IN THE YEARS following Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union exhaled. It was a period known as the Thaw, and like many in her generation Natalya Gorbanevskaya was shaped by the sliver of openness it brought after the long years of pervasive fear and murder. Nikita Khrushchev, the new leader, delivered his “secret speech” in 1956 denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and repressive rule. New thinking, new shapes and colors, made their way in. Picasso’s paintings were exhibited in Moscow and Leningrad, and Natasha, as she was known to all, rushed to see them with her friends from university.
But for the urban intelligentsia this dizzying moment also presented a new set of complications. Just a few months before cubism made its way to the Hermitage, Soviet tanks had brutally crushed the Hungarian revolution. It was no longer obvious anymore exactly what would set the regime on edge. Under Stalin, testing the limits of freedom meant possibly being sent to a Siberian Gulag or marched downstairs to a prison basement and shot. But how far could you go now? The landscape, though cleared of land mines, still had plenty of holes to fall into and sharp rocks to trip over. What would set off the regime? How critical could you be, and what exactly could you criticize? What art was permitted? And what kinds of difficult truths could be uttered above a whisper?
The testing ground for these questions was samizdat. The word was a contraction of “self” and “publishing,” usually by typewritten manuscript, and it was in every way a unique product of the Thaw. By the early 1960s it was the underground method for reading the novels, short stories, poems, political essays, and memoirs that would never make it through the Soviet state censors. Samizdat writing quickly became the most interesting writing, passed from hand to hand illicitly, a sort of forbidden fruit. (A famous joke from the time recounts a mother saying that when her daughter refused to read War and Peace, she gave it to her to retype as samizdat, and she grabbed it and read every word.)
For a burgeoning poet like Natasha, who had been writing verses since she was a young girl, the Thaw made her feel she could express herself more openly, but the options for having her work read were still few. When she was a linguistics student at Moscow University in the late 1950s, her first poems appeared on the university’s wall newspaper—pages of printed broadsheet pasted up around campus, to be read while standing. Other students attacked her as “decadent and a pessimist” for her dark, lovelorn sentiments. She also learned just how dangerous poetry could be in the Soviet Union. After the quashing of the Hungarian revolution, some of Natasha’s friends were arrested for their poems, and she even found herself at the notorious Lubyanka prison (the place where, in fact, inmates had been shot in the basement not long before). Under KGB pressure, she revealed everything about the creation of the pamphlet that had contained the offending poems. In her mind then, at twenty-one, she still imagined herself a good Soviet citizen, a member of the Komsomol, the young pioneers. But afterward she was filled with remorse and never forgave herself for betraying her friends.
By the early 1960s, her writing life benefited from the spread of samizdat, giving her a chance to add her verses to the stream of underground poetry. At first, she would copy out her poems by hand and share them with friends. But after she purchased an old Olympia for forty-five rubles to write her thesis, she began typing them out. She used carbon paper that could create four copies at once. Natasha would reproduce the same collection as many as eight times, to “publish” an initial samizdat run of thirty-two. Her poems of alienation and loneliness would then spread as her readers made their own copies. “I enter my being like a plane going into a spin,” she wrote in one poem, part of her first samizdat publication from 1964, the year when she began putting together annual compendiums. In another she is “not a flame, not a candle, but a light, I am a fire-fly in the damp, tangled grass.”
Increasingly, the samizdat drew Natasha into a community of dissidents. Just by virtue of engaging in an artistic act, even if its subject was more personal than political, she found herself in defiance of a regime and an ideology that wanted control over all cultural production. In the early 1960s she helped organize two samizdat poetry magazines, Syntax and Phoenix, both of which so riled the authorities that they arrested their editors, charged them as criminals, and sent them away to prison camps. Natasha continued to write. In 1962 she was even taken by a friend to meet Anna Akhmatova, a godmother to the country’s dissident poets. Akhmatova’s circle of young acolytes then included Joseph Brodsky, who would soon be denounced and put on trial for what were deemed “pornographic and anti-Soviet” poems. Then in her seventies, Akhmatova’s regal, uncompromising presence made a strong impression on Natasha, and she became set on her identity as a poet, with all the difficulties this life would entail.
If samizdat started this way for her, as a form of self-expression, Natasha was also beginning to see how it could unify the community of dissident artists and writers then increasingly under attack. It fused them together, providing a form of currency when all the usual avenues of culture were closed. But just how instrumental it could be in helping their burgeoning opposition to home in on a clear purpose, hammering away day after day at the same immovable force of the state—that only became evident once the aperture that had allowed some light into their creative lives began to close.
THE THAW ENDED for Natasha and her friends on the day Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested in September 1965. Both were respected and established writers. Whenever purveyors of samizdat had been prosecuted before, it was almost always for invented or planted crimes, but Sinyavsky and Daniel were put on trial specifically for their words. They were charged under a new Article 70, which made “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation” illegal and punishable by prison sentence.
On December 5, 1965, an official holiday celebrating the Soviet constitution, the dissidents gathered at Pushkin Square in central Moscow in protest, a terrifying prospect coming just a decade after Stalin’s death. The banners they unfurled gave an indication of their strategy: not to call for revolution or overthrow, but simply to ask the Soviet state to abide by its own laws—the civil and human rights principles codified in the country’s guiding charter. “Respect the Constitution, the Basic Law of the USSR,” they insisted, and “We Demand That the Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial Be Public.” A couple months later, Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years and Daniel to five in the notorious labor camps in Mordovia.
Natasha knew both of them well. She had often visited Sinyavsky, whose seminar in Soviet poetry she had taken as a student, and she had once met Yuli Daniel at his home. This was her community, with all of its squabbles and love affairs, and the sentencing fell on her hard. What followed over the next two or three years was best captured in the title of one of the samizdat books about the various repressions: “The Process of the Chain Reaction.” There would be an arrest and a trial and then exile or imprisonment, and samizdat began to serve as a way to document it all, the facts of it, including secretly gathered testimony from trials, and the accounts of those few open displays of protest that were often dispersed in seconds. The appearance of the samizdat in turn led to more arrests, leading to even more samizdat. In this way, throughout 1966 and 1967, Natasha saw many of her friends either sent to prison camps themselves or taking care of those who were—not to mention the families they had left behind. The days of poetry deemed subversive simply because its themes were not cheery enough, those days were over. They were now fighting a war with the regime and their only real weapon was onionskin paper.
Natasha made her part in this battle public in February 1968, when she signed a letter addressed to the troika of leaders then running the country and guiding the crackdown—Nikolai Podgorny, Alexei Kosygin, and Leonid Brezhnev—to demand that her friends, arrested for producing samizdat, be given an open trial, as mandated by law. “As long as arbitrary action of this kind continues uncondemned, no one can feel safe.” Natasha knew she was taking an enormous risk and that she was in a particularly vulnerable situation. She was living with her mother and her son, Yasik, in one unit of a noisy, dimly lit communal apartment with shared bathrooms and kitchens. Natasha’s father was killed at the front in 1943, and she had grown up with a single parent. Her own decision now to raise a child by herself—with the help of her mother, of course—was voluntary but unusual. There was a pervasive eccentricity about Natasha. In a photo from 1968, when she was thirty-two, she is dressed in baggy pants, a formless dark, knitted sweater, and tennis shoes. Her hair is messy and comes down only to her chin; cat-eye glasses dominate her face. And now she was pregnant again, once more without the child’s father’s involvement.
Two days after sending off her protest letter, she felt the hand of the state slap her down, and in the strangest, most unsettling way. Early in the last trimester of her pregnancy, she woke up ill one day and, fearing there was a problem with the baby, checked herself into a maternity hospital and was diagnosed with anemia. As in a horror story, once admitted, she wasn’t allowed to leave. In a series of notes that she managed to smuggle out, she described the ordeal in real time. “Why are they keeping me here?” she wrote. “After each ‘Wait until tomorrow’ I collapse like an empty sack.” After a few days, a psychiatrist examined her and deemed her insistence on being discharged a symptom of schizophrenia. She was then forcibly strip-searched and placed in an ambulance, where she was taken to Moscow’s main psychiatric institution, known as Kashchenko.
The nightmare continued with the clothing: “Another way of crushing and humiliating one. Knickers (knitted ones) down to the knees, stockings without elastic which keep falling down…So we all go around looking uniformly awful, scarcely human in appearance, let alone feminine.” Most of the women were indeed mentally ill: “There’s a recreation room here, with a television and a radiogram. I glanced in, thinking I might pass the time watching television. The television was not yet switched on, and two couples were moving round to the radiogram, to the sound of some post-war tango: poor, miserable women, in frightful gowns, twined together, languorously swaying their hips.”
This was the KGB’s way of punishing her. Only the pregnancy had dictated she land here and not in a prison camp. She tried to be strong. “If they did want to frighten me, to throw me off the rails, to traumatise me, they did not succeed,” she wrote in her last note. “I am waiting for the birth of my child quite calmly, and neither my pregnancy nor his birth will prevent me from doing what I wish—which includes participating in every protest against any act of tyranny.” After nearly two weeks, she was suddenly and without explanation sent home.
It was in the days following her release, regrouping with friends, and still very pregnant, that she began imagining some further use of samizdat, extending its role of documentation, creating one central place to compile a detailed list of wrongs committed by the Soviet Union.
NATASHA LIKED THE TONE captured in the protest letters written collectively by dissident friends—cold as ice, precise, almost legalistic, placing state actions alongside citations of law. She had a love of objectivity, as she later put it. She wanted to use this approach in the creation of a samizdat “journal,” one that would capture the way her community was, by 1968, being regularly battered. Even though some news of the arrests and trials was making it out to the West, and sometimes even being broadcast back into the Soviet Union on the BBC or Voice of America’s shortwave frequencies, these were only the most well-known cases. Natasha wanted to gather everything that was happening, the full experience of living through what they were beginning to think of as a neo-Stalinist moment. It was easy to lose track of the many injustices in the day-to-day reality of their persecution, to feel many darts landing but not know how to move beyond an emotional response, or do more than gird themselves. This journal would help them focus—allow them to pick up the scattered pieces and put them together, fixing their attention on the construction of an ongoing argument. It would also allow them to bring together the various strands of dissidence throughout the empire—those persecuted for their religion, those treated with suspicion for their allegiance to their national or ethnic group, and, of course, the political outcasts, some beaten down simply for insisting on truthfulness, others just for being slightly out of step with the unitary vision of the Communist Party. Each saw their plight as unique. Now they would literally be on the same page.
In this journal, Natasha and her friends resolved, they would excise all personal opinion and let the facts speak. Western journalists would take them more seriously as a result, but this decision about style was also a form of resistance. For a regime that, going back to Lenin, valued the press primarily for its propaganda potential, a neutral news source like the one she was envisioning, committed to a clinical, dry recitation of information, was subversive.
Natasha had time on her hands; her due date fast approaching, she was on leave from her job as a translator at Moscow’s State Institute of Experimental Design and Technical Research. She also had editorial skills from years of producing samizdat, and she was a quick typist. There were other intellectuals who had more standing among the dissidents, but they saw the job of compiling and retyping as menial. Natasha was not afraid of work, and she was eager to do something. And so that spring of 1968, at the end of March, feeling her child move inside her, Natasha slipped one of the pages of carbon paper into her Olympia and started to type.
At the top of Issue No. 1, Natasha had given the journal a title, half-ironic and half in earnest: Human Rights Year in the Soviet Union. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (not exactly commemorated in the Soviet Union) had been signed twenty years earlier. For good measure she added Article 19 as an epigraph: “Everyone has the right of freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.” The name that stuck was the one she used as a subtitle, Chronicle of Current Events, after a BBC Russian-language news roundup. It would become known simply as the Chronicle.
Natasha composed the first issue in her apartment on her typewriter, though she had paid someone on the black market to alter the keys on her Olympia to keep the authorities from connecting her political samizdat to her poetry samizdat. It was twenty tightly spaced pages, with seven carbon copies. She finished by the end of April and gave it an issue date of April 30, 1968 (from then on, issues would appear every other month on the last day of the month). Six of the copies were spread among friends to be retyped in turn, and one was given to a Western correspondent. The scribbled notes containing all the information that went into the issue were immediately burned.
From that first edition, Natasha and her friends used the Chronicle to unload the burden of all the harm that had been done to them. In that sense it was fairly parochial. All the events described at first concerned the small circle of intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad, starting with an account of the trial of four among them who had been prosecuted for creating samizdat. Even Natasha’s recent ordeal made it in: “Without any warning and without her relations’ knowledge, Gorbanevskaya was transferred on 15 February from maternity clinic No. 27, where she was being kept with a threatened miscarriage, to ward 27 of the Kashchenko Hospital.”
The journal felt new. It presented itself as a value-free receptacle. The sparse writing was refreshing, almost elegant. Later, Ludmila Alexeyeva, one of the dissidents who most helped with the typing of the Chronicle, described what she called the “wooden, impersonal style” this way: “It would offer no commentary, no belles lettres, no verbal somersaults; just basic information.” The absence of embellishment felt to Natasha like a creative act. Not the experience she had writing poetry, which, she often said, felt to her as natural and necessary as breathing, but a willed sort of chiseling away at emotion that was satisfying in a different way—that sharpened the focus.
Two weeks after disseminating the first issue, she decided to do another press run, which meant sitting down and typing it all out again. Her friend Pavel Litvinov, grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, had become a prominent dissident who had contributed a lot of the information for the first issue. He let Natasha use his family’s apartment during the day as a place to type, mostly to keep the project away from Natasha’s mother. While working there on the afternoon of May 13, she felt the first contractions of her labor. She kept at it a bit longer, but when the pain became too much, she simply left the page in the typewriter and a note for Litvinov to finish the work. She took herself to the hospital, where she gave birth to her second son at 1:30 in the morning. Weeks later when she recovered and went to visit Litvinov, she found the page in the typewriter exactly where she had left it. It was her project, her initiative, appreciated perhaps by the other dissidents, but not yet deemed essential. She would have to prove its importance to them. She finished retyping Issue No. 1 and started on Issue No. 2, which would be dated June 30, 1968.
By the second issue, Natasha began to innovate, adding more features to the journal. The most important was “News in Brief,” a kind of catchall for violations of every sort and updates on the various cases and prisoners. The first item in Issue No. 2, for example, read, “A lathe tore fingers from the hand of Vadim Gaenko in Camp No. 11 in Mordovia. Gaenko from Leningrad is serving four years under Articles 70 and 72 of the RSFSR Criminal Code for taking part in an illegal Marxist circle and issuing The Bell periodical.” She also included a long list of “extra-judicial political repression,” with the names of ninety-one individuals who had been expelled from their workplaces or kicked out of the party for various perceived offenses like signing protest letters or teaching outlawed books.
Most of the material came from friends who wrote what they knew on slips of paper or committed it to memory and then told it to Natasha, whose identity as the editor was an open secret. With this second issue, Natasha also moved outside the urban centers, with a letter from a group of Crimean Tatars who described the lingering psychic pain from the forced and brutal Stalin-era expulsion from their land. For the Chronicle to convincingly act as a legal brief for the aggrieved Soviet citizen, for it to focus dissent, it had to extend beyond the concerns of Moscow and Leningrad’s intelligentsia.
Natasha was now devoting most of her time to the journal, running around the city collecting material, meeting with relatives of prisoners to debrief them after visits to the camps in the east, and then scrambling to type it all out in the Chronicle’s accumulating pages. It was arduous, secretive work. Her one consolation was that at the time she did not believe the KGB cared much about the Chronicle.
Just as she became comfortable in her identity as the hidden editor, furtively typing alone in borrowed apartments, Natasha felt called to take part in a more physical form of protest. On August 21, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. She still felt guilty about the way she had turned on her friends in the wake of the Hungarian revolution. This was her chance to redeem herself. She had to show solidarity with the people of Czechoslovakia and the liberalizing moves of the country’s new leader, Alexander Dubček.
Natasha and a group of her friends, including Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz, the wife of the imprisoned writer Yuli Daniel, decided they would stage a sit-down protest in Red Square. An act of such flagrantly public dissent had never been attempted on what was essentially sacred ground, mere feet from Lenin’s mummified body. They prepared by making Czech flags and banners with slogans like “For Your Freedom and Ours,” which she then folded up and placed beneath the mattress in her three-month-old son’s pram. Just before the appointed time at noon on August 25, she rolled sleeping baby Osya toward Red Square, an extra pair of cloth diapers and pants at his feet.
They met at Lobnoye Mesto, the stagelike raised circular stone platform in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral, where Ivan the Terrible was said to have carried out beheadings. And when the bell struck noon, the seven friends took out their banners and flags and sat in silence in the middle of the bustling square. Within minutes they were shut down. Natasha recorded her memories right away for inclusion in the next issue of the Chronicle: “People had hardly begun to gather round us when those who were intent on undoing our demonstration came racing towards us, beating the nearest onlookers to it. They leapt on us and tore down our banners without even sparing a glance for what was written on them. I shall never forget the sound of ripping cloth.”
A crowd organized by the KGB to rile up the mostly confused pedestrians began shouting at the protesters, “They’re all Jews!” and “Beat up the anti-Soviets!” Meanwhile, black Volgas, the cars of the KGB, sped through the square and police hopped out, roughly pulling the seated protesters off the ground and into the vehicles. Only Natasha was left, standing by her baby’s pram as strangers yelled at her. The screaming woke him up, and she quickly changed his diaper in the middle of the frenzied crowd. Then another Volga pulled up, and Natasha was lifted up and thrust into the car, her baby just barely pushed into her arms before the door slammed shut and two not-so-random bystanders joined them as witnesses. “I threw myself at the window, lowered it and shouted: ‘Long live free Czechoslovakia.’ Halfway through the sentence the witness took a swipe at my mouth. The man got in beside the driver and said: ‘To the 50th police station.’ I lowered the window again and tried to call out: ‘They’re taking me to the 50th police station.’ ” The witness seated next to her in the car then hit Natasha again, “which was both humiliating and painful.”
Natasha, because she was still nursing an infant, was almost immediately released. A few days later she wrote a letter that appeared in The New York Times, among other publications. As the only participant “still at liberty,” Natasha described what happened in Red Square and expressed pride that, as she put it, “we were able even if briefly to break through the sludge of unbridled lies and cowardly silence and thereby demonstrate that not all citizens of our country are in agreement with the violence carried out in the name of the Soviet people.”
With her closest collaborators, Litvinov and Bogoraz, now jailed and soon sentenced to Siberian exile, Natasha felt increasingly alone. She was ordered to present herself at the Serbsky Institute for Psychiatric Medicine, where a committee of psychiatrists and KGB officers deemed her “non-responsible for her actions—the possibility of low-profile schizophrenia is not excluded.” The committee recommended that “she be declared insane and lodged in a penal category psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment.” But the state prosecutor simply ordered the case closed and appointed her mother as her official guardian. Natasha threw herself back into the Chronicle work, not knowing how long she had.
BY THE END OF 1968, the Chronicle was a fixture in the Soviet Union, a regularly appearing samizdat publication that told a continuing and highly detailed story of repression. In the way a small local newspaper can endow meaning to a group, much as The African Morning Post did, the Chronicle helped the dissidents see themselves fully as a community at war with their own state. The harassment and nighttime searches and exiles and long prison terms gained new significance in those typewritten pages. By recounting it all there, as evidence, the dissidents came to feel part of a single narrative in which they alone were demanding accountability. And, by the fifth issue, the circle of readers had greatly expanded, so much so that most did not know of the existence of the small, harried single mother of two who was pulling it all together.
It was in Issue No. 5 that Natasha addressed her readers as a distinct audience for the first time. The “Year of Human Rights,” 1968, was coming to an end, and she wanted to explain that the journal would persist: “From the five issues of the Chronicle to date, one may form at least a partial impression of how the suppression of human rights and the movement for them has been taking place in the Soviet Union. Not one participant in this movement can feel his task is ended with the end of human rights year. The general aim of democratization, and the more particular aim pursued by the Chronicle, are still to be achieved. The Chronicle will continue to come out in 1969.”
Natasha began receiving the most unexpected kind of positive feedback. The publication she had created was as neutral and open as a bulletin board, and soon strangers were pinning up their own items. The crumpled pieces of paper started arriving almost as soon as the first issue was released, containing details large and small of offenses individuals had witnessed or experienced themselves. If they seemed credible, Natasha included them in the “News in Brief” section. Soon, the pieces of paper were feeding the Chronicle with much of its content. The notes were passed down a chain, hand to hand, much the way the Chronicle itself was disseminated. And based on what was getting to her, the chain was lengthening, with news arriving from cities like Kiev, Kharkov, and far-off Perm, long train rides away from the capital.
Every link in the chain knew only the two other links to which it was attached. Natasha wanted to keep it that way. In that same Issue No. 5, she made explicit what had already become practice. Anyone who is interested “in seeing that the Soviet public is informed about what goes on in the country may easily pass on information to the editors of the Chronicle,” she wrote. “Simply tell it to the person from whom you received the Chronicle, and he will tell the person from whom he received the Chronicle, and so on. But do not try to trace back the whole chain of communication yourself, or else you will be taken for a police informer.”
This system’s only downside was that it had the taint of being secretive and conspiratorial, and that was not a message Natasha wanted to convey. She didn’t see the Chronicle as an illegal enterprise. Its entire modus operandi was transparency—“glasnost” in Russian—uncovering the inner workings of the Soviet Union for the benefit of vigilant citizens. The concept of an underground newspaper had a major archetype in Lenin’s own prerevolutionary propaganda organ, Iskra, printed abroad and smuggled into tsarist Russia, where it had to be hidden and spoken about in hushed tones. The Chronicle was fueled by a different impulse, not building up a shadow revolutionary army, but rather exposing to light, one abuse at a time, the repressive quality of the Soviet state. If a revolution of sorts was envisioned as a result of this process, it was to come from this slow peeling away of obfuscation and illusion that the state used so adeptly to hide its repression.
Natasha wanted the reporting to strive for total accuracy. In Lenin’s view, articulated in 1901, the press was “not only a collective propagandist and collective agitator, but also a collective organizer.” The dissidents weren’t looking to propagandize or agitate or organize. They were interested in shattering the distinctly Soviet feeling of having two selves—one that whispered truths in private and another that was regularly called on to deny reality out loud. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who by 1969 was retyping issues and also providing information from her contacts in Ukraine, described working on the Chronicle as pledging oneself “to be faithful to the truth.” It was almost a religious feeling: “The effect of the Chronicle is irreversible. Each one of us went through this alone, but each of us knows others who went through this moral rebirth. This creates among people who scarcely know one another, but who were connected with the Chronicle, very strong spiritual ties, the kind that probably existed among early Christians.”
For Natasha this faith took the form of being fastidious about corrections. As early as Issue No. 2, there was a section for pointing out misspellings of names or wrong dates in previous issues. Natasha kept this up. And she also wanted her reader-contributors to understand that accuracy was a critical aspect of their work. Natasha was frequently shocked to see fifth- or sixth-generation recopied editions of the Chronicle with mangled names and figures. This was inevitable with samizdat, which could be like a written version of the game telephone. “In those instances when it is not absolutely certain that some event has taken place,” Natasha told her readers in Issue No. 7, “the Chronicle indicates that the piece of information is based on rumor. But at the same time, the Chronicle requests its readers to be careful and accurate in the information they provide for publication.”
These were essentially journalistic ethics that were most adhered to and respected in the West and not at all part of how Soviet media functioned. In its insistence on transparency, the Chronicle was shaping sensibilities. When readers reported some mistreatment they had witnessed—a colleague being unfairly fired or a KGB search of a neighbor’s apartment—they joined this shadow fellowship of truth, what in other countries might simply be called civil society. The act of jotting down this news on a piece of paper in the pared-down, legalistic language of the Chronicle and then moving it along the chain of like-minded Chronicle readers connected each of these individuals to a network that was trying to live by different values.
Into 1969, the size and breadth of the issues grew. Now at least thirty pages of tightly packed news, the journal was covering occurrences that spanned the Soviet Empire. The initial items of Issue No. 7 (dated April 30, 1969) were the accounts of trials, the first in the southern Crimean city of Simferopol of a Tatar, Gomer Bayev, who was accused of distributing “deliberate fabrications defaming the Soviet State and social order,” and the second in Jurmala, on the Latvian coast, of Ivan Yakhimovich, who was arrested after he wrote a letter protesting a political trial. There was also a piece on the persecution of Greek Orthodox priests. The “News in Brief” section included eighteen short items, reports from readers drawing on the local experiences of various marginalized communities—Tatars, Soviet Jews, Russian Orthodox priests, and Ukrainian nationalists.
Natasha was still at the center, quilting every issue together, a careful assembler of a pastiche of reports, large and small, making their way to her in Moscow. She depended on her mother to watch Yasik and Osya. The Chronicle took up nearly all of her time. She was often lugging her twenty-pound typewriter in its case through the Moscow metro and down the wide snow-covered boulevards and up stairways to the empty apartments she borrowed for her work. Hitting the keys hard enough to make an impression that would show up through six pages made considerable noise. She already stood out as suspicious and didn’t need the sound of banging keys through thin walls to further implicate her. So she had to keep moving. The number of pieces of paper she dealt with had also grown by 1969. Holding on to them for too long put her and the writer in danger.
The Chronicle was demanding more and more of a sacrifice from her, but this was also because it was becoming more important. She felt this acutely when the mother of a political prisoner just off the train from having visited her son rushed to meet her in secret so she could unload all she had learned. Natasha would take notes about who was having their food ration cut in that camp, who had been injured recently while carrying wood, who was sick and not receiving medical care. It all went into the next issue’s section on news “from the camps.”
Or there were the trials, another major target of the Chronicle’s attention. The inside of a courtroom, especially in a political trial, was a cordoned-off space in the Soviet Union. Like the prison camps, it was where the crushing machinery of the state was on full display. Natasha would debrief individuals who had managed to sneak in and take notes, sometimes making audio recordings, but more often than not, committing entire bits of testimony to memory. She copied down all these details—of arbitrary rulings, invented laws, and defense counsels never allowed to present evidence—and then put them in the Chronicle. Sometimes the journal even reconstructed the entire proceedings of a political trial.
Readers were able to see how the courts functioned. Issue No. 6 revealed, for example, the way in which the authorities constructed a fake “public” for ostensibly open trials, busing in pliant individuals to attend them and keeping out the friends and families of dissidents: “All those chosen to represent ‘the public’ at the trial turned up at the Proletarsky District’s party committee building at 8 a.m. on October 9th; there they were informed that they would be present at a trial of ‘anti-Sovietists.’ Then they were taken to the court in a bus which drove straight into the yard and they entered the building by the back door.” The Chronicle further reported that the source of this information, one of those planted audience members, “felt embarrassed when in the course of the trial he recognized the falsehood of the information he had been given, and ashamed when, with the rest of the audience, he walked through the saddened crowd—which sympathized with the defendants—after the verdict.”
Natasha now relentlessly searched out new information. It made her less than completely careful at times. In an episode from the summer of 1969 that would soon reverberate off the red marble walls of a Moscow courtroom, an ex-convict named Vilko Forsel met Natasha at an apartment of friends while she was vacationing with her older son in the Estonian city of Tartu.
As soon as she heard that the man had spent ten years in Vladimir prison, she perked up and began peppering him with questions about the conditions, particularly about the well-being of the political prisoners: How many were there? Were they housed together? What kind of food were they eating? Were the guards more aggressive with them? Then she turned to the case of a Tartu schoolboy who had recently been beaten for passing out leaflets connected to the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Did he know anyone with more information about this? Forsel, a little tipsy from his afternoon of vodka and pickled mushrooms, didn’t know what to make of this tiny and slightly disheveled Muscovite lady. Then she pulled out a few issues of the Chronicle and handed him the most recent. He leafed through them and stopped when he saw an article about the Crimean Tatars and their struggle to “return to their native land.” Forsel wasn’t too drunk to understand the danger, and he angrily shoved the issues back at Natasha. “I didn’t like the way a man who had just come out of prison was being drawn into some risky enterprise, being hindered from living in peace,” he later told the court. He was asked whether he reported the exchange to anyone. Yes, he said, I went and told the KGB.
NATASHA HAD ALWAYS FIGURED it was a matter of time. With every added Chronicle reader, her chance of arrest increased. After ten issues, the KGB and its head, Yuri Andropov, had upgraded the threat level of the journal. And then there was the matter of the BBC and Voice of America, which would broadcast readings of entire issues. The stations saw the journal’s reporting as a reliable news source, a contrast to the Potemkin paradise presented in the pages of Pravda and Izvestia. Their frequencies were jammed from transmitting into Soviet territory, but they still managed to reach wily Soviet citizens with shortwave radios.
When her apartment was searched in late October 1969, Natasha knew she had to pass off her editorial duties to someone else, and quickly. It was difficult to give it up, but she had also come to see herself as a conduit for a collective voice. Someone less compromised could now perform that role. The essential thing was to keep the journal going.
Her first successor had an eventful start to her editorship. Galina Gabai, the wife of a political prisoner, had taken over the work of Issue No. 10 and had already collected much of the material for the following issue when the KGB arrived early one morning. Before opening the door, she had the good sense to stuff a handful of the most sensitive notes inside her bathrobe. And then, as ten KGB agents, some undercover in sweat suits and others in dark ties, filled her small apartment, she edged into the kitchen and toward a large steaming pot of borscht cooking on the stove, dropping the pages into the bubbling red soup before they could see. After that close call she decided to relinquish her responsibilities.
So on the freezing morning of December 24, Natasha herself had in her apartment the scraps of paper and longer reports that would make up Issue No. 11, including a long piece about Vladimir prison, incorporating the bits of intelligence she’d gleaned from the stranger she’d met in Estonia, Vilko Forsel. That’s when the knock came. She had an envelope crammed with handwritten notes that was in the center drawer of her desk, and a few other crumpled pages stuffed in the pocket of her coat hanging by the door; the KGB would pounce on any handwriting to try to track down contributors. She watched the agents shake out books, hammer their fists against the floors and walls to find possible hollow hiding spaces, cut through cushions, and pour her kitchen utensils out of their drawers.
At one point, as Natasha sat at her desk trying to calmly sharpen a pencil with a safety razor, one of the agents started flipping through what was perhaps her most treasured possession: a manuscript copy of Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem with a personal inscription by the poet herself. She leaped up to grab it from the agent’s hands, forgetting she was holding a razor, and cut a deep gash across his fingers. Blood began dripping down to the floor. Natasha immediately apologized, but it seemed a particularly bad omen.
By the time the search was done, the agents had gathered a pile of paper a foot thick and dozens of books. Only then did they let Natasha know that she was under arrest. Three friends had stopped by during the search, and still concerned about leaving any incriminating papers and not sure if the KGB had found them, she whispered, “Go through the desk,” before she was taken away. She also grabbed a light coat and left the one she hoped still had the scraps in its pocket, though she felt the painful chill of December slap her in the face as soon as she walked outside and was shoved into the waiting black Volga.
What she’d feared most was that the authorities would once again simply declare her insane. Having already been confined to a mental hospital and then diagnosed again following the Red Square demonstration, she knew there was an obvious solution for dealing with her. Other dissidents had suffered a similar fate, like her friend Pyotr Grigorenko, the major general turned activist who was at that moment locked in a psychiatric ward. The KGB officers brought her to Butyrka prison, where she was charged with slander of the Soviet system under Article 190-1, as well as resisting arrest for the incident with the razor blade.
In April, after three months in prison, she was taken to the Serbsky Institute as she had suspected and examined by a commission of psychiatrists including Professor Daniil Lunts, who had become infamous for liberally diagnosing dissidents with “sluggish schizophrenia,” a mental illness newly invented by Soviet doctors. Lunts joined in the conclusion that Natasha had a “slow progressive” case of this schizophrenia. Though she was described as being completely normal—“converses willingly, calm bearing, a smile on her face”—her unwillingness to perceive her behavior as wrong was proof of pathology: “Does not renounce her actions, but thinks she has done nothing illegal. Unshakably convinced of the rightness of her actions, she moralizes a great deal, in particular saying that she acted thus ‘so as not to be ashamed in the future before her children.’ ”
The trial took place on July 7, without Natasha. As a rule, mental patients were not allowed to be present in court proceedings. The prosecution used Forsel, the man Natasha had met in Estonia, to prove that she was at least spreading the Chronicle. Copies of the journal had also been confiscated from her exiled friends Litvinov and Bogoraz (Natasha had visited them in Siberia that fall). This particular issue, the prosecution argued, could be traced back to Natasha’s typewriter—it had been grabbed during the search, and they could now match the keystrokes. And finally there was her own account of being forcibly confined in the beginning of 1968, called “Free Health Service,” which had been smuggled to the West and broadcast over shortwave radio. This evidence, together with the testimony of the KGB agent who had been accidentally cut during the search, was enough for the prosecution to declare that she had “systematically prepared and circulated slanderous concoctions defaming the Soviet political system.”
Natasha’s mother was allowed to speak from the stand. Weepy and exhausted, she made a plea: “If my daughter has committed a crime, sentence her to any punishment, even the most severe, but do not place an absolutely healthy person in a psychiatric hospital.” The defense lawyer’s only argument—echoing the one heard in the case against Nnamdi Azikiwe—was that the Chronicle was entirely anonymous. No proof had been given that Natasha or anyone else had anything to do with creating or spreading the journal. It had no address, no masthead or bylines. Even if some issues of the Chronicle seemed to come from Natasha’s typewriter, that was still not proof that she herself had typed it. The circle of people using that machine had never been established.
The court took no time to come to its judgment. It found her guilty, but of “unsound mind.” She would be placed in a “psychiatric hospital of special type for compulsory treatment.” The period of time was left undefined.
In the months that followed, while Natasha awaited her transfer, she was placed in the hospital wing of Butyrka prison. “I’ll try to say briefly what’s most important,” she wrote in a letter to her mother in November. “I think that all I did was right and justified, but it is terrible to feel that you and the children have to pay for the right things I did. The weight that has fallen on you—that weight I have felt fully only in prison….I miss the children terribly. Do they remember me?”
It was in early January that she sat chained to a seat on a train chugging its way through a barren, snowy landscape. Natasha knew where she was going, knew too much in fact about the prison for the mentally ill set up under Stalin, five hundred miles east of Moscow on a bend in the Volga River. Only a year before, in Issue No. 10 of the Chronicle, she had compiled a report on the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Kazan. She enumerated its horrors in a sparse style, exactly as they were conveyed to her by former inmates: “If the patients commit offences—refuse to take medicine, quarrel with the doctors, or fight, they are strapped into their beds for three days, sometimes more. With this form of punishment, the elementary rules of hygiene are ignored: the patients are not allowed to go to the lavatory, and bedpans are not provided.” She also knew the general layout of the psychiatric hospital, what would be expected of her and the other patient-prisoners during their three-and-a-half-hour workdays (sew aprons and sheets), and even the name of the antipsychotic medication the doctors would soon force her to take.
Natasha remembered the words of a poem she had written for her friend Yuri Galanskov, who had been similarly locked up in a psychiatric ward in 1966 and drugged: “In the madhouse / Wring your hands, / Press your pale forehead against the wall / Like a face into a snowdrift.” Now it would be her face, pressed and vanishing.
The Chronicle, though, continued. There was a new editor, and there would be another and another after that until the early 1980s, when a fierce crackdown finally killed the journal. And yet the dissidents’ relentless focus on glasnost—what Lyudmila Alexeyeva called a “process of justice or governance, being conducted in the open”—would within a couple years become the signature policy of a new Soviet premier, an effort at transparency he felt he had no choice but to implement. It would soon undercut the totalitarian state and ultimately cause it to implode. The journal, which for so long had funneled and concentrated the dissidents’ efforts, was the vessel for this process. In language crisp and unadorned, its insistence on truth had made it harder and harder to accept lies. The fate of the Chronicle’s founder was treated no less clinically. In Issue No. 18, an item among others: “On 9 January 1971 Natalya Gorbanevskaya was transferred from Butyrka Prison to the Special Psychiatric Hospital on Sechenov Street in Kazan (postal address: building 148, block 6, postbox UE, Kazan-82), where a course of treatment with Haloperidol has been prescribed for her.”