Word: sovietizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Whislced Away. Free of mamka, Kuznetsov immediately dashed for the nearest British government office. A civil servant telephoned a Russian-speaking journalist, David Floyd, the Daily Telegraph's Soviet expert. Floyd instructed the defector to take a cab to his home. Since the evening was warm, Kuznetsov had left his coat in the hotel. He insisted that they return to his single room in the Apollo Hotel to get his film-laden coat and documents. Kuznetsov also retrieved his typewriter ("my old favorite") and some Cuban cigars ("They are so cheap in Moscow"). Then the two men rushed...
Shortly after the public announcement of the British decision, Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Smirnovsky stormed into the Home Secretary's office, demanding the author's return. Calllaghan refused. Two days later, Smirnovsky called on Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart and asked that Soviet diplomats be allowed to see Kuznetsov. But Kuznetsov refused to meet with his countrymen. Instead, he wrote a declaration of his reasons for leaving and three letters: one to the Soviet government, another to the Communist Party, and a third to the Writers' Union (see box on following page). His eloquent words provided startling and intriguing...
Like any man beginning a new life, Author Anatoly Kuznetsov last week sought to explain why he ended the old one. Denouncing his earlier published works as hopelessly corrupted by the Soviet system, he even took a new name: A. Anatol. TIME here presents, in documents made available to its editors, Kuznetsov's explanation of why he fled to the West and three letters that he sent to the Soviet Union after his defection...
...loss of hope: I simply cannot live there any longer. This feeling is something stronger than me. I just can't go on living there. If I were now to find myself again in the Soviet Union, I should go out of my mind. If I were not a writer, I might have been able to bear it. But, since I am a writer, I can't. Writing is the only occupation in the world that seriously appeals to me. When I write, I have the illusion that there is some sort of sense in my life...
...those 25 years, not a single one of my works has been printed in the Soviet Union as I wrote it. For political reasons, the Soviet censorship and the editors shorten, distort and violate my works to the point of making them completely unrecognizable. Or they do not permit them to be published at all. So long as I was young, I went on hoping for something. But the appearance of each new work of mine was not a cause for rejoicing but for sorrow. Because my writing appears in such an ugly, false and misshapen form...