Make noise, remember, says Russian writer

Press, 17 April 1980, Page 6

Make noise, remember, says Russian writer

By

GENEVIEVE FORDE

“What is it to be — Afghanistan or the Olympics?” asked the interviewer, John .Goodliffe, of the University of Canterbury, of Viktor Nekrasov, a Russian writer who now lives in Paris. Mr Nekrasov is in New Zealand for a few days at the end of an Australasian trip. He was brought here by Amnesty International. By late yesterday afternoon, he was a veteran of two Christchurch press interviews, and was obviously ready for the leading topics of the day where Russians are concerned. ' “He said if he was President Carter he would invade Cuba,” said Mr Goodliffe, in response to a question as to how the West should react to Soviet Union aggression, as in the case of Afghanistan.

Mr Nekrasov knew Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Russia, and described him as “a great Russian writer — a writer who revealed a great deal about the Soviet Union to the West; but a better writer than a politician.” Nonetheless, he agreed with Solzhenitsyn’s argument that the West has to be tough where Russia is concerned.

“The West is too trusting. You have to be on the alert when dealing with the Soviet Union,” said Mr Nekrasov through Mr Goodliffe. “Carter is beginning. He’s starting. When Kennedy banged his fist during the Cuban crisis, Khruschev gave in. Carter is acting correctly at the moment with a trade boycott and the Olympic boycott.”

Mr Nekrasov thinks the Olympic Games will still take place, and that trade boycotts would be better. Mr Nekrasov should know about boycotts. He was coldshouldered out of Russia, and saved from incarceration only by his reputation outside the country as a writer.

He was born in Kiev into a middle-clas family; his father was a bank officer and his mother a doctor who trained in Paris. Mr Nekrasov

lived in Paris with his parents at that time. The familj’ returned to Russia. His father died during the 1917 revolution, of natural causes, and his elder brother was killed bv the "Reds” at the age of 18 during World War I because he had in his possession some of his mother’s French books. They thought he was a spy. In the 19305, during Stalin’s purges, in which some 40 million Russians died, Mr Nekrasov was a student of architecture and involved in theatre. “We did not believe that this was going on, there was a limited amount of information,” he said. By “some sort of miracle” his family did not lose a member under Stalin. Most families did. Mr Nekrasov said Stalin was also largely responsible for the 20 million Russians who perished during World War II; he had killed off all the good generals beforehand and it took some time for others to get the experience needed to take over.

Mr Nekrasov fought in the war, joined the Communist Party at that time because he thought it was doing well in fighting the evil of fascism, and after, while lying injured in hospital, wrote the book for which he is most famous — “In the Trenches of Stalingrad” — partly because he had wanted to be a writer as a child and partly, out of enforced inaction.' The book won him the Stalin Prize, worth 50,000 roubles — “a lot of money in those days” — and with considerable prestige attached to it. Once a writer had won that, .he had no difficulty getting his work published, Mr Nekrasov said. However, before long he found his writing criticised in the newspapers, but nothing came of this until he was “foolish enough” to write favourably about his experiences in the United States when he travelled there and to Europe in 1960.

That, indiscretion attracted the attention of Khruschev. He received a “severe reprimand” from the Party. “There are grades of pun-

ishment for dissident artists, ranging from ‘reprimand’ to expulsion from the Writers’ Union, which means you cannot get published any more.”

In 1969, Mr Nekrasov offended again, by signing a I letter to Mr Brezhnev about

the cases of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Many of the people who signed were “persecuted” by the K.G.8., but he received only a second “severe reprimand.” Finally, in 1973, as a cumulative affect of his various

aberrations, Mr Nekrasov was expelled from the Communist Party and the Writers’ Union. A plan for a twovolume publication of works was stopped. He wrote a letter to Mr Brezhnev saying he wanted

to leave, and Mr Brezhnev, “not surprisingly,” was only too readv to agree. “He felt that Brezhnev was heartily sick of him,” said Mr Goodliffe. Since then Mr Nekrasov has been living and writing in Paris with his wife, who was an actress in Russia, and who, he said, is worrying about his being so far away across the world.

He said that people in New Zealand might get the im-i pression from Pravda that ; Russians lived very well, but if one talked to the average citizen over a glass of vodka it would be a different story. There was a constant shortage of food in Russia, but the housewives got used to it. “That is not the essence of the matter,” he said. “The more important mat- ■ ter is that Soviet citizens are not allowed to speak, think, 1 or read what they want to.”

When asked how the Soviet Government could stop citizens from thinking what they wanted to, Mr Nekrasov said: “The only time you think is at night with your head under a blanket. For a thought to matter it has to be spoken to somebody. There is an organisation called the K.G.B. which likes to listen to your thoughts. "You might call them spies. The Russians have different words for them,” said Mr Nekrasov. Some of these were untranslatable, said Mr Goodliffe, but some of the others were “knockers” (people who knock on doors) and “stampers” (people whose footsteps you hear behind you). During his last month in Kiev there were usually two men following him everywhere, Mr Nekrasov said, with a variation of four men in a car with a radio. In the Soviet Union, workers cannot afford houses or cars—“not even a sausage” and they cannot go on strike but, although there are no : millionaires there, there are ■ people, leading people in the ’ party, “who have so much ■ money they don’t know what 1 to do with it.” 1 Most of the people just :

grumble about things over their vodka, but the “intel< ligentsia” were the group who had protested. Artists, scientists and priests were the ones who had ended up in jail, unless their fame protected them, and many of them had died there. Of the three mililon prisoners in the Soviet Union, 10,000 of them — “an educated guess,” — would be political prisoners.

i Anti-semitism in Russia had always been there — from the top — but it had never been worse than it was now, said Mr Nekrasov, and that was why so many Jews were leaving Russia. Only about 3 per cent of jobs in higher education establishments were allowed to go to Jews, who make up two million out of the total population of 260 million.

Mr Nekrasov said that’ when the pianist, Irina Plotnikova, came to Christchurch last year and was quoted by the news media as saying she was very happy living in Russia, she would have had to say that or she would not have been allowed to leave

Russia again. “Anybody is put in prison who has his own ideas and doesn’t conceal them, provided they are not to famous,” said Mr Nekrasov. “In the case of these people, they have to acknowledge world opinion, because they want to trade. They don’t want to spoil relations.”

He said that 90 per cent of the Russian embassies throughout the world had, K.G.B. agents in them and that the recent Soviet ambassador to New Zealand, while he personally probably would not have handed money over to a local Communist Party, might have arranged for it to be handed over. “All the Soviet embassies do it,” he said. The best things people in the West could do to help Soviet political’ prisoners were to “write, write, write” — to Mr Brezhnev, anybody. “Make a noise. Don’t forget them,” Mr Nekrasov said.