Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [330]
The older generation often had trouble understanding their younger compatriots. Men and women who had fought with guns in the forest could not understand dissidents fighting with bits of paper.9 But the old were still able to inspire the young with their example. Such encounters helped to form people who would, later in the decade, organize the nationalist movements that ultimately helped to destroy the Soviet Union itself. Looking back on the experience, David Berdzenishvili, a Georgian activist, told me he was glad that he had spent two years in a 1980s labor camp rather than two years in the 1980s Soviet army.
If the personal networks had hardened, so too had the links with the outside world. An edition of the Chronicle published in 1979 illustrates this perfectly, as it contains, among other things, a day-by-day account of life in the Perm-36 punishment cells:
September 13: Zhukauskas found a white worm in his soup.
September 26: He found a black insect 1.5 cm long in his bowl. The discovery was immediately reported to Captain Nelipovich.
September 27: In punishment cell No. 6 the temperature was officially measured as 12 degrees centigrade.
September 28: The morning temperature in the cells was 12 degrees. Second blankets and padded trousers were issued. Heaters were placed in the rooms of the duty guards. In the evening the temperature in the cells was 11 degrees.
October 1: 11.5 degrees.
October 2: A 500-watt heater was put in cell No. 6 (Zhukauskas, Gluzman, Marmus). The temperature, both morning and evening, was 12 degrees. Zhukauskas was asked to sign a document in which his output was stated to be ten times lower than it was. He refused . . .
October 10: Balkhanov refused to attend voluntarily a meeting of the camp Education Commission. On the orders of Nikomarov he was taken by force.
And so on.
The authorities seemed powerless to stop this sort of information from flowing—or to prevent it from instantly appearing on Western radio stations, broadcasting in the USSR. The 1983 arrest of Berdzenishvili was announced on the BBC within two hours of its occurrence.10 Ratushinskaya and her barrack mates in the women’s camp in Mordovia sent Reagan a congratulatory message after he won the U.S. elections. Within two days he had received it. The KGB, she wrote gleefully, were “beside themselves.” 11
To most sensible outsiders peering through the looking glass at the strange world of the Soviet Union, such cleverness seemed somewhat beside the point. For all practical purposes, Andropov appeared to have won the game. A decade’s worth of harassment, imprisonment, and forced exile had kept the dissident movement small and weak.12 Most of the better-known dissidents had been silenced: in the middle of the 1980s, Solzhenitsyn was in exile abroad, and Sakharov was in internal exile in the city of Gorky. KGB policemen sat outside Roy Medvedev’s door, monitoring all of his movements. No one in the USSR seemed to notice their struggle. Peter Reddaway, probably the leading Western academic specialist on Soviet dissent at the time, wrote in 1983 that dissident groups “have made little or no headway among the mass of ordinary people in the Russian heartland.”13
The goons and the warders, the crooked doctors and the secret police, all seemed safe and secure in their chosen professions. But the ground was moving beneath their feet. As it turned out, Andropov’s strict refusal to tolerate dissent would not last. When he died in 1984, that policy died with him.
When Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985, the character of the new Soviet leader at first appeared mysterious, to foreigners and countrymen alike. He seemed as