Gulag

Some of these changes were rightly dismissed as mere camouflage, linguistic change instead of real change. “You are mistaken,” the novelist Yuli Daniel wrote a few years later, in a letter from prison smuggled out to a friend. “You are mistaken if you thought I was sitting in prison. I was being ‘held in an investigative isolator,’ whence I was not thrown in the cooler, but was ‘installed in a punishment isolator.’ And this was done not by jailers but by ‘controllers,’ and this letter is not being sent from a concentration camp but from an ‘institution.’” ¹⁰

Daniel was also right in another sense: if the state authorities wanted to arrest someone on suspicion of thinking differently, they still could. In place of Article 58, the code created Article 70, on “Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda,” and Article 72, on “Organizational Activity of Especially Dangerous Crimes Against the State and Also Participation in Anti-Soviet Organizations.” In addition, the authorities added Article 142, on “Violation of Law on Separation of Church and State.” If the KGB wanted to arrest someone for his religion, in other words, they still could.¹¹

Yet not everything was exactly the same either. In the post-Stalin era, the authorities—prosecutors, prisoners, camp guards, warders—were far more sensitive about appearances, and really did try to adhere to a semblance of legality. When, for example, the language of Article 70 proved too loose to convict everyone whom the authorities felt it necessary to put behind bars, they added Article 190-1 to the criminal code, which forbade the “dissemination by word of mouth of deliberate fabrications discrediting the Soviet political and social system.” The judicial system had to look like a judicial system, even if everyone knew it was a sham.¹²

In what was also a clear reaction against the old system of troikas and special commissions, the new law stipulated that arrestees must be tried in a court of justice. This, it turned out, would inconvenience the Soviet authorities far more than they could have anticipated.

Although he had not been condemned under any of the new, anti-dissident laws, the trial of Joseph Brodsky was in many ways a harbinger of the new era to come. The fact that it was held at all was a novelty: in the past, people who irritated the state had not been tried in public except in pre-arranged show trials, if they were tried at all. More important, Brodsky’s behavior at the trial was enough to prove that he already belonged to a different generation from Solzhenitsyn, and from the political prisoners of the recent past.

Brodsky once wrote that his generation was “spared” the experience of indoctrination endured by those just a few years older. “We emerged from under the post-war rubble when the state was too busy patching its own skin and couldn’t look after us very well. We entered schools, and whatever elevated rubbish we were taught there, the suffering and the poverty were visible all around. You cannot cover a ruin with a page of Pravda.” ¹³

If they were Russians, Brodsky’s generation typically arrived at their critique of the Soviet status quo via their literary or artistic tastes, which could not be expressed in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. If they were Balts, Caucasians, or Ukrainians, they were more likely to have got there through nationalist sentiments, inherited from their parents. Brodsky was a classic Leningrad dissident. He rejected Soviet propaganda from a very early age, and dropped out of school at fifteen. He worked in a series of temporary jobs, and began to write poetry. By his early twenties he was well known in the Leningrad literary world. The aging Akhmatova made him her protégé. His poems were circulated among friends, and read aloud at secret literary gatherings, another new feature of this era.

Predictably, all of that unofficial activity brought Brodsky to the attention of the secret police. Brodsky was first harassed, then arrested. The charge was “parasitism”: since Brodsky was not a poet licensed by the Writers’ Union, he qualified as a vagrant. At his trial in February 1964, the state produced witnesses, mostly unknown to Brodsky, who testified that he was “morally depraved, a draft-dodger, and a writer of anti-Soviet verses.” In his defense, there were letters and speeches from famous poets and writers, including Akhmatova. To all of this, the prosecution witnesses responded angrily: