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PARTISAN REVIEW
sinki Accords to open up the situation for writers and other
people in the cultural communities in Eastern Europe? Are there
any more opportunities that we have not yet taken advantage of?
PAVEL LITVINOV: Immediately after the Helsinki Accords
were signed, a group of Soviet dissidents, as you probably know,
guided by the ideas of Professor Orlov, started the Moscow-Hel–
sinki Watch group, and immediately such groups appeared in
Kiev and Vilnius. Tomas Vendova, who is the representative of
the Lithuanian-Helsinki group, is here and could tell about this
experience, and others could tell more than I, because I left the
Soviet Union before the Helsinki agreements were signed. But as
I know from information I have received, the Helsinki agree–
ment gave some boost to the human rights movement in the So–
viet Union; and in Czechoslovakia, for example, the Charter 77
movement appeared very
SOOI1
after. So there was definitely some
kind of hope, and people started to send information from the
Soviet Union, to be counted among the Helsinki signatories.
During the Carter administration certain things were created–
in Congress, the Commission for Security in Europe, for exam–
ple. Helsinki Watch groups appeared in many countries in Eu–
rope. And in the last two years, when this Madrid conference
started, there was a confrontation about Helsinki, and I was very
pleased to see that Americans and Western European countries
continued to stand up and not let the Soviet Union get away
with violations-at least to the extent pqssible under the Hel–
sinki agreements. Of course, everyone has to remember that the
Helsinki agreements are not exactly binding agreements; they
are declarations and juridically very poorly formulated. So not
much could be done. And, as you know, all participants of Hel–
sinki movements in the Soviet Union are either in prison or
largely incapacitated, although several people in each group-in
Moscow, in the Ukraine, in Lithuania, in Armenia-continue to
speak out.
PHILIP KOKUR: I left the Soviet Union six years ago, and
when I came here I thought I had a message to tell the American
people about the Soviet Union. They didn't listen, and I thought
I just wasn't good at explaining what I thought. But the same
thing happened to other people who came from the Soviet
Union with a very similar message. We are talking about the lit–
erature in exile today, which I believe has a very important mis-
