A problematic source

"Samizdat" is a book published in 1974 by Monad Press, presumably a publishing arm of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, at the time a Trotskyist organization. The book contains documents from the Soviet underground opposition. Since the publishers are left-wing, the collection mostly includes leftist samizdat. The texts are of varied quality, and the two main items are very problematic.

The longest document is titled "Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist" and is purportedly an autobiography by a Trotskyist survivor of Stalin's labour camps. Unfortunately, the text is disjointed and contains quite a few erroneous or even bizarre statements, making me wonder how much of it is really true? The editors admit that the memoirs have been heavily amended and altered during their circulation as samizdat. The anonymous Bolshevik-Leninist claims to have met both Trotsky, Tukhachevsky, Sergei Sedov, Lenin's widow Krupskaya, Zinoviev and Kamenev - the two latter in prison. He claims to have shared a cell with Zinoviev, who supposedly told him that Stalin was present at Zinoviev's first trial - in disguise, posing as an unknown Asiatic comrade! When Zinoviev realized this, he quite simply fainted. The author also claims to have met Sergei Sedov (one of Trotsky's sons) at the labour camps in Vorkuta. While Sergei was indeed there, other parts of the story don't make any sense, as pointed out by the editors themselves.

Another problematic document is "Memoirs of Aleksandra Chumakova", apparently found in the same samizdat manuscript as "Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist". The author supposedly worked for the notorious Lazar Kaganovich, and claims that Trotskyists spoke openly at party meetings until 1932. She retells a romanticized and unbelievable story about a 15 year old girl who was imprisoned by the secret police, and on one point she talks about the Left Opposition containing people of "Russian and Jewish nationality" - the same expression used by the anonymous writer of "Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist". This is doubly strange, since neither Lenin nor Trotsky recognized the Jews as a separate nationality. I doubt that Trotskyists emphasized the "Jewish" character of their movement. That sounds more like something neutral on-lookers or opponents might say, since Trotsky was technically a Jew (his real name was Bronstein).

Brigitte Gerland's "Vorkuta" sounds more trustworthy. Gerland was a dissident German Communist imprisoned in the Soviet Union but subsequently released and transferred to West Germany. Some of the information in her article (such as the different Trotskyist factions in the labour camps) are confirmed by other sources. Thus, Ante Ciliga mentions that imprisoned Trotskyists were divided in different factions in his book "The Russian Enigma". Here, the problem is something else. The editors at Monad Press claim that the Ukrainian fascist movement UPA was actually socialist, while Gerland's article explicity says that they were *not* socialists but pro-American, and therefore refused to co-operate with left-wing dissidents! Where on earth did all these "socialist" UPA fighters go, one wonders? Deep undercover?

The rest of the book concentrates on Pyotr Grigorenko, a former Soviet officer who became a dissident during the 1960's. The book reprints documents written by Grigorenko and some of his collaborators. While Grigorenko wasn't a Trotskyist, he did claim to be a Communist, and his organization was called Union of Struggle for the Revival of Leninism. Grigorenko was quite active, organized protests in support of the Prague Spring, and became well known in the West (eventually, he was apparently allowed to leave the USSR). A document from a smaller and less known dissident group, the Union of Communards, is also reprinted. They too claimed to be leftist, and demanded free elections and a multiparty system in the Soviet Union. Yet another leftist document published deals with the forced Russification of Latvia (the Soviet authorities denounced it as a forgery). Mostly as PR window dressing, "Samizdat" also reprints a short piece signed by Andrei Sakharov and Roy Medvedev.

"Samizdat" may be of some interest to serious students of Soviet history, or perhaps to Russians, but some of the documents reprinted may say more about the phenomenon of samizdat itself, than they do about the actual opposition.