Erica takes 10 copies

Ten or even twelve, if you agree to two very pale pages. Probably, Galich, who wrote that she “takes four copies”, shoved not to her “Erica” in her “Eric”. The cigarette gave 10 copies of the “chronic events” (HTS) from one bookmark. Vladimir Ulyanov would be upset if he found out that not only the Iskra, but also the HTS could be an excellent “collective organizer”. Our dissident world, the real (unlike the false and invented Soviet) was very crowded. The same people made a “chronicle” and spread it (letting it through the faithful hands into the wide world), were not only its manufacturers and compilers, but also actors. “Today - you, and tomorrow - I” - so we lived.

Here we are (Leva Volokhonsky, who is no longer; Ira Kaplun, who is not there either; Volodya Borisov, thrown by force, in handcuffs, in France, and I) we lie on the carpet of Ira in the apartment and make a letter in defense of Vladimir Svirsky, the Narodnik and the Geologist. And then they take to Lev, and we are already writing about him. And in 1978-it is my turn, and they write without me. Natasha Gorbanevskaya (affectionately - Vorobski) made the first HTS, and I got to her pencil, that is, on the handle and machine (the first leaflets of 1969 at the Palace of Congresses, the first arrest). Then in 1970 we met in the Kazan Special Tulle, and I, holding my breath, listened to her ingenious verses on a walk, and then distributed them for another 15 years.

The same people made HTS; distributed there- and samizdat; wrote human rights letters; collected signatures; sacredly kept the Fund for assistance to political prisoners from Solzhenitsyn fees; We went out to Pushkin on Tolbul, then on December 5 at 18 o’clock, then (then) on December 10 at 19 o’clock and removed the Human Rights hat and sat together in the police department. The same people stood in the cold at the courts of ships (they were not allowed into the hall), where the dissidents were judged under articles 70 and 190 approx; And then they sat on the bench later. Met in camps in Perm -35, -36 and -37, in Potma. "Chronicle" was not an impassive chronicle; It can be called a black book from the Schwartsevsky Dragon, where Providence records all lawlessness and villainy.

The “chronicle” became that bowl of the Holy Grail, around which all decent people united. So among the dissidents, the issue of unification was not resolved at the congresses and without a squabble. HTS, a chronicle of the protection of human rights, a chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church - only there it was the main thing, urgent: who was imprisoned for an oral or written word; how much they gave; What horrors are going on in special tours, how hard in pre -trial detention centers and camps are; How the Crimean Tatars and religious people are depressed. And missiles, astronauts, ballet, congresses and sweet lies - all this did not matter, because if there are prisoners of conscience in the country, there is nothing more significant in it.

And when the chain of these same prisoners flowed again - V. Mirzayanov, A. Nikitin, V. Orekhov, G. Pasko, and on December 11, 1994, tanks went to the border of Chechnya, I realized that we were gone, and the denouement is only a matter of time.

The Chronicle was a real media, although there were no crosswords and the sports department in it. Therefore, Alexander Podrabinek was three times, when in 1987 he started a continuation: “Express Kronika”, which lived until March 2000, to Putin. Now the remnants of the free press have been preserved, but if we still roll back, then we can’t do without HTS. “The turn of the spiral is pulled out. Interpret - there is not enough dream book. Events flow again to the finished “chronicle” (N. Boltyanskaya). The “chronicle” was made by human rights activists, they are also journalists. And the lines of Bella Akhmadulina are the best law on the press: "As if Marina and Anna are preserved, and the literature and conscience are indissoluble."

First published in NT No. 17–18 of April 28, 2008