WRITERS IN EXILE
357
write it, but I did have a small part in translating some things for
this book. They collected all the materials, including trial rec–
ords and Soviet press clippings and foreign press clippings, and
they tried
to
analyze the trial of Siniavsky and Daniel. Soon after
that, as is well known , Ginzburg and Galanskov were arrested.
At that time , I became one of those people who felt that I had to
do something, and I started to collect material about the trial of
Ginzburg and Galanskov and other people who spoke in their
defense-among them, Vladimir Bukovsky. And I also collected
documents published, if this word can be used, in
samizdat–
documents which were circulated in typewritten manuscripts
and then sent abroad and published in America and other
countries.
At that time there appeared something that later came
to
be
called the human-rights movement, or the dissident movement,
in the Soviet Union. Of course , some people argue about the
exact time when it started, but definitely very soon it became
quite clear that information about arrested writers-people ar–
rested for saying or writing something-was plentiful. The in–
formation started
to
circulate and somebody had to take respon–
sibility for getting all this information together. And a very
important magazine appeared, the
Chronicle of Current Events,
which is devoted exclusively to information about violations of
human rights-arrests of writers, prohibitions against books and
movies, hunger strikes in labor camps, harrassment of different
nationalities, religious groups, and so on. This type of writing
started in bimonthly, anonymous
samizdat
magazines, then
began to circulate and even to be published in the West. The
most surprising thing is that the
Chronicle of Current Events
started in April 1968, and now we have the sixty-second issue of
this magazine, which, almost without interruption (though it
once was interrupted for eighteen months) still appears. People
who write for this magazine, though most of their names are un–
known to the public, continue to be harrassed, arrested, fired
from their jobs, sent to mental hospitals and prisons. But the
magazine, miraculously, continues to appear. I happen to be a
lucky person who was around when the first issues of
Chronicle
appeared and started circulating in
samizdat.
And this type of literature-those books and collections of
trials, this type of nonfiction-started in a way
to
dominate the
