Word: amalrik
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After three years in Siberian prison camps, Writer Andrei Amalrik, 35, was looking forward to going home. In May he wrote his wife Gyusel in Moscow to say that he expected to be released on schedule later that month. He was mistaken. As soon as his term expired, Amalrik was rearrested and has now been sentenced to three more years for "fabrications defaming the Soviet state" -the same charge that produced his previous conviction. In protest, he has gone on a hunger strike. His friends fear for his life, since he is already in poor health from meningitis and years...
...decision to keep Amalrik in prison is part of a stepped-up Soviet campaign against "liberal" intellectuals. Only last winter the underground journal Chronicle of Current Events was forced by the secret police to suspend publication. Gabriel Superfin, editor of the memoirs of Soviet Elder Statesman Anastas Mikoyan, was arrested last month on suspicion of having helped publish the journal, and Historian Pyotr Yakir and Economist Viktor Krasin have been held in jail without trial for more than a year on related charges. Amalrik was flown to Moscow to be questioned in the case but refused to cooperate-a fact...
...judicial pretense. His wife, who Tass reported had been allowed to attend his trial, was in fact barred from the courtroom. She saw her husband only as he was hustled to and from court in police cars. As for the charge of compiling "fabrications," that apparently consisted of Amalrik's notes on his experience in prison...
...Amalrik has been in trouble with Soviet authorities ever since he was a student at Moscow University, when he was expelled for an "un-Marxist" study stressing foreign influences in early Russian history, and for taking the manuscript to the Danish embassy for forwarding to Danish scholars...
Unlike Nobel Prizewinner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, however, Amalrik is virtually unknown in his own country. His two books have been published only in the West-in violation of Soviet law. In the first, Involuntary Journey to Siberia, he gives a spare, vivid account of his exile to a Siberian collective farm for "parasitism" (failure to hold a regular job). Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? is a political treatise that foretells Russia's ultimate disintegration, and predicted in 1969 that the U.S. and China would reach a rapprochement...