VADIM BELOTSERKOVSKY
55
had been in hiding in the West, had worked a year and a half at
Radio
Liberation (now Liberty), and had then deserted back and come out
with an expose of the activity of the imperialists, the CIA, Radio
Liberation, and so on. Commentary, as they say, is superfluous.
After his expulsion from
Veche,
Osipov founded a new journal,
Zemlya,
with the aid of Rodionov. He put out two issues, but after his
arrest
Zemlya
too ceased to exist. And the activity of remaining
nationalist groups was also reduced to nothing, "of its own accord."
The elite group fell silent soon after Solzhenitsyn's expulsion.
Why did the authorities disperse the nationalist opposition?
Possibly they had become embarrassed before the West, crushing only
Democrats; and maybe also before nationalist party adherents in the
republics as well. "You let our nationalists rot in the camps, but you
don't touch your own!" The authorities evidently,decided to cope with
the task of kindling anti-Semitism themselves, by methods which are
familiar to us all by now.
Vladimir Bukovsky, responding not long ago
to
the question of
why the Soviet authorities cannot crush the human rights movement,
compared it to an iceberg, the underwater part of which is hidden in
broad strata of the intelligentsia (primarily, I would add, the scientific
and technical stratum: most people active in the movement are physi–
cists, mathematicians, etc.). The nationalist movement, by contrast,
can be compared to gobs of silt which have been torn from the mired
bottom of society and are floating to the surface. Being decayed matter,
this silt is seldom able
to
float on top without help-a fact, I repea t,
which does not exclude the danger of its being stirred up in the event of
some "earthquake," again with the aid of the powerful machine of the
authorities.
The nationalist movements in the republics are another matter.
These reflect and defend genuine national interests and for that reason
are, like the human rights movement, comparable to an iceberg and
thus ineradicable, although the force and harshness of the repressive
measures directed against them exceed the force of the measures
directed against the democratic movement in the RSFSR. A large
proportion of political prisoners in the USSR are activists in the
national movements of non-Russian republics.
The strength of the human rights movement in the RSFSR is
explained, incidentally, both by its multinational character and by its
collaboration with the national-democratic movements in the repub–
lics. The Russian nationalists are of course irreconcilably hostile to
other " nationalists."
