Republishing samizdat documents is a rather rare phenomenon, though I believe that it is sometimes worth doing. It was exactly twenty years ago, in February 1966, that the trial of the writers Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel took place. For the first time in many years, a political trial evoked a stormy public reaction in the Soviet Union. As a result of this public reaction, a book documenting the trial appeared. It contained both court records and letters “to the authorities” in defense of the arrested writers, as well as samizdat documents that had been passed around from hand to hand back then. I bring the reader’s attention to one of those documents, written in the form of “a letter to a friend.” It is today that, for the first time, we reveal the name of its author: Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov.

I do not even know if the letter was addressed to a particular individual. I think that the addressee was simply a circle of people that the author chose to focus on and address. This circle existed in Moscow in the late 1950s. Unfortunately, over time the group nearly disappeared, mainly because most of its members passed away. This was a group of ex-prisoners of the Stalin era. In this circle (which was, by the way, quite wide) there were dozens of people who knew each other quite well. Unless you had also been through prison or a labor camp, it was practically impossible to become a part of it. I became acquainted with these people in 1962, after my first prison term. Understandably, it was here that in February 1966 the (semi-closed) political trial of the two writers was being discussed with particular interest. I remember, as if it were now, one of the apartments of the writers’ house (located by the “Airport” metro station) on the day of the trial and immediately after. People gathered here every day to see with their own eyes and read whatever reached us from the courtroom.

What arrived were piles of typewritten pages – transcripts of interrogations of the accused and their witnesses, speeches of the attorneys, the defendants’ closing statements. Someone also brought in what they had managed to get from samizdat: letters of protest, petitions, appeals. All of this we read out loud, often typing away at the typewriters and discussing them until we were hoarse over a cup of cold tea and the smoke of tobacco. And there was only one person who, amid all the noise and arguments, hardly ever said a word. He was a frequent guest in this home. He sat leaning against the wall, with his fur hat pulled down low over his face (February was very cold that year.) Sometimes it seemed to me that it was uncomfortable for him to sit on the chair, that he was about to squat down instead, as the old-timers did in the camps. This was Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov. He almost never said anything and very rarely asked questions, but he listened to others with undivided attention. I remember how one day he disappeared (I had noticed this at once, as he had evoked an avid interest in me) for three days or so. And then he appeared once again. On this same day, “A Letter to an Old Friend” was read aloud in “our home.”

I also went there every day. Aside from my keen interest, I had yet another goal: I was gathering all the documents about the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel for The White Book (in those days, I had already firmly resolved to compile it). That evening I listened to this letter for the first time. For a long time afterwards, I did not know in which part of The White Book I would put it. Because, in one way or another, this letter encompassed everything that had gone into the book, and I did not want to miss a tenth or even a hundredth part of all the material I had accumulated. To me, each document in this book was a historical document. But finally, it seemed, I found a solution suggested by the literature of the previous century: the book did not have a table of contents, and “A Letter to an Old Friend” came to replace it, in a sense. You could simply open the book, look at the portraits of Sinyavsky and Daniel, read the letter, and everything would become clear. The letter’s last lines carried the main idea of the book, when the author of the letter quoted Peter Dolgorukov: “For Russia, this cure is glasnost’.”

Even then, many of us already suspected that the author of the letter was Shalamov. Much of its intonation echoed Kolyma Tales. But naturally, nobody spoke of this assumption out loud. Towards the end of 1966, when my book was ready and I had shared it with many people, I happened to meet Shalamov at the Lenin Library. He was pacing around the catalogue gallery in his slightly unsteady, staggering gait, muttering something and seemingly taking note of nobody.

Having noticed me, he approached and started asking about the book. He had not seen it yet. I told him what was in the book, where, and how it was arranged. In particular, I remarked that the book ended with “A Letter to an Old Friend.” Here he stopped and asked me sharply, “And how long a sentence do you think you’ll get for this?” I replied: “Well, for this charge, no more than seven years.” A shadow passed over his face. “Lucky you. In our time, it would have been at least twenty-five.” In the end, my sentence was five years – both of us got it wrong.

I was arrested in January 1967. My investigators did not take note of the letter right away. Later they tried to attribute it to me, but this version of the story quickly fell apart: even they understood that a person of my age and with my life experience would not be able to write such a letter. And so the charges against me at the trial were as follows: “The author tendentiously compiled a book which included anti-Soviet documents: “A Letter to an Old Friend” and a leaflet signed ‘The Opposition’.”

It was only after I got out of the camp that I finally learned that the author of “A Letter to an Old Friend” was Shalamov. I was informed of this by a well-known professor of literature Leonid Efimovich Pinsky, in whose home the circle of ex-prisoners – those to whom the existence of The White Book on the Trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel is indebted – used to gather.