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By Root 1372 0

the language of these treaties came from the house journal of the Soviet samizdat networks: the Chronicle of Current Events. This newsletter, dedicated to a neutral recording of otherwise un-publicized news events—human rights abuses, arrests, trials, demonstrations, new samizdat publications—was founded by a small group of acquaintances in Moscow, including Sinyavsky, Daniel, Ginzburg, and two dissidents who would become famous later, Pavel Litvinov and Vladimir Bukovsky. The tale of the Chronicle’s further evolution and development is itself worthy of a book the length of this one. In the 1970s, the secret police conducted a virtual war against the Chronicle, organizing coordinated searches of the homes of anyone who was suspected of being connected with the journal: on one memorable occasion, an editor plunged a set of papers into a pot of boiling soup while the KGB searched her apartment. The Chronicle survived the arrests of its editors, however, and managed to reach the West as well. Eventually, Amnesty International would publish regular translations.29

The Chronicle played a special role in the history of the camp system too. Very quickly, it became the main source of information about life in the post-Stalinist Soviet camps. It published a regular feature, “Inside the Prisons and Camps”—and, later, “Inside the Punishment Cells” as well— which recorded news from the camps, and published interviews with prisoners. These startlingly accurate reports of events in the camps—the illnesses of various dissidents, the changes in regime, the organized protests—drove the authorities wild: they found it impossible to understand how the information got out. Years later, one of the editors explained:

Some [information] is carried when a fellow is released from the camps. There would be contact somewhere along the line after he left. Or you could bribe prison guards so that when you met with relatives, you could pass written information and verbal information. Then the relatives might stop in Moscow and pass on what you said. You could bribe guards, for example, in Mordovia. These [the Mordovian political camps] were all new camps, organized in 1972, and there were all new guards. They would pass notes sometimes when they became sympathetic to our situation. There was a mass hunger strike in the camps in 1974, and when they saw that, the guards were sympathetic.

You can also corrupt guards. They don’t earn much. They don’t have much. They come from provincial areas. You might, for example, get something from Moscow—a cigarette lighter—and bribe a guard. Or he would give you an address. The bribe—the goods or the money—would be sent there in exchange for passing information ...30

There were also methods of concealment. One ex-prisoner described one of them:

In minute letters, I write out my latest poem on four centimetre-wide strips of cigarette paper . . . These strips of cigarette paper are then tightly rolled into a small tube (less than the thickness of your finger) sealed and made moisture proof by a method of our own devising, and handed on when a suitable opportunity presents itself.31

However they did it—by concealment, bribery, or flattery—the information that the Chronicle managed to extract from the camps remains significant today. At the time of the writing of this book, post-Stalinist MVD and KGB files remain largely closed to researchers. Thanks to the Chronicle, however, to other samizdat and human rights publications, and to the many, many memoirs which describe the camps of the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct a consistent picture of what life in the Soviet camps was like in the years after Stalin.

“Today’s camps for political prisoners are just as horrific as in Stalin’s time. A few things are better, a few things are worse . . .”

So began Anatoly Marchenko’s memoir of his years in prison, a document which, when it first began to circulate in Moscow in the late 1960s, deeply shocked the city’s intelligentsia, who believed the Soviet labor camps had closed for