Voice of Dissent

At home, the Kremlin is having its own persistent problems with Russia's dissident intellectuals, who continue to badger the regime to relax its tight control on free expression. Last week the latest and most daring demand for reform came from a prominent Soviet nuclear scientist, whose 10,000-word essay --entitled "Thoughts About Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom"--is being clandestinely circulated among a small circle of Russian writers, scientists and artists. In it, Andrei Sakharov, 47, demands nothing less in Communist Russia than an entirely free society enjoying complete intellectual liberty.

"After 50 years of full control over the minds of the entire country," writes Sakharov, "the leadership seems afraid of even a hint of debate. Yet the only guarantee of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economic development and culture is intellectual free dom and debate." Sakharov charges that censorship has not only killed "the living soul" of Soviet literature, but is stifling fresh ideas in other creative fields as well. He therefore calls for the abolition of Glavlit, the omnipotent censorship department that rules over the printed word in the Soviet Union, and urges its replacement by new and liberal press laws.

A distinguished member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a Stalin prizeholder who helped develop Russia's hydrogen bomb, Sakharov condemns the imprisonment in labor camps of Authors Yuli M. Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky and other intellectual dissidents. He demands the release of all political prisoners. As if that were not bad enough, he says that Russia must "without doubt" support the democratic reforms in Czechoslovakia. Though he censures U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, he also blames the outbreak of the Middle East war on Russia's "irresponsible encouragement" of the Arabs, charges that Russia's continued antagonism toward Israel hampers peace in the area. The Kremlin greeted this heretic sally with customary silence. If anything, it has made the intellectual climate in the Soviet Union even more stifling in recent months. As if to underscore this toughening line, the U.S. State Department last week announced that Russia has a new defector from its literary ranks. Arkady Belinkov, 47, a Soviet literary critic whose best-known work is a biographical essay on Author Yuri Tynianov, has decided that he and his wife wish to remain in the U.S., where they have been visiting for two weeks.

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