Abstract
The first targets in the struggle for freedom of expression were totalitarian regimes: today the campaign reaches further
Index on Censorship is 50 years old. Over the years, this small quarterly publication has published some of the most celebrated writers in the world, including Margaret Atwood, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mario Vargas Llosa. It has also prided itself on promoting the work of lesser-known dissident writers living under authoritarian regimes, whether behind the Iron Curtain, under apartheid in South Africa, or from the dictatorships of Latin America or the Middle East.
More recently, it has been closely involved in campaigns on behalf of writers and artists in Belarus and has worked to publicise the fate of intellectuals and journalists in Hong Kong, Myanmar, Turkey and Afghanistan, while monitoring media crackdowns in Russia and China. At the same time, Index has never been shy of criticising western governments and institutions when free speech is under attack.
The origin story of Index on Censorship is steeped in the romance and myth of the Cold War. In one version of the narrative, it is a tale that brings together courageous young dissidents fighting a totalitarian regime and liberal western intellectuals, both groups united in their respect for enlightenment values. In another, it is just one colourful episode in a fight to the death between two superpower ideologies, where the world of letters found itself at the centre of a propaganda war.
Both versions are true. It is undeniably the case that Index was founded in the Cold War by a group of intellectuals blooded in the cultural diplomacy that saw western governments (and intelligence services) fighting to demonstrate that the life of the mind could only truly flourish where western values of democracy and free speech held sway.
In all the words written over the years about how Index came to be, it is easy to forget the people at the heart of it all: the dissident writers themselves, living the daily reality of censorship, repression, and potential death. The story really began not in 1972, with the first publication of this magazine, but with a letter to The Times and the French paper Le Monde on January 13, 1968. This “Appeal to World Public Opinion” was signed by Larisa Bogoraz Daniel, a veteran dissident, and Pavel Litvinov, a young physics teacher who had been drawn into the fragile opposition movement during the celebrated show trial of intellectuals Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel (Larisa’s husband) in February 1966. This is now generally accepted as the beginning of the modern Soviet dissident movement.
The letter was written in response to the so-called Trial of Four in January 1968, which saw two students, Yuri Galanskov and Alexander Ginzburg sentenced to five years’ hard labour for the production of anti-Communist literature. The other two defendants were Alexey Dobrovolsky, who pleaded guilty and cooperated with the prosecution, and typist Vera Lashkova. Ginzburg later became a prominent dissident and lived in exile in France, Galanskov died in a labour camp in 1972, and Dobrovolsky was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Lashkova’s fate is unclear.
The letter was the first of its kind, appealing to the Soviet people and the outside world, rather than directly to the authorities. “We appeal to everyone in whom conscience is alive and who has sufficient courage…Citizens of our country, this trial is a stain on the honour of our state and on the conscience of every one of us.” The letter went on to evoke the shadow of Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s and ended: “We pass this appeal to the Western progressive press and ask for it to be published and broadcast by radio as soon as possible – we are not sending this request to Soviet newspapers because that is hopeless.” The trial took place in a courthouse packed with Kremlin supporters, while protesters outside endured temperature of 50 below zero.
Poet Stephen Spender responded by organising a telegram of support from 16 prominent artists and intellectuals, including philosopher Bertrand Russell, poet WH Auden, composer Igor Stravinsky, and novelists JB Priestley and Mary McCarthy. It took eight months for Litvinov to respond, as he had only heard the words of support on the radio and was waiting for the official telegram to arrive (it never did). On August 8, 1968, the young dissident outlined a bold plan for support in the West for what he called “the democratic movement in the USSR”.
He proposed a committee made up of “universally respected progressive writers, scholars, artists and public personalities” to be taken not just from the United States and Western Europe, but from Latin America, Asia, Africa and, ultimately, from the Soviet bloc itself. Litvinov later wrote an account in Index explaining how he had typed the letter and given it to Dutch journalist and human rights activist Karel van het Reve, who smuggled it out of the country to Amsterdam the next day. Two weeks later, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.
The Litvinov letter that spawned Index on Censorship
On August 25, 1968, Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz Daniel joined six others in Red Square to demonstrate against the invasion. It was an extraordinary act of courage. They sat down and unfurled home-made banners with slogans that included: “We are Losing Our Friends”, “Long Live a Free and Independent Czechoslovakia”, “Shame on Occupiers!” and “For Your Freedom and Ours!”. The activists were immediately arrested and most received sentences of prison or exile, while two were sent to psychiatric hospitals. Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright and first president of the Czech Republic, later said: “For the citizens of Czechoslovakia, these people became the conscience of the Soviet Union, whose leadership without hesitation undertook a despicable military attack on a sovereign state and ally.”
It is all too easy to see this period through a western lens: that the Appeal to World Public Opinion was important because it led to the founding of Index. The truth is that the letter was important because it internationalised the struggle of the Soviet dissident movement. As Litvinov later wrote: “Only a few people understood at the time that these individual protests were becoming a part of a movement which the Soviet authorities would never be able to eradicate.” Index was a happy consequence of Litvinov’s appeal; it was not the point of the exercise and there was no mention of a magazine in the early correspondence.
The original idea was to set up an organisation, Writers and Scholars International, to give support to the dissidents. It was only with the appointment of Michael Scammell in 1971 that the idea emerged to use a magazine to publish and promote the work of dissidents around the world. Spender and his great friend and collaborator Stuart Hampshire, an Oxford philosopher, were still reeling from revelations about CIA funding of their previous magazine, Encounter. “I knew that [they]…had attempted unsuccessfully to start a new magazine and I felt that they would support something in the publishing line,” wrote Scammell in 1981.
Speaking recently from his home in New York, Scammell told me: “I understood Pavel Litvinov’s leanings here. He understood that a magazine that was impartial would stand a better chance of making an impression in the Soviet Union than if it could just be waved away as another CIA project.”
Philip Spender, the poet’s nephew, who worked for many years at the magazine, agreed: “Pavel Litvinov was the seed from which Index grew…He always said it shouldn’t be anti-Communist or anti-Soviet. The point wasn’t this or that ideology. Index was never pro any ideology.” It has been suggested that Index was effectively the successor publication to Encounter, set up by the same Cold Warriors and susceptible to the same CIA influence. In her exhaustive examination of the Cultural Cold War, Who Paid the Piper?, journalist Frances Stonor Saunders claimed Index was set up with a “substantial grant” from the Ford Foundation, which had long been linked to the CIA. In fact, the Ford funding came later, but it lasted for two decades and raises serious questions about what its backers thought Index was for.
Scammell now recognises that the CIA was playing a sophisticated game at the time. “On one level, this is probably heresy to say so, but one must applaud the skills of the CIA. I mean, they had that money all over the place. So I would get the Ford Foundation grant, let’s say, and it never ever occurred to me that that money might have come from the CIA.” He added: “I would not have taken any money that was labelled CIA, but I think they were incredibly smart.”
By the time the magazine appeared in spring 1972, it had come a long way from its origins in the Soviet opposition movement. It did reproduce two short works by Solzhenitsyn and poetry by dissident Natalya Gorbanevskaya (a participant in the 1968 Red Square demonstration, who had been released from a psychiatric hospital in February of that year). But it also contained pieces about Bangladesh, Brazil, Greece, Portugal and Yugoslavia.
Philip Spender said it is important to understand the context of the times: “There was a lot of repression in the world in the early 70s. There was the imprisonment of writers in the Soviet Union, but also Greece, Spain and Portugal. There was also apartheid. There was a coup in Chile in 1973, which rounded up dissidents. Brazil was not a friendly place.” He said Index thought of itself as the literary version of Amnesty International. “It wasn’t a political stance – it was a non-political stance against the use of force.”
The first edition of the magazine opened with an essay by Stephen Spender, “With Concern for Those Not Free”. He asked each reader of the article to say to themself: “If a writer whose works are banned wishes to be published and if I am in a position to help him to be published, then to refuse to give help is for me to support censorship.” He ended the essay in the hope that Index would act as part of an answer to the appeal “from those who are censored, banned or imprisoned to consider their case as our own”.
Since Index was founded, the Berlin Wall has fallen and apartheid has been dismantled. We have witnessed the War on Terror, the rise of Putin, and the emergence of China as a world superpower. And yet, it is not too grand or presumptuous, the role of the magazine remains unchanged – to consider the case of the dissident writer as our own.
