"They chose freedom"

Soviet dissidents in the documentary recall what they fought for, and the children of the Khrushchev’s “thaw” have fought experience, Soviet dissidents believe that it was they who “conquered the freedom that we use today,” but the nomenclature did not allow them to power. Therefore, now, after 15 years of overthrowing the Soviet regime, their methods of struggle have not lost their relevance. On December 1, the premiere of the documentary of the documentary of Vladimir Kara-Murzi Jr. “They Choose Freedom” took place at the Sakharov Museum. And today, in memory of the 40th anniversary of the first demonstration on Pushkinskaya Square (and on the now former day of the Constitution) they will hold their rally.

The premiere of the film took place in the library of the Museum of Sakharov, located opposite the house where the inventor of the atomic bomb Andrey Sakharov lived. No other site decided to show the show of a year and a half documentary about dissidents - the founding fathers of the human rights movement in our country. It is unlikely that, as the participants noted, our current TV will dare to do so. Although the film is made with the expectation of a television show.

The beautiful, bold and honest work of a young journalist - I don’t know who in our country would dare to shoot those who are more and more often accused of betrayal of the country's interests from the highest stands.

Vladimir Kara-Murza built his film for an interview and short historical remarks. He gave the interlocutors the opportunity to interpret events in their own way, to talk about different aspects-funny, tragic, hopeless.

The story is about a small group of dissidents, whose star hour fell on August 1968, when they went to Red Square in protest against the entry into Czechoslovakia of the Warsaw Treaty. To them, the author added the widow of Academician Sakharov Elena Bonner, Sergey Kovalev, Vladimir Bukovsky, Anatoly Scheransky.

The director asks questions - not his fault that the answers do not develop in a monolithic heroic poem. And this is the documentary truth of the film. No wonder the author called his film not “They chose freedom”, but “They chose freedom”.

What is not in the film

Of course, it is impossible to cover the entire history of the Soviet underground in such a short document. Vladimir Kara-Murza made a film only about one direction in the huge sea of the protest movement.

In the tape there is no Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Leonid Borodin, Igor Ogurtsov, about whom the “enemy voices” are used to talking at one time, “and everything is sitting.” There is no Vladimir Osipov, Alexander Ogorodnikov, Vasily Stusy here - there is not a single mention of hundreds of Orthodox people driven by the “thaw” into a new punishment cell. There are no Lithuanian Catholics, Ukrainian Uniates, Bendera, Vlasov, Armenian, Tatar, Tajik, Georgian sideliers. Not a word is said about General Peter Grigorenko, En-Te-Esovites, Socialists, Christian Democrats, Baptists, Jehovahs and Evangelists.

But I don’t know which of today's television journalists will decide to continue the series, begun by Kara-Murza Jr.

The dissident environment has always consisted of irreconcilable parties. Then life also bred like -minded people.

In the film, this topic is not emphasized, but the author subtly builds backs: those who left are sitting against the backdrop of fireplaces. Those who stayed are sitting, according to an intellectual habit, against the background of book ranks.

Love for poetry

Dissants recall that the movement began with reading poetry at the Monument to Mayakovsky. Famous and unknown, talented and mediocre, engineers and teachers, students and teachers read there.

Our contemporaries today have to explain, where Samizdat began and what it is: people exchanged leaflets printed on a typewriter. “Samizdat” - I write myself, I publish it myself, I distribute it myself.

Kara-Murza masterfully copes with the difficulty of translating the language of that era to today. And already on the sidelines after the premiere, I hear how the young spectators tell an anecdote of that era: “Imagine, my son does not read books! He reprinted him “War and Peace ...” on the typewriter.

There are several well -known private collections of Samizdat in the world - they have many economic, political, theological works, works on sociology and psychology, literary criticism and religion. No graphomania - the selection of "Samizdat" worked more reliably than the "market", the rubbish did not reprint.

Of course, Moscow youths from rather prosperous families were deceived in something-the opposition did not begin only from poetry. But today's youth who writes kilometers of the wires on the Web, it is easier to understand their peers half a century ago. To explain today about the value of freedom is much more difficult than about poetry.

Go out to the square

Among all who got into the film, the most experienced prisoner was Vladimir Bukovsky, who rejected 12 years in camps and a psychiatric hospital and exchanged in 1976 to the leader of the Chilean communists Luis Corvalan. That's why he did not participate in the demonstration on Red Square - he sat.

Bukovsky determined the meaning of the dissident movement in the breakthrough of the information blockade: "We made it so that it was impossible to refer to an excuse, so beloved by the older generation: we did not know what was happening."

Bukovsky recalls how then people were deliberately listening to the Western radio stations, which reported which of the dissidents were imprisoned. For him, and this, probably, of course, was the main thing that they planted himself and his friends.

Maybe that's why Bukovsky is taken to argue that their demonstrations have been the first since 1929.

He still does not seem to know about the camp uprings of the 30-50s, the shares of workers, the Novocherkassk execution. He does not remember the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1933, when thousands of Ukrainians crawled to the railway canvas, and trains with vacationers rushed past them and the Red Army drove the dying with bayonets. By clarity, these “demonstrations” will be more hard to stand on Pushkinskaya Square. And not only Russian emigration and the West, but also hundreds of thousands of people in the country knew about them.

The dissidents practiced impeccable method: you go to a daring act, you are grabbed, and that evening foreign radio stations say that an innocent human rights activist was arrested in the USSR. All the fault is that you went to the square. But the whole feat is only in this.

Human rights activists loved to compare themselves with the Decembrists. But those heroes even after 30 years of Siberia knew that they went to Senate Square not just to go out. They had ideas and plans, albeit very approximate.

Kara-Murza asks throughout the film, but no one gives him a clear answer-what idea they carried to the country.

Alexander Yesenin-Wolpin says that they demanded publicity. But the publicity of which is no longer quite clear. The idea sounds that they contributed to what Reagan called the USSR the "Empire of Evil."

If you summarize, then the meaning of their life was to withstand the enormous impersonal machine of power - this is a worthy task at all times. It is a pity that in the film this idea is clearly not talked.

The changeable greatness of freedom

There are several points in the film when questions inevitably beg.

The film participants happily avoided physical torture: the terms and methods were no longer Stalin and not yet today. The creator of the Bulletin of the Chronicle of Current Events Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who was sitting in a psychiatric prison, recalled forced treatment. And now, homeless children are sent to the force of hundreds - chopping aminazin and “sulfa”. And the world does not protest.

The dissidents are sure that the idea of sending them to the West belongs to the head of the KGB then Yuri Andropov.

The expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, according to Bukovsky, was a trial stone. Without embarrassment, Bukovsky claims that "two years later Solzhenitsyn got off the screens - and no one remembered him." That, unlike other dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was allegedly not a politician, but remained a cabinet writer. Therefore, the dissidents in captivity and in the West were at the peak of the information wave, and Solzhenitsyn was in the back of the struggle for freedom.

But today it is enough to go to any bookstore (even in Russia, at least in the West) to make sure that everyone knows who is Solzhenitsyn, and who is Bukovsky is hardly.

Of all the participants in the film, only Alexander Podrabinek refused to emigrate to Israel, for which he sat down. Anatoly Scheransky paid 9 years in prison for what he fought for - for emigration to Israel. Everyone else rode without special remorse.

Today, hopes for emigration, voluntary or not very, do not. In Kabardino-Balkaria long before the attack on Nalchik, 400 families turned to peace with a prayer: give a shelter anywhere. Now many of them are suspects. The dissidents are silent about them ... Double standards, it turns out, are characteristic of everyone - and fighters for freedom too.

Anatoly Scharansky says many kind words about the academician of Sakharov, about his great civilian feat, about “the greatness of internal freedom in a person who explodes the Globy system”, which the USSR seems to him. But for some reason, the same Scharansky is completely indifferent to Israeli Sakharov-Mordecha Vanuna. It seems like a nuclear, too, did not want his country to use a nuclear bomb, talk about developments, served 18 years in prison, now he is forbidden to meet with reporters and travel abroad ...

The former dissident of Scharansky is silent. He is now a state -owned person, thinks about state security. The dissidents in his country do not seem to him the embodiment of "internal freedom exploding the Globe system."

The trial of the CPSU

The most acute part of the film is dedicated to unfulfilled names of dissidents after the collapse of the USSR. For 15 years, it turns out they had been waiting for trials over the CPSU. But for some reason they said about it only now.

Bukovsky, who has been refused a Russian visa for five years, believes that the West since 1991 pressed on Yeltsin so that he would not open all the archives, did not reveal the secrets of conspiracy with the Soviet regime. Why was he silent for so many years?

Sergei Kovalev recalls how Yeltsin took him with him on his first trip to the west to demonstrate to the world how the new power in Russia is liberal. Why didn’t he talk about this either in 1991 or in 1996?

The dissidents believe that they were used by the same old nomenclature, but did not invite them to power. This is the biggest resentment. They compare how the dissidents were in power in the Czech Republic and Poland, and in Russia they remained only a screen. Therefore, they say, Russia remains a country of slaves, who is meekly agreeing that it is taken away from it.

Only now these people spoke that reforms could be carried out softer, not to rob the people. Why were they silent under Yeltsin? Did they really think that they would be called to steer?

The film has interesting personnel that you will not see on TV: President Putin goes along a long path, greets hundreds of people and looks somehow lost and uncertain. The dissidents hint that a new stage of struggle begins.

The Pigobink says: the Chekists were worse than everyone, and Putin could not build anything, he needs an enemy to resist. Bukovsky predicts the inevitable collapse of the regime, in which the "economic base is less than its political ambitions."

And to me, a sinful thing, at the end of the film, very illiberal thoughts climbed into the head: in Russia, like a hundred, like two hundred years ago, "the government remains the only European."

And it’s good that the film about protest veterans was shot by a young television journalist - he is looking for a language that is understandable to today's viewer who decide in which country to live in, and how exactly this is achieved.

12/04/2005 / Nadezhda Kevorkova, the material was published in the "newspaper" No. 230 dated 05.12.2005.