Andrei Amalrik

Andrei Alekseevich Amalrik (Андре́й Алексе́евич Ама́льрик, 12 May 1938, Moscow – 12 November 1980, Guadalajara, Castile-La Mancha, Spain), alternatively spelled Andrei or Andrey, was a Soviet writer and dissident.

In 1942 he was wounded at Stalingrad and invalided out of the service.

Andrei's father's hardships explain Andrei's decision to become a historian.

For his father, after climbing the educational ladder, was after the war refused permission to study at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of History on account of what authorities felt was his own compromised political past.

But as historian John Keep wrote: "Andrei has gone one better by not only writing history but by securing a place in it."

Andrei's father developed a serious heart condition which required constant nursing.

This care was provided first by his wife, and on her death from cancer in 1959 by his son Andrei, until Andrei's arrest prevented him from ministering to his father's needs.

He died when Andrei was in prison.

In high school, Andrei Amalrik was a restless student and truant.

He was expelled a year before graduation.

Despite this, he won admission to the history department at Moscow State University in 1959.

In 1963, he angered the university with a dissertation suggesting that Scandinavian warrior-traders (Vikings, usually called Varangians in Russia) and Greeks, rather than Slavs, played the principal role in developing the early Russian state in the ninth century.

Amalrik refused to modify his views and was expelled from Moscow University.

Without a degree, Amalrik did odd jobs and wrote five unpublished plays but was soon under the gaze of the security police for an attempt to contact a Danish scholar through the Danish Embassy.

He also became close to the unofficial youth literary group SMOG.

Amalrik's plays and an interest in modern non-representational art led to Amalrik's first arrest in May 1965.

A charge of spreading pornography failed because the expert witnesses called by the prosecution refused to give the needed testimony.

However, the authorities then accused Amalrik of "parasitism," and he was sentenced by an administrative tribunal to banishment in western Siberia for a two-and-a-half-year term.

He was freed briefly and then rearrested and sent to exile in a farm village near Tomsk, in Siberia.

Allowed to make a brief trip to Moscow after the death of his father, Amalrik persuaded Tatar expressionist artist, Gyuzel Makudinova, to marry him and share his exile.

Thanks to the efforts of his lawyer, his sentence was overturned in 1966 and Amalrik returned to Moscow, moving with Gyuzel into a crowded communal apartment with shared bath, kitchen, and telephone.

During the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in February 1966, Amalrik and other dissenters stood outside of the trial to protest.

Amalrik often met with foreign correspondents to relay protests, took part in vigils outside courthouses and even gave an interview to an American television reporter.

In June 1966, after being released early from exile, Amalrik returned to Moscow.

He got a job as a freelancer at the Novosti Press Agency.

This work allowed him to create a circle of acquaintances among foreign correspondents.

He handed over to a foreign correspondent the "Memorandum" of Andrei Sakharov.

Amalrik was published abroad.

Together with Pavel Litvinov, he wrote the collection "Trial of the Four" about the trial of Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Alexey Dobrovolsky, and Vera Lashkova.

In October 1968, he gave the collection to foreign correspondents, with whom he talked a lot.

At the end of 1968, he was fired from Novosti and began working as a postman.

After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, pressure on Russia's intellectuals was stepped up by the authorities.

Amalrik's apartment was twice searched, in May 1969 and February 1970.

Amalrik was best known in the Western world for his 1970 essay, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?.

Amalrik was born in Moscow, during the time of Joseph Stalin's purges.

When the Soviet revolution broke out, Andrei's father, then a young man, volunteered for the Red Army.

After the war he went into the film industry.

Andrei's father fought in World War II in the Northern Fleet and then the Red Army.

He was overheard uttering negative views about Stalin's qualities as a military leader, which led to his arrest and imprisonment; he feared for his life, but shortly afterward was released to rejoin the army.

It was this exile he described in Involuntary Journey to Siberia (1970).