In Soviet Prisons

To the Editors:

By publishing Solzhenitsyn’s interview in your issue dated October 4, you performed a valuable service, as it had previously appeared in the United States only in more condensed form. However, as you were working with a French text, many of the Russian names appeared in NYRB in a strange transliteration, and some of them, for various reasons, became unrecognizable. Hopefully, therefore, the following list of some of the most distorted names will be useful. They have been restored to a normal English transliteration and, in some cases, have had first names added by myself:

Gabriel Superfin, Boris Mozhayev, Vladimir Soloukhin, Yury Trifonov, Victor Krasin, Boris Talantov, Yakov Odobescu, Yury Shukhevych, Svyatoslav Karavansky, Stepan Soroka, Ionas Shtagers, Zinovy Krasivsky (not “Sinoviev, Krassivsky”!), Vladimir Gershuni, and Anatoly Marchenko.

Most of these people are dissenters, whose names Solzhenitsyn does little more than list. Their fates are, however, described in the Chronicle of Current Events, the samizdat journal praised by Solzhenitsyn and published, until its suppression late last year, by Amnesty International in London. More recently their stories have continued to receive coverage in a new publication, A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, published by the Khronika Press (505 Eighth Avenue, NYC 10018). This journal covers roughly the same topics as the old Chronicle, and, like it, appears six times a year. Its chief editor is the scientist Valery Chalidze, now a New Yorker, but, until deprived of his Soviet citizenship while on a lecture tour here last December, an active dissenter in Moscow.

Peter B. Reddaway

New York City