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Soviet Dissident Collections in the Hoover Archives
By Elena Danielson
SIDEBAR to Soviet Dissent and the Cold War
Although the Hoover Institution has collected Soviet dissident materials beginning with the founding of the Soviet Union, the largest collections date from the Cold War. Original documents—such as the voluminous broadcast tapes and records of Radio Liberty, which served as a surrogate free press during the repressive censorship of the post-war era—on the figures mentioned in David Satter’s article can be found in key Hoover collections.
Another extensive collection, Andrei Sinyavsky’s papers, includes the correspondence files for his journal Sintaksis, a major publishing outlet for exiled dissidents. From Stanford physicist Sidney Drell, the Hoover Archives received papers that document his support for his embattled Russian colleague Andrei Sakharov. The Pasternak family papers trace the ordeal of Boris Pasternak during the Stalin years. In Olga Carlisle’s papers one can trace the smuggling of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s manuscripts to the West, where they created a sensation. The Irwin T. Holtzman collection celebrates three of the most persecuted writers in the Soviet era: Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, and Isaac Babel.
The photos on the following pages provide a glimpse of the wealth of materials. For more information, visit the Hoover Institution Library and Archives web site at www.hoover.org/hila.
—Elena S. Danielson
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1. The photo on Andrei Sinyavsky’s June 1971 labor camp release certificate reveals the strain of his ordeal.
2. Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky are reunited in the summer of 1971 at Zvenigorod. (Daniel had been released in 1970.) The bravery of these two figures inspired a generation of dissidents.
3. Letter written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the United States to Soviet physicist Mikhail Polivanov, whom he addresses by his code name, “AB.” Polivanov had been secretly storing Solzhenitsyn’s papers.
4. Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Stanford University, 1976.
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5. The manuscript “Fictitious Marriage: A Vaudeville in One Act,” submitted by Vladimir Voinovich to the journal Sintaksis, edited and published by Sinyavsky and his wife, Maria Rozanova.
6. American physicist Sidney Drell corresponded with Andrei Sakharov and also wrote in his defense. In this letter, incorporated in the U.S. Congressional Record on the occasion of Sakharov’s sixty-fifth birthday, Drell asks Mikhail Gorbachev to allow Sakharov to return to Moscow from his government-imposed internal exile.
7. Scientific drawings by Andrei Sakharov accompany a scholarly paper sent to Sidney Drell.
8. Sidney Drell (left) and Andrei Sakharov, Stanford University, August 1989.
9. In 1981, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast a dialogue between dissident writers Viktor Nekrasov (left) and Anatol Gladiline in the Paris studio. Radio Liberty frequently had programs on dissident writings and interviews and, in 1968, created a samizdat archive to collect, store, and retrieve dissident writings for broadcast and other uses.
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Elena S. Danielson was formerly the associate director of the Hoover Institution and director of the Hoover Library and Archives.
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