ABSTRACT: "Cases such as the one involving Eduard Kouznetsov are particularly intolerable here in Italy: for many reasons, not the least of which is an excessive and ultimately unsolicited zeal toward the Communist Party". The Soviet author was sentenced to 15 years of internment in a "gulag".

(Radical News n.3, February 15, 1979)

In a few days, it will be 150th anniversary of Tolstoy's birth. The event will be celebrated throughout the world, and especially in the USSR. But no matter how vast and solemn, it will be a formal and rhetorical celebration: in the USSR as in the rest of the world. At the time of the revolution, Lenin said that Russia was behind the times by 300 years. Yet Russia had had Tolstoy. By how many years is Russia and the whole world behind the times today, compared to Tolstoy?

This question has been haunting my mind ever since I read the "Journal d'un condamné ŕ mort", by Eduard Kouznetsov: published in France, in 1974, I knew nothing about this book until three days ago, and I only vaguely remembered the Kouznetsov case: a brief article in the Italian press eight years ago reported an attempt to hijack a plane at the Smolyne airport, which brought to the arrest of the authors of the attempt, to their trial and the harsh convictions. Kouznetsov was sentenced to death: this sentence was then changed to internment in a "special-regime camp" for 15 years. I knew nothing more - and I believe there is very little information concerning the case in Italy - about this case, of the book which had clandestinely been sent to the "Gallimard" publishing house, of the International Committee for the liberation of Eduard Kouznetsov which was set up in Paris. Cases such as these are particularly intolerable here in Italy: for many reasons, not least that of an excessive and ultimately unsolicite

d zeal toward the Communist Party. The Solzhenitsyn case, for example, was dismissed with an incredible promptness, comparable to no other European country, and the very word "gulag", terribly familiar everywhere, has been assimilated in our language with extreme reluctance. I must confess I too participated in this process of collective repression. We waved Solzhenitsyn aside with the excuse that at a certain point he became free, rich, a Nobel Prize, and, despite his Nobel Prize, a lousy writer. None of these excuses can apply to Kouznetsov: he was sentenced to death for the mere offence of conceiving a plan to hijack a plane, which represents in itself a juridical monstrosity: he now lives in a concentration camp, he is ill and yet treated like all other prisoners: and he is a great writer, even if only of this diary. I never signed appeals for dissident writers and artists of the USSR: not as a matter of principle, and even less out of prudence, but simply because I never had the occasion. I am a member

of the Italy-USSR Committee because I feel and am a friend of the Russian people and of those who, in the past and in the present, express its soul. This is why I am joining the International Committee for the liberation of Eduard Kouznetsov, serenely, with an indignation that does not reach hatred: with the hope that those who rule the USSR will celebrate the 150th anniversary of Tolstoy's birth with an act of justice and reconsideration (not leniency, because leniency is a consequence of justice), thus proving, for a moment, that they are not so distant from Tolstoy.