(Part about Alexander Yessenin-Volpin) If Sakharov became the leader of the movement soon after after joining it, Alexander Yesenin-Volpin was nonetheless its father and philosopher. A renowned mathematical linguist, Volpin had already been incarcerated twice against his will in psychiatric institutions when the writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky were arrested in 1965 for publishing their work abroad. Volpin organized a demonstration in the center of Moscow demanding that the trial be open to the public. At the appointed moment, he unfurled a banner -- "Respect the Constitution" -- and launched the Soviet human-rights movement. "There is a concept in linguistics that divides a sentence into its code and its content," says Alexander Gribanov of the Sakharov Archive at Brandeis University. "What Volpin ... did was set up a code, whose content was not yet determined, by which to act in a free society. He pretended that this society already existed." Volpin now lives in a hulking concrete housing project for the elderly in Revere, an eyesore among the neighborhood's vinyl-sided one-family houses. Revere itself is a working-class town distinguished by residents with thick Boston accents. Volpin, one of the first dissidents forced to leave, in 1972, has found himself a most incongruous place to land -- it is almost as if he were hiding out. It occurs to me, then, as I approach the squat, massive building, that, paradigmatically, I am Nazi-hunting. The town dump of history, as Trotsky knew so well, is where the losers go, and there is a suspicion in America, expressed in countless movies and novels, that escaped Nazis, those ?ber-losers themselves, still hide somewhere in our suburbs, hoping only for a quiet, normal life. Yet the people I am searching out are heroes, legends, men of unquestionable courage and character. Volpin is now 75 years old, but I find his tiny one-bedroom apartment cluttered with file cabinets and notebooks. Out of all this he directs my attention to two neatly hand written sheets of incomprehensible mathematical notations that lie on the floor atop The Boston Globe. Volpin is working, he tells me, on proof theory, and he expects to revolutionize the field. "First, no one will understand it," he says. "Then no one will believe it. They won't know what to do with it for a while. They've been teaching it one way for 70 years, and now they'll have to teach it another way." He shrugs, smiles. He has all the stage props of a mad scientist--the careless white hair on the balding head, the wispy white beard whose ends he occasionally tugs, and the disturbing conviction that he's about to overturn a scientific orthodoxy--but instead of the desperate plea for understanding, he is quietly, abashedly sure of himself. He speaks with a slight aristocratic drawl and seems to find everything he's done entirely unexceptional. "I was never a politician," he says. "Politics is trying to get power, and making laws, decrees. That wasn't me. I just did what every conscientious citizen would do." In the same shrugging, smiling tone, he explains what he considers perfectly obvious: "You have to fight the power, wherever it is, and you have to tell it when it lies." Shrug. Smile. "You have to say, 'Damn you, you're lying!' And spit in their face." Chuckle. Grin. Volpin is chiefly famous for his idea that you can fight the regime by demanding that it follow its own laws. While there is a political shrewdness to this, there is also a luminescent and revolutionary humanism: unlike American radicals of the sixties, Volpin proposed, against every self-righteous impulse in the current of dissent, to treat the monsters in power as rational beings. "Any person feels uncomfortable when they're caught in a lie," he explains. "When they put [Vladimir] Bukovsky on trial, they kept, formally, to the 'open doors' law; that is, the doors were open. But they made it so you couldn't get in anyway, because the trial was on the second or third floor, and they were blocking the stairs. But, formally, they kept to it." I attempt to provoke him. This is difficult, because Volpin does not hear very well, and I am forced to shout. Shouting amplifies the grammatical uncertainties (case endings) I typically slur over in Russian. Nonetheless, I need to broach the question, that was once at the heart of dissident thinking, of retribution. Alexander Galich promised the lackeys who expelled Pasternak from the Writers' Union, "We won't forget your laughter or your apathy/ We won't forget a single one who raised his hand." Solzhenitsyn warned his own tormentors in the same union that "the time is near when each one of you will seek to erase his signature from today's resolution." But while many of the former Communist countries have attempted to de-commission the old cadres through a process called "lustration," Russian society has steadfastly refused. So I shout, approximately, "What about trial? Should there have been a more serious attempt to try old Communists?" "A trial was bound to be a farce," he says. "They should have been tried 40 years ago, but now? Revenge would ruin everything that's been accomplished.... There is no more nomenklatura as such. It's been broken. They might still have bank accounts and they might even still have power, but they have to hide it. They can't appeal anymore to Marxism-Leninism, the class struggle. That's something." "But dachas! They all have dachas!" "So let them have dachas. What, they can't build more dachas? There's no room?" I nod, okay. "The most important thing has been done," he says. "We had a peaceful revolution." "Why haven't the dissidents come to power?" "Who wants power? We didn't want power. There was a myth under the Communists of national-patriotic unity. That was a lie, and we exploded it... Now, now they have to stop killing people right and left. First that, then everything else. It could take 200 years. It's a violent world, drenched in violence. People are afraid of one another. It shouldn't be that way." "This new government, Yeltsin, I don't know -- to hell with them.... What am I going to do, keep hammering the same nail in over and over? I did my part in Russia, for six years I did it and then it was time to scram. Now I have this." And he indicates the mathematical proofs scattered across the floor. Volpin is disgusted and encouraged and weary; he does not indulge regrets. Thirty years ago, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, Volpin argued in the samizdat Chronicle of Current Events that imprisoned dissidents should be released because, when it came time to visit other galaxies, "these people will not shame our planet." Now he allows a smile when I ask about Sakharov, the only dissident who ever had enough popularity, potentially, to be elected president. "Yes," he says. "Andrei Dmitrievich might have become president. And this would have been good." But, in their careless, inexorable way, things continue. Volpin and I conclude the conversation with a pleasant monologue on proof theory. "If I leave behind me a theory that will become the basis for mathematics for several decades, that'll be sufficient. See, certain paradoxes insinuate themselves into the foundations of mathematics. That's where I begin. Otherwise they'll say: You're contradicting Goedel!" Keith Gessen: Exiles on Main Street: Soviet Dissidents in the U.S. of A. - the whole text on Johnson's Russia List.
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