VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV
to take those placards back home with us ? I had no intention of
going back home .
175
One would think only lovers on their way to a tryst would be so
eager. Lest the reader worry too much, I note that Romeo did finally
keep his tryst with Juliet, and the
gebisty
did finally break up the
demonstration.
The bond between the dissidents and the KGB is one based on
contrariety, but not on compulsion. Ultimately, however, even the
contrariety on which the bond is based inevitably leads to a para–
doxical similarity. Not to a complete identity, perhaps, but to an
identity as regards methods.
In
order to oppose the enemy, one must
learn his methods and use his weapons. The hangman's victims
learn from the hangman ; the victims of persecution learn from those
who persecute them:
"If
you run with wolves , you must howl like a
wolf." Hence the undemocratic character of the Russian democrats:
their intolerance, elitism, dogmatism, bureaucratism, fear of criti–
cism, demagogy, and other traits that they deplore as attributes of
the regime, and yet take on themselves.
In
early 1977, in the Moscow subway, there was an explosion
that killed several passengers . Immediately following it, two state–
ments were issued. One of them, from Victor Louis, an English
journalist (but a Soviet citizen) with close ties to the KGB, blamed
the explosion on the dissidents. The other, from academician
Sakharov, blamed it on the KGB. But what if that explosion had
been a mere accident? Alas! Given the sharp polarization in the
Soviet Union, there is no room for accidents-they are outside the
law. The dissidents and the authorities, it would seem, are
competing with each other in giving reality an ideological tincture.
Finally, three Armenians - none of them dissidents or KGB
agents - were charged with having set off the explosion, convicted,
and shot. They were tried behind closed doors, which raises the
presumption that they were scapegoats. But, of course, the crime
had to be pinned on
somebody,
otherwise the omnipotent KGB might
be suspected of incompetence.
Here an interesting question suggests itself: would the Armen–
ians' lives have been spared if the Chief of State had been not
Brezhnev, but Solzhenitsyn? or Sakharov? The course followed by
liberal dissidents like Sakharov has by now sharply diverged from
that followed by such nationalistic dissidents as Solzhenitsyn. The
two groups are calling down curses upon each other, and each no
