The Tyranny of Silence by Rose Flemming

Author:Rose, Flemming [Rose, Flemming]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Cato Institute
Published: 2014-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

8. From Russia with Love

Silence is a way of talking, of writing. Above all, it is a way of thinking that obfuscates and covers up for the cruelty that should today be a central preoccupation of those who make talking, writing, and thinking their business.

—Kanan Makiya

It was October 30, 1972, and a 38-year-old Russian astrophysicist and biologist stood accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. The trial was taking place in the small town of Noginsk, and the man’s name was Kronid Lyubarsky. Until then, Lyubarsky had been pretty much unknown to the state security agency KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti), despite being a key figure in the underground dissident press, or samizdat. He held a position in a research facility just outside Moscow that worked on the Soviet space exploration program for the planet Mars. He had been arrested 10 months earlier in the wake of KGB raids targeting people who edited, stored, and distributed the Chronicle of Current Events, the most important publication of the Soviet human rights movement.

The trial was taking place away from Moscow to discourage Western media and activists from following the case. But when Lyubarsky was eventually allowed to speak, eyewitnesses said the tension in the courtroom was electric.1 He laid out arguments against Soviet censorship: the tyranny of silence that forbade Soviet citizens to discuss or even to mention a long list of issues. He pointed to the double standards of the Soviet regime and the variability of prohibitions over time.

Lyubarsky did not take part in public demonstrations against the regime. His “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” limited itself to editing and distributing the Chronicle, possession of several hundred samizdat publications that he lent to friends and acquaintances, and political opinions that he aired in private company, in particular criticism of the gradual rehabilitation of Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

“Information is the staple diet of the scientist,” Lyubarsky stated in his concluding defense speech. “A farmer works with corn, a worker works with metal; in the same way, an intellectual works with information. One can only form an independent opinion to the extent that one possesses information.”2

Kronid Lyubarsky was sentenced to five years in a labor camp. He was released in January 1977, though he was prevented from returning home by laws denying former convicts the right to live within a 100-kilometer radius of Moscow. Lyubarsky resumed his work collecting information on violations of human rights and headed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s fund for the aid of political prisoners. Within months, the authorities were threatening him with renewed internment of 10 years or emigration. As a result, he and his wife Galya left the Soviet Union in October of the same year, with the firm conviction that they would never see their homeland again.

“I felt like I was in a crematorium, saying goodbye to friends and family at the airport,” he would recall years later.3

The majority of Soviet dissidents, including Lyubarsky himself, were sentenced under Article 70 of the Soviet Penal Code. That article prohibited anti-Soviet

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