in terms of one great dichotomy ending in a final battle. There is no plurality of forces in the world, there are only two. These two are not the opposition of freedom against tyranny . . . , but of one faith against another. These two faiths, moreover, spring from the same source. The ex-Communists are not former Communists, they are Communists ‘turned upside down’.Footnote 34
In light of these definitions, Spender's and van het Reve's positions are reviewed. In the essay published in The God That Failed, Spender described how both his enrolment into the communist party and his leaving were deeply connected to the Spanish Civil War. Reflecting on his choice of communism due to his anti-fascism, Spender underlined the importance of not taking sides. In this respect, it appears that Deutscher's view of ex-Communists does not apply to Spender. Indeed, in the same essay, Spender expressed his ‘intense pity’ for the poor and the unemployed, who were ‘the victims of the crisis which began in 1930’, the victims of ‘a disease of capitalism throughout the world’. He concluded the essay by expressing his belief that the only solution to the world's problems would be ‘to lead a movement throughout the world to improve the conditions of the millions of people who care more for bread than for freedom; thus raising them to a level of existence where they can care for freedom’.Footnote 35 His ethical ground might be described as seeking ‘global distributive justice’, to use a current term. Thus Spender, representing an anti-Stalinist left, was not that distant from Deutscher.
Furthermore, as a poet and literary critic, Spender was unwilling to abandon freedom of expression, which was significantly limited under Stalin. Working as an editor and writer for Encounter from the beginning of the 1950s, he continued to be a politically active intellectual. However, his years of active work were tainted by a political scandal revealed by the New York Times in 1966. This scandal, which shocked Spender, was related to the financial aid provided by the CIA to the Congress of Cultural Freedom and its journals including Encounter. While the CIA's involvement might be considered unsurprising in the context of the Cold War, Spender, who was unwilling to take sides, decided to leave the Congress and Encounter in May 1967.Footnote 36 The Bogoraz-Litvinov appeal appeared soon after his disillusionment and departure, as a new stimulus.
In contrast, van het Reve worked at a university as a scholar of Russian literature. According to Arendt's taxonomy, he appears to have been a former Communist. However, his residence in Moscow as a foreign correspondent from 1967 until 1968 led him into a political and ideological battle with the Soviet authorities. Van het Reve and his comrades, who founded the Alexander Herzen Foundation, were labelled agents of the CIA by Soviet propaganda.Footnote 37 In this way, he once again became involved with the communism that he had discarded. It could be said that he came close to a type of ex-Communist distinct from a former Communist.
In an interview published in the Christian Science Monitor in April 1972, van het Reve was asked a question concerning ‘when or how he himself became disillusioned by communism’. He replied, ‘everyone has his own Kronstadt. . . . I can't tell you when mine was. I took up Soviet studies after getting interested in modern Russian literature, and no one can continue such studies for long without ceasing to be a believer. There are just too many contradictions.’Footnote 38
In this reply, the phrase ‘everyone has his own Kronstadt’ is crucial. This was derived from Louis Fisher, in one of the six essays contributed to The God That Failed. ‘Kronstadt’, a Russian naval fortress, was the site of a serious rebellion in March 1921 against Bolshevik rule involving previous supporters of the communist regime, which was ruthlessly suppressed. In his essay, Fisher used ‘Kronstadt’ as a keyword to symbolise a pivotal event that led each true believer to become an ex-communist, which he identified in his case as ‘the Soviet–Nazi Pact of 23 August 1939’.Footnote 39 Van het Reve deliberately used the phrase ‘everyone has his own Kronstadt’, to evoke the message conveyed in The God That Failed.
However, immediately following this remark, the interviewer described van het Reve as follows: ‘but the professor is no cold warrior. There is, indeed, a curious innocence about him, an openness, a completely unconspiratorial manner, which is what probably gave Soviet dissidents confidence in him when he first came across them at the trial of one of them, Vladimir Bukovsky, in Moscow 1967’.Footnote 40 The interviewer found van het Reve to be a different sort of character from the ex-Communists identified by Deutscher and Arendt. Litvinov repeatedly praised him as a brave person.Footnote 41
Neither van het Reve nor Spender appears to fit easily into a binary framework of ex-Communists and former Communists. They did not fight the Cold War by taking sides and ‘concentrate all their efforts and talents on the fight against Communism’. As discussed below in detail, Spender may have been looking for ‘a substitute for a lost faith’ from the 1950s, but he was also drawn to universal values like freedom of speech as fundamental human rights. While Arendt's remark concerning former Communists that ‘their communist past remained an important biographical fact’ also applied to van het Reve and Spender, it seems that their communist pasts influenced their new projects as well in terms of their moral positioning, involving a pity or sympathy for the oppressed of the Soviet Union.
Two Projects to Aid Soviet Dissidents: The Alexander Herzen Foundation and Writers and Scholars International
The Bogoraz-Litvinov appeal led to close personal links between Litvinov, van het Reve and Spender. This appeal, which accused the Soviet authorities of oppressing dissent and violating legal procedures in the ‘Trial of the Four’, requested assistance from the Soviet and international public, specifically ‘everyone in whom conscience is alive and who has sufficient courage’, to express their disagreement with ‘this shameful trial and the punishment’ of the defendants.Footnote 42 Published in the Times on 13 January 1968, it prompted Spender and fifteen friends to send Bogoraz and Litvinov a telegram, which read: ‘we, a group of friends representing no organisation, support your statement, admire your courage, think of you and will help in any way possible’.Footnote 43
On learning of Spender's message, Litvinov along with Amalrik responded, and their reply was entrusted to van het Reve,Footnote 44 who translated it into English and sent it to Spender, accompanied by van het Reve's letter dated 22 August 1968 as follows:
Dear Mr. Spender,
Pavel Litvinov asked me to send you the enclosed letter. My English is not good enough to translate it for you, but I trust you will find somebody to do it. Since Litvinov's position at the moment is very precarious – he may have been arrested yesterday for all I know – and since he mentiones (sic) me in his letter, I beg you to entrust the translation to somebody you know and about whose discretion you are sure.Footnote 45
Van het Reve forwarded the communication while the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was occurring. Given the date on the letter, he could not have known that Litvinov and his fellow dissidents would hold their protest demonstration on 25 August. In any event, van het Reve's letter with Litvinov's reply was likely to have had a tremendous impact on Spender, in particular after learning of the Red Square demonstration and Litvinov's arrest, and put Litvinov's request for help in an even more serious light. Van het Reve was likely to have also felt the force of this request.
Litvinov's translated letter, dated 8 August 1968, consisted of two proposals. One was ‘to create an international committee or council that would make it its purpose to support the democratic movement in the USSR’. Litvinov added that ‘this committee would not have an anti-communist or anti-Soviet character’. The other was that, with a view to providing ‘information to world public opinion about the real state of affairs in the USSR . . . , the committee could operate with some sort of publishing house which could issue . . . , in Russian, English and other languages, various kinds of material from Russia and concerning Russia’. Relating to these publishing activities, Litvinov proposed that ‘the committee itself might be able to issue some sort of periodical magazine’, and added that ‘if the committee could solve its financial problems successfully, it might be possible to pay the authors’.Footnote 46
These two requests were both implemented through projects initiated by van het Reve and Spender while Litvinov was in exile in Chita.Footnote 47 Concerning the Alexander Herzen Foundation (hereafter, the foundation), a draft document signed by van het Reve on 5 December 1969 to brief the media and others shows that ‘the foundation was legally established on 19 May 1969 in Amsterdam’.Footnote 48 The major members of the foundation were listed as Jan Willem Bezemer, professor of Russian history at the University of Amsterdam, Karel van het Reve and Peter Reddaway, lecturer in Russian history at the London School of Economics. Van het Reve explained why the foundation identified itself with the name of Alexander Herzen as follows:
Alexander Herzen (1812–70) was the first Russian writer who published in the West books and periodicals without any censorship. His publications were widely read in Russia, and many Russians sent him manuscripts. Among Soviet intellectuals his name is held in great esteem because of his courage and liberalism, his intellectual and political integrity.Footnote 49
The dissidents, including the participants in Moscow's Red Square demonstration, exemplified those ‘Soviet intellectuals’. For Litvinov, Herzen was ‘my favourite hero’. In addition, the famous slogan ‘For your freedom and ours’, quoted in a placard raised by Litvinov himself in the demonstration, and which Litvinov called ‘my’ slogan,Footnote 50 was frequently referred to as being related to Herzen's political position, although the Polish intellectuals initially used it in solidarity with Russian Decembrists and for the independence of Poland against the Tsarist regime. Gorbanevskaia, who also called ‘For your freedom and ours’ ‘my favourite slogan’, claimed that she prepared this placard and handed it to Litvinov on the spot, because she knew that he valued the slogan. Gorbanevskaia and Litvinov considered that the slogan meant that ‘people oppressing other peoples cannot become free’.Footnote 51
The foundation not only linked the views of Herzen and the dissidents but also aimed to achieve similar results to those sought by Herzen: namely, to publish ‘books and periodicals without any censorship’ in the West. Through their foundation, van het Reve and his colleagues made public Samizdat documents written by Litvinov, Amalrik, Marchenko and others to inform the Western public of the dissidents and their writings. Publications occurred first in Russian to provide Soviet writers with the opportunity to disseminate their works, and to enable Soviet public opinion to be influenced through multiple media, including radio broadcasts in Russian, as ‘[Herzen's] publications were widely read in Russia, and many Russians sent him manuscripts’.
By issuing unpublished manuscripts as books published in Russian, the foundation also acquired the copyright of each Samizdat document and could subsequently raise funds by granting other publishers the rights to publish the texts in other languages. Therefore, the foundation created a framework to provide the authors of Samizdat documents with financial aid as payment for writing.
Amalrik appears to have been the foundation's best-selling writer, with essays published in many languages, including Japanese, especially his most well-known work ‘Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?’ Amalrik was paid for his writing, as seen in the following letter dated 16 July 1976 and addressed to van het Reve's wife, who was deeply engaged in the foundation's activities: ‘I am very sorry that we should always turn to these monetary issues. This is not due to the fact that I want to have as much money as possible, but that I want to accurately represent the picture of our publishing business. Writing fees are the main source of our existence.’Footnote 52
According to commercial material dated 16 October 1976, Amalrik's essays, including ‘1984’, earned him 4,900.38 US dollars in licence fees or sales, involving works published in numerous languages other than Russian.Footnote 53 In addition, the foundation also paid him for their Russian editions. A 1970 expenditure and income report concerning ‘Amalrik's 1984’ shows the following figures: 2000 issues; printing and shipping costs of Dutch guilders (fl) 5,103.12 and 190.80, respectively; and 1725 sales of 2000 issues, earning fl. 9,890.61. The total profit was fl. 4,596.69. This report indicated that the foundation retained 30 per cent of this income, whereas Amalrik received 70 per cent.Footnote 54
Van het Reve clearly aimed to fulfil one of the two major requests made in Litvinov's letter to Spender. The foundation also made efforts to release Marchenko's essay and, although it was finally published by a British publisher Pall Mall Ltd, this effort suggests that van het Reve tried to act in response to Litvinov's postscript request. According to a report entitled ‘Contracts and Royalty payments, A. Marchenko for “Moi Pakazanya”’, the foundation sent some aid parcels to Marchenko's mother while he was imprisoned, using royalties paid by Pall Mall Ltd.Footnote 55
The foundation's archival documents indicate a decline in its activities from the late 1970s, and especially after 1985, following Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika and Glasnost policies. The foundation finally ended publishing uncensored Samizdat documents and was closed in 1998. During its existence, the foundation's work in conveying Soviet dissident voices to the world during the long 1970s played a significant role in propagating human rights norms and practices.Footnote 56
Van het Reve's project resulted from the friendship between Litvinov, Amalrik and van het Reve. As Litvinov recalled, ‘every Saturday, Andrei Amalrik and I met our friend, Karel van het Reve, who would receive samizdat from us. . . . He was an absolutely brave man, much braver than the average foreign correspondent in Moscow’.Footnote 57 The pivotal event appears to have been a farewell party for van het Reve, held in Amalrik's room, immediately prior to his return to Amsterdam in August 1968. According to van het Reve, at the end of the party, Amalrik suddenly began typing something, then asked Litvinov and Bogoraz to sign it, signed it himself, and handed it to van het Reve.
It was a kind of diploma, in a joking tone, in which was noted that Karel van het Reve is now an honourable participant in all protests, petitions, demonstrations, and so on, of the Russian opposition. . . . I was extremely happy with that paper. . . . That document was more valuable to me than all my other diplomas, because it reminded me that I have contributed a bit to the collapse of the giant lie of Russian government propaganda.Footnote 58
At the same party, van het Reve would have been handed the letter addressed to Spender by Litvinov, who was convinced of his upcoming arrest. Van het Reve's project was most likely the outcome of his sincere response to the deep trust of his friends, as shown in the ‘diploma’.
Another major request proposed in Litvinov's letter was accepted by Spender, with the founding of Writers and Scholars International (WSI), a council for supporting Soviet human rights defenders in October 1971. To announce its founding, Spender wrote an essay entitled ‘Writers and Scholars International’ in the Times Literary Supplement, which was reprinted under the title ‘With Concern for Those Not Free’ in the first issue of Index.Footnote 59 Beginning with the view that 1968 was a turning point in the development of ‘intellectual freedom’, a phrase Sakharov had also used in his famous essay, Spender drew special attention to ‘several appeals from writers, scientists and scholars in Eastern Europe to colleagues in the West’: in other words, the interactions between intellectuals beyond borders or political regimes, exemplified by the Bogoraz-Litvinov appeal. Spender interpreted these events as follows:
The Russian writers seemed to take it for granted that in spite of the ideological conditioning of the society in which they live, there is nevertheless an international community of scientists, writers and scholars thinking about the same problems and applying to them the same human values. . . . It is as though they take it for granted that freedom of intellect and imagination transcends the ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’ social context.Footnote 60
Alluding to the existence of an ‘international community’ among writers and scholars sharing ‘human values’ beyond borders or political regimes, Spender focused on Litvinov's request without referring to Litvinov by name:
One writer – now packed away in a Russian Labour camp – did have a positive idea of the ways in which colleagues in the countries of comparative freedom could help those in the lands of censorship and repression. He wrote to an English writer asking him whether it might not be possible to form an organisation in England of intellectuals who made it their business to publish information about what was happening to their censored, suppressed, and sometimes imprisoned colleagues. He insisted that such an organisation should not concern itself only with writers in Russia and Eastern Europe but throughout the world. He thought that an attempt could also be made to obtain and publish censored works, together with the news about the writers of them.Footnote 61
WSI was ‘an organisation in England of intellectuals’. Its main activity was ‘to publish a journal called Index, edited by Michael Scammell, which will . . . record and analyse all forms of inroads into freedom of expression and examine the censorship situation in individual countries and in relation to various constitutions and legal codes’.Footnote 62
While WSI and Index constituted Spender's response to Litvinov's request for support, the project could also be viewed as a global project extending beyond Litvinov's initial request. Indeed, WSI's founding declaration stated that ‘Writers & Scholars International has been founded to make people more continuously aware of the suppression of freedom of expression wherever it occurs’. In addition, Index informed its readers of human rights issues on a global scale, not limited to Soviet cases. The first issue of Index declared its intention of publishing ‘a quarterly chronicle of events around the world . . . in which freedom of expression is being limited or denied’, and conveyed information from dozens of countries.Footnote 63
Spender also stressed that ‘the role of WSI will be to study the situation of those who are silenced in their own countries and to make their circumstances known in the world community to which they spiritually belong’, and furthermore located this project in the context of an emerging global ethics as follows: ‘I think that doing this is not just an act of charity. It is a way of facilitating and extending an international consciousness, traversing political boundaries, which is already coming into being, though it is much hindered by dictatorships, censorship and acts of persecution’.Footnote 64
In responding to Litvinov's request, Spender attempted to combine his support with a coherent vision involving a global extension of liberty and freedom, which, despite the various challenges and frustrations of his life, best represented his own life-long commitment to freedom of expression and freedom from oppression.Footnote 65 Michael Scammell succinctly captures the personal and historical meanings of Spender's project. Noting that ‘it was characteristic of Stephen to take a fraternal, communitarian approach to persecution’, Scammell declared: ‘Litvinov's letter was a sort of challenge to Stephen and his co-signatories: put your money where your mouth is, and Stephen was energised enough to disregard his earlier Encounter disappointment and throw himself again into a new cause’.Footnote 66
WSI and the Index project took up a new cause identified in Litvinov's letter and contributed to the global development of human rights norms and practices in the long 1970s, as did van het Reve's project. With its focus on supporting dissidents, the Alexander Herzen Foundation ended following the Soviet Union's demise, while the Index continues to publish on matters related to freedom of speech internationally.
Conclusion
Samuel Moyn has claimed that only the grand project of human rights has survived as ‘the last utopia’, whereas other kinds of utopian projects, including socialist alternatives, the creation of a new international order based on Third World movements and student movements across developed countries, have all been frustrated.Footnote 67 To support his view, Moyn has engaged with the Soviet dissident and human rights movement and their Western supporters, although only briefly touching on Spender's WSI/Index and with no mention of van het Reve's Alexander Herzen Foundation. In terms of this article, Moyn's following insight is instructive: ‘that some found in human rights not a new utopia but rather a response to a god that failed is without doubt’.Footnote 68
While this view was expressed in relation to Leszek Kołakowski, an ex-communist philosopher from Poland, it is also applicable in understanding the background motives of the three figures discussed in this article. Litvinov, van het Reve and Spender had all experienced the communist project as ‘a god that failed’ and, while rejecting communism, remained deeply committed to promoting freedom of speech as a core principle of human rights. Spender had consistently aimed to enhance freedom of expression, despite numerous setbacks, especially with Encounter. The Bogoraz-Litvinov appeal provided Spender with a new cause, human rights, that appears to have been attractive as a new utopia as well as a response to a god that had failed. Even with Spender's death in 1995, the Index remains operational, in the ongoing struggle to safeguard human rights.
Finally, Spender's essay ‘With Concern for Those not Free’ provides further key sophisticated insights concerning the notion of a transnational moral community. Spender argued that WSI's major role was to respond to the appeals of Eastern European intellectuals, given that ‘there is . . . an international community of scientists, writers and scholars thinking about the same problems and applying to them the same human values’, and that it was necessary to inform ‘the world community to which they spiritually belong’ of their plight. Such action was not ‘charity’, but ‘a way of facilitating and extending an international conscience, traversing political boundaries, which is already coming into being’. For Spender, 1968 was a turning point in the emergence of an international community of conscience or, alternatively, a transnational moral community.
Spender's analysis is supported by subsequent developments. Following the Bogoraz-Litvinov appeal in 1968, there appeared a wide range of appeals from Soviet citizens and intellectuals addressing the UN Secretary General and Commissions of Human Rights, the US Congress, the World Congress of Psychiatrists and other persons and organisations throughout the long 1970s, from which responses were expected. Van het Reve's and Spender's projects were examples of dedicated commitment in response to such appeals. Amnesty International also began to support publication and dissemination of an English version of a Soviet dissident magazine conveying human rights information, entitled Chronicle of Current Events. Following the founding of the Initiative Group for the Defence of Human rights by Petr Iakir and others in May 1969 and the Committee of Human Rights by Valery Chalidze, Andrei Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov in 1970, a Moscow section of Amnesty International led by Tverdokhlebov and others was established in 1973. Benjamin Nathans has pointed out that ‘the establishment in October 1973 of a Moscow section of Amnesty International . . . offers further evidence of the turn to transnational frameworks and institutions among Soviet human rights activists’.Footnote 69
These and related events contributed to the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 and to US president Jimmy Carter's human rights diplomacy from 1977, which, in turn, further motivated transnational civic movement like Helsinki Watch Groups and other human rights NGOs.Footnote 70 During the long 1970s from 1968, numerous activities and organisations flourished, based on a new transnational moral community. Events in the year 1968 need to be re-evaluated as critical in creating and developing this community, to which Litvinov, van het Reve and Spender made significant contributions.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my deep gratitude to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their many valuable comments and suggestions. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP26370860, JP17K03179.
