May 12, 1938
Andrei Amalrik was born. Dissident, writer, and author of the 1969 essay "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?"
As the regime becomes increasingly bureaucratized, it becomes increasingly deideologized. The need for some kind of ideological foundation forces the regime to seek a new ideology, namely, Great Russian nationalism, with its inherent cult of force and expansionist aspirations.
He studied at the history department of Moscow State University. He was expelled for an unconventional term paper on "The Normans and Kievan Rus'." In 1965, he was exiled to Siberia for two and a half years for "parasitism."
The regime first spends colossal efforts to silence everyone, and then spends efforts to find out what people actually think and what they want.
Released early. Worked at the Novosti Press Agency. Through a foreign correspondent, he transmitted Sakharov's first Memorandum to the West—on peaceful coexistence and intellectual freedom.
If you can't be against the system of violence, at least don't be for it! Fortunately, I already know of examples where respected doctors of science, who would never have signed letters in defense of Sakharov, nevertheless went off to harvest rotten potatoes just to avoid signing letters condemning him.
Amalrik published in the West and in samizdat. In 1970, he was arrested. For "disseminating knowingly false fabrications..." he received three years in a labor camp. Later, he received another three years under the same charge. After a hunger strike and a wave of outrage around the world, the sentence was commuted to three years of exile.
Perhaps we will have "socialism" with bare knees, but by no means socialism with a human face.
In 1976, together with Orlov and Shcharansky, he considered creating groups that would document human rights violations in the USSR. This is how the Moscow Helsinki Group was born.
It is not fear, but the awareness that nothing can be changed anyway, that often paralyzes any action in Soviet society.
In 1976, Amalrik emigrated. In 1980, he died in a car accident. His "Notes of a Dissident" were published in 1991, and he was rehabilitated at the same time.
