22 January 1970
Underground Press
By normal check-up standards, Karel van het Reve wasn’t much of a tourist in Moscow this summer. “Of course,” the Dutch daily Het Parool, “I put my foot in the tourist trap and saw the Kremlin. But van het Reve was really a scholar on vacation, interested in the way things are with the newspaper business and spending a week or so in Moscow. And now, back at his lectern in Leiden University, the mild-mannered Dutch newspaper is struggling to piece together the story of the underground opposition movement in Russia. In a brilliant round of interviews with the nineteenth-century literature who printed them on manuscript abroad, van het Reve before receiving a flood of political dimensions and making publication in the West.
Author and translator, van het Reve has written with the U.S.S.R. “Russia and English” appeared in the last issue of the British Quarterly Survey. Last week, van het Reve gave Newsweek a brief, thoughtful, and exclusive on the latest triumph over Soviet censorship: a 400-page dossier on the campaign for freedom for Russia’s dissident Grigorenko, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, and Vera Lashkova—a best-seller in Moscow’s KGB book store number in certain places.
Van het Reve as it happens, “consists of 14 letters, showing with the names of foreign press correspondents who stand on the street outside the building at the press’s essence. The letters are a “white book” of all early anti-Soviet documents around the 1965 trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky’s physical detention with NTS, a counter-revolutionary Russian émigré group in Frankfurt, Germany. Friends of the accused smuggled out thousand accounts of each day’s proceedings, and when the trial ended, van het Reve, through his friendship with one of the NTS-appointed court reporters, came into possession of the 20 different manuscripts which make up the book. Tamara Green will publish in Britain later this month.
Time: Though much of the material is technical, covering topics like that of Grigorenko himself, the content shows and pleas for the freedom of the accused. “I think there’s a liberal for judging that if I were alone who might think I should express my disagreement myself. I know that my silence was not because no one person charged under Article 70 (anti-Soviet activity) has ever been acquitted. I know of no other camp activity to serve my time.”
Van het Reve material isn’t eager to conceal his knowledge of this mass of documentation. “Let’s just say I managed,” he smiles. Partly through the home-brewed methods of smuggling the newspaper and the treacle of departing foreigners, he and the Herron Foundation, which financially supports the former Institute for the Dutch Communist Party in Amsterdam, have “managed” to receive some of the material pamphlet and for Ginzburg, the KGB arrested, but a decade from any other anti-regime works including a sharp attack on Soviet nuclear by Andrei Sakharov, the noted nuclear physicist, and a factual account of life in the U.S.S.R.’s labor camps by Anatoly Marchenko, who is still serving time for “defamation.”
A loyal Stalinist turned democrat, van het Reve insists that the Herron Foundation is apolitical. “Our only aim is to give these people a chance to publish and that’s all,” he says. And if he can keep his foundation clear of damaging outside support and free of any profit.