The author of that astonishingly bold document Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? gives here a rigorously exact, dispassionate account of his experiences as a nonconformist intellectual in Soviet Russia. His interest in avant-garde art and his contacts with foreign journalists and diplomats led to his imprisonment, trial, and exile, on a charge of "parasitism," to a collective farm in Siberia. Amalrik's evident concern in this absorbing account is with the truth, whether he describes the difficulties of life in Moscow in an apartment building shared by spying, hostile neighbors, or the abysmal living conditions to which agricultural workers are doomed. An accomplished writer with an original mind, Amalrik reports without bias, without illusions, without resentment, and above all, with total fearlessness. He insists on publishing his work in the West under his own name, stressing his rights under existing Soviet laws, and he was recently sentenced again to a prison term for his outspoken comments on life in the U.S.S.R. He represents a new breed of Soviet man.
Reviews:
"... exceptionally moving because of its composure. . . . The details of the story are harrowing, but there is not a trace of self-pity in it . . . the portrait of a fearless, outspoken, idealistic man."
— Helen Muchnic, The New York Review of Books
"Amalrik hauntingly, brilliantly depicts a cross-section of Soviet society and its jailers . . ."
— F. D. Reeve, Washington Post
"Amalrik's narrative brings home the fact that a new breed of courageous and defiant young intellectuals has emerged on the Soviet scene."
— Merle Fainsod, Book World
Involuntary Journey to Siberia is Andrei Amalrik's memoir of arrest, trial, and exile in Soviet Siberia. Written by one of the USSR's best-known dissidents, the book provides a firsthand account of political repression, everyday life under Soviet rule, and the experiences of nonconformist intellectuals and exiles. It is one of the earliest detailed accounts of internal exile in the Soviet Union to reach Western readers.
