July 22: Yuri Karyakin's birthday, one of the "voices" of perestroika
On July 22, 1930, Yuri Morozov (Karyakin) was born in Perm—writer, journalist, and public figure. He rehabilitated Dostoevsky in the Soviet press, saved Solzhenitsyn's manuscript of "The First Circle" from seizure, and uttered the famous phrase, "Russia, you've gone crazy!" on live television.
Provincial childhood
Stepping on a rake is our national sport
His mother was a housewife, coming from a large family of farmers. His father, a district party secretary, died early—he was expelled from the party, and the stress worsened his tuberculosis. Yuri was four years old.
At the age of 13, he moved to Moscow with his mother and stepfather, an aircraft factory worker. The surname Karyakin comes from him. In 1953, he graduated from the philosophy department of Moscow State University.
"Investigation" and expulsion
A year later, Karyakin was expelled from graduate school after he and his colleagues conducted an "investigation" into influential professors, accusing them of plagiarism and informing on other scientists. One of the suspects was his supervisor, Ivan Shchipanov.
A year earlier you would have been camp dust
Later, the author of the “investigation” was reinstated in graduate school, but was not allowed to defend his dissertation.
Prague and the "School of Freedom"
Karyakin worked for the journal "History of the USSR," and from 1960, for "Problems of Peace and Socialism," published in Prague. A creative atmosphere reigned in the editorial office.
It was a unique school of freedom, freedom from the constraints of Moscow, freedom of discussion in which much was permissible. But it was still freedom within the confines of a cage—albeit an expanded and slightly gilded one.
In his publications, he spoke out against the Cold War and for peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world. He was one of the first to rehabilitate Dostoevsky, who had long been a virtually banned writer in Soviet Russia.
Conscience, according to Dostoevsky, is such an awareness of one’s thoughts and feelings, as if everyone knows about them
Once, a denunciation was written against Karyakin for disagreeing with the “party line,” but nothing happened.
I (a naive fool!) asked, "Well, let's say the Communists win, hold power for an electoral term, and then suffer defeat in the next election. What will you do?" The answer was always the same: "We won't give up power. And to hell with new elections."
How can I learn to write in such a way that I don’t have to take my words back later?
Solzhenitsyn's rescued manuscript
In the mid-1960s, while working as a special correspondent for the newspaper Pravda, Karyakin attempted to publish an excerpt from Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle. He rescued the manuscript, which had been seized, by retrieving it from the editor-in-chief's safe.
Being a member of the CPSU and a convinced Leninist, he believed that “the tyrant Stalin ruined everything.”
Expulsion from the party
In 1968, Karyakin was expelled from the party for an anti-Stalin speech at an evening in memory of Andrei Platonov, the author of the philosophical doctrine of the “substance of life.”
At the city committee meeting, I read the transcript of my speech and cursed. Everything was distorted. As it turned out later, Brezhnev was informed that Karyakin had called on writers to prevent Stalin's "substance" (i.e., shit)—that's how they took it literally—from being reintroduced into the mausoleum where Lenin's "substance" (i.e., shit) rests. One can imagine their righteous anger!
Theatre, magazines, dissidents
Karyakin taught school and collaborated with the Taganka Theatre and director Yuri Lyubimov, writing the script for the play "Crime and Punishment." His work was published in the magazines "Znamya" and "Ogonyok," and he defended Vysotsky and Sakharov.
For about 35 years he worked at the Institute of the International Labor Movement (since 1990, the Institute of Comparative Political Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences).
The "voice" of perestroika
Karyakin was one of the "voices" of perestroika. He was a member of the Interregional Deputy Group, the first legal parliamentary opposition group in the USSR. He participated in the founding of Memorial.
In 1989, he was elected as a People's Deputy of the USSR from the USSR Academy of Sciences. At its very first congress, he demanded that Solzhenitsyn's citizenship be restored. After the August coup, he proposed that the deputies disband themselves:
Without three heroic days defending the White House, this Congress would have voted for the junta. We couldn't handle you with your aggressively obedient majority.
"Russia, you've gone crazy!"
In 1993, Karyakin signed the "Letter of 42" in support of Yeltsin's policies. That same year, commenting on the LDPR's victory in the first Duma elections, he famously exclaimed live on television:
Russia! Come to your senses, you've gone crazy.
He believed that voters had betrayed the values of democracy by choosing populism and demagoguery.
In 2001, Karyakin received the Presidential Prize for Literature and Art. He died in 2011 in Moscow, having never fully recovered from a stroke. He was 81.
