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PARTISAN REVIEW
you see belongs to the same realm of "peaceful offensive."
Further, after mention of the concessions on jamming of radio
broadcasts, there follows an even more intriguing passage:
"Appar–
ently,
it will become easier for foreign correspondents in the USSR to
travel within the country and to meet Soviet people . . . next in line
comes the question of giving the Soviet people wider access to Western
newspapers and journals. ' , (Starting from zero.) Here Medvedev seems
to be handing his pen over to the notorious information-pedler, Mr.
Victor Louis.
An exampIe ofMedvedev' sstyIe of argument is his statement that
Soviet dissidents have recently begun' 'to express increasingly extrem–
ist views and to put forward ever less constructive proposals, ruled more
by their emotions than by considerations of political expediency.
"One ofthose people,'
,3
he writes, "recently declared that even the
Blacks of South Africa are not subjected to such harsh persecutions as
the Soviet dissidents. Another,
4
after first criticizing Willie Brandt
harshly and unjustly for his Eastern policy , said that Brandt should be
judged by a Nuremberg trial of the future. A third
told fn'ends
that
Allende's regime in Chile had brought the country to an impasse and
that the military coup, even with all its excesses, was the lesser evil for
Chile and the Chilean people .
The fourth
5
appealed to the American
Congress not to encourage trade relations with the USSR until it guar–
antees freedom of emigration."
This is an utterly unworthy trick on Medvedev's part! He puts
people of completely divergent views into one "bag" and further–
more, adds an anonymous person alleged to have said something to
some friends. In no way different from the Soviet press, he depersonal–
izes Solzhenitsyn, Maksimov, and Sakharov and exploits this device to
distort their statements. He mentions Maksimov's statement about a
military trial for Brandt, but fails to mention that Sakharov censured
this statement and that Maksimov publicly acknowledged Sakharov's
criticism as justified. Finally, Medvedev knows that none of these three
men would ever endorse the words of some anonymous person who
approves of the terror and the military coup in Chile . After such a trick,
the compliments paid to Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, with which
Medvedev's article is strewn, come through as sheer hypocrisy and
assumed objectivity.
3Solzhenitsyn 4 Maksimov 5Sakharov
