The Cavalier daily Wednesday, February 16, 1972 | ||
Boycott Of Yevtushenko Urged
As Rank Protest Over Hypocrisy
By ANTHONY STIGLIANO
(Mr. Stigliano is a graduate
student in educational
research. He is associated with
the Piedmont Rural Research
Cooperative.
—Ed.)
In the Soviet Union,
Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident
intellectual, is under a sentence
of twelve years in prison for
"slandering the Soviet state."
At the same time in California,
Angela Davis is beginning her
trial, the most recent act in the
repression of the Black
Panthers.
Both Davis and Bukovsky
have as their prime motivation
an important and articulate
idea of human freedom. They
have endangered their lives by
acting to make this idea more
than an abstraction, or a
legalism.
It appears prima facie that
the persecution of a Black
Revolutionary organization
and the imprisoning of Soviet
intellectuals have little in
common. After all, Angela
Davis would like to see the
legal system — that
rationalization of the activities
of Pentagon and corporation —
dissolved. Bukovsky, on the
other hand, had been
imprisoned in an earlier case
when he led a demonstration in
1967 which demanded that the
Soviet government "respect the
Constitution."
His most recent conviction
involved the smuggling of
evidence that Soviet dissidents
were being committed to
insane asylums to silence them.
Nevertheless, one must recall
that Martin Luther King Jr.
spent many nights in jail
merely to get the government
to respect its own laws.
But the laws themselves
turned out to be tools by
which people lose their
identities if they comply, or
weapons by which people lose
their dignity or their lives if
they resist.
The Panthers were founded
because of the realities of
racism and state power in
America. Bukovsky and the
Soviet Civil Rights movement
are still realizing the similar
relation between oppression
and law in Russia. If Bukovsky
and Davis were to meet, Angela
might think Vladimir to be
rather naive. He is learning,
however.
Vladimir Bukovsky has
spent an enormous part of his
life in prison or in "mental"
hospitals. He was part of a
march in Red Square
protesting the Soviet invasion
of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He
is active in the underground
information service (Samizdat)
which provides enormous
amounts of information
concerning the suppression of
those who are struggling to
make socialism democratic.
This suppression is quite
unlike the terror which killed
millions under Stalin. Instead
of firing squads, there are
mental institutions where one
may be imprisoned without the
bother of a trial.
A dissident like Grigorenko
is declared "insane" after he
strongly and publicly
criticized Soviet policy. It was
only after a public outcry that
he was released. Similar things
have happened to numerous
other intellectuals who are
committed without trial, but
hopes for their release are dim
because of the Soviet coverup.
Bukovsky and many others
in Samizdat have been
instrumental in publicizing
these events; without them,
few would be able even to
surmise what is happening.
Admittedly, the oppression in
Russia has not been as
spectacularly overt as the
oppression of the Panthers.
Nevertheless, in both countries
we see the same response to
radical questions and demands:
silencing the voices by "legal"
and violent means.
Because many of the Soviet
dissidents are in the public eye,
a simple arrest by the secret
policy would be embarrassing
for the Soviet Union's
masquerade as defender of
freedom. Hence, the use of
State psychiatric wards as
prisons. But many times the
method of suppression is
subtler; writers are prohibited
to travel either in the USSR or
outside its boundaries to give
readings or showings of their
work.
Solzhenitsyn, author of
First Circle (never published in
Russia), cannot leave to receive
the Nobel Prize awarded to
him recently. When Mstislav
Rostopovitch, the cellist,
supported Solzhenitsyn's
struggle against censorship, he
was deprived of his permission
to go on concert tours for a
year. The KGB has learned
their lesson about public trials
from the outcry consequent to
the persecution of Sinyavsky
and Daniel some years ago.
While these writers are held
in the Soviet Union under
varying degrees of
imprisonment. Yevgeny
Yevtushenko: Russian Poet To Appear Here Monday Night
the United States. In an
interview, he has referred to
the efforts of Bukovsky and
Solzhenitsyn as "scandals"
used by the Western press to
traduce the Soviet Union.
Yevtushenko has made
other very strong statements
verbally and through his
actions against the whole idea
of a civil rights movement. He
asserts that this loosely
organized group of men and
women are not to be taken
seriously by those who spouse
freedom as an ideal.
It is not a coincidence that
Yevtushenko's statements are
similar to those of liberals in
this country who decry and
explain away radicals.
Yevtushenko and the liberal
chorus in America stand up to
defend freedom from its
critics. But this "freedom" is
defined by the political and
economic needs of government
and corporation.
Both Bukovsky and Davis
have exceeded the
"reasonable" (i.e., profitable)
limits set by this definition.
Bukovsky by stating that
centralized bureaucracy is
insignificant compared to the
free human voice.
Angela Davis has
overstepped the boundary by
her opposition to the
representatives of single class
and a single culture defining
freedom for exploited classes
and minority cultures. Both
Bukovsky and Davis are
undermining governmental
monopoly of power to
legitimatize actions, hence,
they are being persecuted in
the ways their respective
governments have determined
to be most expedient.
Given the struggle of the
civil rights movement in the
United States as a paradigm
one might easily see Bukovsky
and his friends realizing that
even if the Soviet government
decides to follow its own laws,
it would follow them only to
make repression appear
rational. The Soviet Civil
Rights movement's demand
that their government "respect
the Constitution" is about in
the same stage as the American
Civil Rights movement was ten
years ago.
Now at the University of
Virginia on the 21st of
February, Yevtushenko will
read his poems lamenting the
oppression of the Panthers. But
his crocodile tears are belied by
the situation of his fellow
artists who cannot read poems
lamenting the imprisonment
of Grigorenko, Sinyavsky,
Daniel, Amalrik and Brodksy.
Yevtushenko will, with
American liberals, ignore the
tyranny upon which their
liberalism and social positions
are so dependent. Both will
deny that there is any parallel
between the imprisonment of
Bukovsky and the trial of
Davis. To admit this parallel
would be to admit that the U.S.
U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in their
massive centralization,
bureaucratization and
programmed public apathy are
cut from the same cloth.
It is up to you, all of you,
to consider these questions.
Yevtushenko will speak softly
of the death of Anne Frank,
but not a whisper will be heard
for the strangulation of Soviet
Jewish culture. Yevtushenko
will shout about the shootings
at Kent State, but his face
turns close-mounted toward
the spotlight never mentioning
those languishing in the
Serbsky Mental Institute.
Yevtushenko will tell us of
Angela Davis, but Bukovsky is
an irritating scandal.
As Americans who refuse to
have vested interests define
which beliefs are to be acted
upon, and what injustice is to
be protested, we must see that
the injustice perpetrated on
Angela Davis is the same
injustice being done against
Bukovsky. To separate the two
cases conceptually and say that
a judgement on one does not
imply a similar judgement on
the other is rank hypocrisy.
If we are dismayed about
Bukovsky's imprisonment, we
ought to be horrified at Angela
Davis's persecution. Both are
of one injustice, organized
power crushing individual
protest. You must decide what
you will do. For my part, I
shall side with the voices of
Bukovsky and Davis against
Yevtushenko and his liberal
admirers. I intend to boycott
Yevtushenko.
The Cavalier daily Wednesday, February 16, 1972 | ||