Living the big lie

David Levy

When will the West learn that Russians think primarily in terms of friends and enemies, and of truth and falsehood only as functions of these? Whose side are you on? That is their only question to those who search for facts. If you reveal a damaging truth about me, you are my enemy (or nie-drug, unfriend). Why else would you reveal it? Even of foreign correspondents in their midst, the humblest of Russians have one basic question: Is he loyalny to us? As for official spokesmen at press conferences, they notoriously spend more time denouncing questions from Western correspondents than answering them. Dirt under the carpet should be left alone and the carpet trodden lightly upon.

Recent bewilderment over the sentencing of physicist Yuri Orlov shows the West's enduring resistance to acceptance of Russian culture and custom. However, an incident in Orlov's life two and a half years ago, made all the more memorable today for having been a precursor of his subsequent cruel fate, cured me at least, once and for all, of that misleading Western orientation toward truth versus falsehood in pondering the Soviet phenomenon.

On 10 December 1975 the Russian dissident biologist Sergei Kovalev had gone on trial (for lack of a more accurate word) in a courtroom in Vilnius, Soviet Lithuania, for slandering the Soviet state by reporting police wrongdoing. (For this crime, he received the same sentence that Orlov recently received and is serving it right now.) Outside in the vestibule Dr Andrei Sakharov, towering above a coterie of supporters that included Yuri Orlov, was angrily crowding 'two red-armbanded security guards in civilian clothes and demanding to be let through the black padded double doors where an appropriately vindictive audience of hand-picked trusties had packed the courtroom. At one point the doors opened momentarily and Sakharov, who was supposed to be in Oslo that very day receiving his Nobel Peace Prize, was able to bawl his demand for admittance directly into the courtroom. The guards, till then smiling and even amiable, turned ugly, shoving the small crowd of dissidents backwards into the centre of the vestibule. There was a scuffle that ended with one of the dissidents, Dr Yuri Orlov, being marched off into a police room off a corridor.

Orlov was not held very long, ten minutes perhaps. My neglect to time the exact duration of his detention was due to my other endeavours, being the only Western correspondent to have gone up to Vilnius for the so-called trial (the total absence of any acquittals from the dismal record of such procedures makes nonsense of the word, which in Russian is much more appropriately called protsess). I had had to question the rest of the dissidents about what precisely had happened in the short melee and — ah yes, of course! — to question the guards for their version in the interests of that objectivity which our Soviet hosts go on about so much.

Notebook in hand and suitably solemn, I approached the two guards and explained, my status and my professional duty to get their version of what I had just seen happen.

'You saw nothing!' one said and the other echoed — adamantly, definitively and categorically but not at all defiantly, so self-evident was it to them that their authority was the only fact. That was their side of the story, one in which Evelyn Waugh's admonition never to apologise, never to explain, found its apotheosis. The evidence of my eyesight and hearing was of no account. These guards, obviously under strict orders to use force only as a last resort, had decided, after using force, that they had not used it. No sense in cluttering up the record with historical facts. Orlov was soon let go and I reported the incident by telephone to UPI in Moscow immediately. No sanctions were imposed on me as a result. An opposite fate was to befall Orlov for reporting and compiling for world scrutiny the abuses of justice and the horrors of Soviet penal servitude. Orlov might have forgotten that such abuses cannot and do not happen in a humanitarian socialist state, a state informed by 'socialist humanism' in fact, and that therefore it is a grave slander to allege that they do. Everyone of course knows deep down that sometimes they do, but only a traitor fails to forgive the Soviet Motherland for inevitable lapses and, indeed, actually touts them abroad. Here surely must reside the 'fresh insight into the reality of Soviet life' that John Macdonald, who defended Orlov in a shadow trial in London, claims Orlov's ordeal has given the world (Spectator, 20 May). But the insight will probably remain the same old one which pictures Russia as a cynical place, which fails to see that it is the place where far greater truths hold sway over mere pettY fact. Men are, after all, far more motivated by fiction than by fact. And it was the great classic Russian writers who proved this to mankind. The nearest that a Western correspondent has come to this appreciation of the sanctity of the Big Lie in Soviet politics, in my experience, was when Hedrick Smith, the former New York Times correspondent in Moscow, who had worked in many other capitals including Washington, said that everywhere he had worked he had encouri• tered the Big Lie, but always alloyed with varying percentages of truth.

'But here in Moscow,' he added, appearing genuinely baffled, 'it's the only place where you find the hundred per cent lie.'

How, then, does one account for Orlov's reckless disregard for this wisdonll Released from his brief detention in the Vilnius courthouse, he vouchsafed to me his belief that open dissidence was in fact making him a completely free man. Like Sakharov, he had become an ideological apostate and had broken with the Soviet establishment that pays regular lip service to the ideology as its part of the bargain with the Party. No longer did Orlov have ro attend Party-sponsored meetings at the institute where he lectured and make the usual salaams and obeisances to the exalted purity of the Soviet Union, its policies and institutions, demanded of the scientific elite. Gone was the imperative of hypo' critical public posturing. Free at last. At first blush, it would seem that this born-again Russian, now in jail for well over

a year and doomed to nearly six more years

there, plus five years of banishment to the outer reaches of the Soviet land mass, made a grave miscalculation. But even jail seals

somehow to be a different thing to Russians from what it is to us. For them it provides a unique kind of freedom we find unfatholl

able. If the evidence of those, like BukovskY and Amalrik, is of any value, Soviet prison offers the great benefit of free speech without any further threat to one's fate thao the punishment already being endured. No other country's prisons offer the psychological release of Soviet prisons for the simple reason that no other country creates the same singularly artificial habitat for human beings that the Soviet Union creates. It simply is not a natural environment for mortal flesh and blood, even by its own admission, if not in so many words. Human beings just do not act and react the way the Soviet environment expects them to react. And the expectation has the force of law, the police and the army behind it.

Is it any wonder then that the Soviet penal system resorts to psychiatric treatment of those it incarcerates for breaking with the social and political system, that system which today virtually guarantees the safety and physical freedom of those who merely pretend to conform to it? Is it too much to ask of a sane citizen to play a simple, straightforward game with the authorities in return for the rewards for such postulated loyalty? If 99.99 per cent of the Soviet population can do it, why cannot Orlov? And Sakharov? And the rest who, as the phrase goes, 'represent only themselves'?

Yuri Orlov, with his fair red hair, blue eyes and short but athletic build, no doubt knew the physical risks he was taking in acting like a free man, though I never asked him point blank whether or not he was afraid of being sent to prison. And no doubt too he minimised those risks in his mind by counting too heavily on Western concern for him. Unlike Sakharov, his name was unknown before this present dire phase of his career, and of this he certainly was well aware. But just like Sakharov, he had no grasp whatever of the sheer abundance of public concerns in the West, the overwhelming and unabating mass of them, which preclude any real retributive action against the Kremlin's processes (read 'trials') of internal political control.

Only the Kremlin itself has a real grasp of that.