Silence Of Communist Writers Defended

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30843, 31 August 1965, Page 14

Silence Of Communist Writers Defended

(N.Z. Press Association— Copyright) NEW YORK, August 29. Mihajlo Mihajlov, a Jugoslav writer convicted of insulting the Soviet Union in magazine articles, explained in a statement published today why most writers in Communist countries are silent about the real conditions in their countries.

The statement, written for the “New Leader,” defends the writers and contends that many Westerners are completely mistaken about the nature of the internal struggles in all Communist countries in Eastern Europe.

Mihajlov received a suspended prison sentence of five years in Jugoslavia for his “Moscow Summer” articles. The first two were published in “Delo,” a Jugoslav journal that has been banned. The third appeared in the “New Leader” on June 7. Mihajlov was also refused reappointment as a lecturer in Slavic languages and literature in the Zadar division of Zagreb University. He says that the following three basic assumptions are often made by Westerners to explain the silence of writers in Communist countries but are without foundation in fact: fear of reprisals, the inability to get their writing published, and satisfaction with things as they are. “The Socialist intellectual who expresses himself freely before the Western public begins to feel, somehow, like a traitor,” Mihajlov says. Truth Spoken

“I believe this feeling has been experienced even by writers who, thanks to exceptional circumstances, have succeeded in speaking the truth about their society in their own country: Pasternak, Dudintsev and Solzhenitsyn must have felt this uneasiness.”

Pasternak, whose “Doctor Zhivago,” a novel set in the Russian revolution, caused an international uproar, was pre-

vented by the Russian Government from accepting the Nobel Prize. Vladimir Dudintsev in “Not By Bread Alone” describes life under the dea’. hand of bureaucracy, and Alexander Solzhenitzyn’s, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” depicts man’s inhumanity to man in Stalin’s concentration camps.

Mihajlov adds: “And this sense of treachery is a much more decisive factor in inhibiting free expression than fear of reprisals. We intellectuals of Socialist societies feel like traitors when we speak the truth, traitors both to our countries and to all who fights for freedom in capitalist society . . . that is why the majority of us are silent” Fundamental Conflict Discussing the nature of the internal struggle in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe—a struggle of which Jugoslavia, according to Mihajlov, is the focal point he says:

“I do not believe the fundamental conflict of our day is between Socialist and Capitalist systems: rather it is the conflict between democratic socialism and totalitarianism —be it political totalitarianism, as in the Socialist countries, or economic, as in the West.”

“Jugoslav society has today arrived at a critical point,” says Mihajlov. “The road may lead either

backward toward a totalitarianism of the Soviet type, or toward a hitherto unattainable democratic socialism.” Mihajlov says democratic socialism can be called Christian socialism, "not because the free democratic Socialist society would profess the Christian faith, but because the projection of authentic Christianity into the sociopolitical sphere is democracy.” Totalitarianism must be overcome, he says, “if only because no totalitarian society will be a match for the Asiatic totalitarianism which is just being born.”