Émigré Experience of the West as Related to Soviet Journals

Abstract

To observers of the rapidly accelerating opening-up of the Soviet press in the years since 1986, the position of émigrés has offered a particularly sensitive gauge. The publication of the writings of émigrés is an a priori expression of a degree of liberalisation — one that was not achieved at all in the period of the Khrushchev ‘thaw’, with which recent developments were initially compared. The (almost exclusively posthumous) publication of works by émigrés of the First Wave began in 1986.¹ But the return to print of living émigrés, ready and able to express their scepticism about the process that was underway, was an undertaking fraught with potential embarrassment, and Soviet editors approached it with understandable caution. In March 1987 one of the first signs of a new readiness to tolerate diverse views was the publication in Moskovskie novosti of the notorious ‘Letter of the Ten’ (émigrés) which had just appeared in prominent Western newspapers such as The Times and The New York Times, and which expressed grave reservations about Western euphoria over developments in the USSR.² In December of that year publication of a selection of poems by Iosif Brodskii closely followed his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature.