Standing for truth against tyranny

BORIS PUSTYNSTEV was never among the dissidents in the old USSR who became big names in the West. But with Russian imperialism on the prowl in Ukraine, it's important to note the passing of a principled internationalist who went to prison camp in the 1950s rather than renounce his opposition to Moscow's foreign intervention.

It was former political prisoners like Boris, who passed away last month at the age of 78, who helped shape a younger generation of pro-democracy and human rights activists as the USSR crumbled in the 1980s.

A leading light of the bohemian intellectual scene in 1970s Leningrad--now St. Petersburg--Boris never stopped talking politics. He planted some of the seeds that would flower in the pro-democracy movement that emerged under the "glasnost," or "openness" policy of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR.

Boris was a founder of the group Memorial, which led the fight to expose the political repression under Joseph Stalin and his successors. Some in the movement thought it was politically safer to confine activity to shedding light on past crimes. Boris, however, was a leading advocate for all the victims of repression. He was among those who demanded that Gorbachev officially acknowledge the government's responsibility for the immense suffering in the prison camps, which operated decades after Stalin's gulag system had supposedly been shut down.

Having been sent to a prison camp for five years for opposing Russia's invasion to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Boris took a special interest in the plight of people who endured what he called the "empire" of the USSR.

Many liberals reconciled themselves with Russian chauvinism in the post-USSR era, but Boris remained a staunch internationalist. In a speech in 2000, he remarked, "My own people are still too far from being ready to show repentance to the people they wronged, to offer sincere apologies to nations whose lives we crushed down with a soldier's boot." He opposed Moscow's two savage wars in Chechnya.

BORIS HAD no illusions about democracy in Russia, either. In post-USSR St. Petersburg, he ran for office unsuccessfully and continued to monitor human rights abuses in the post-Gorbachev era presided over by Boris Yeltsin, eventually establishing the organization Citizen Watch.

In the early 1990s, he spoke out about the rising influence of the old KGB in St. Petersburg--under a supposedly liberal city administration where a young Vladimir Putin had been given a job courting foreign investment for the city. One day, Boris was grabbed on his doorstep by two men who worked him over, yet didn't bother to take his wallet. "It was a professional job," Boris said--that is, a message telling him to keep quiet.

Boris ignored that threat and kept speaking out. He'd made that decision decades earlier when, as a college student in St. Petersburg in the mid-1950s, he joined an underground group of activists that was critical of the USSR for failing to follow its own formally democratic constitution.

The youth were emboldened by the political thaw ushered in by USSR leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had opened up political space by criticizing Stalin's worst crimes. But when Boris and his friends passed out leaflets opposing the invasion of Hungary, they were arrested.

As the son of a nuclear submarine engineer, Boris could have recanted and walked away. Instead, he found himself heading into the prison camps even as Khrushchev allowed tens of thousands to leave them. He knew what he was getting himself into: In his hometown of Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, Boris had befriended a former political prisoner who had described his ordeal in detail. Now, behind the barbed wire himself, Boris found opportunity amid the misery, learning German from POWs from the Second World War who were still being held--people who, officially, did not exist.

Five years later, Boris was freed. He continued his education and became an expert translator, dubbing foreign films into Russian for the prestigious Lenfilm studio. (Subtitles weren't permitted, since someone in the audience might understand the original language and get ideas beyond what was permissible.)

When an ex-KGB officer working at the studio recognized his name, Boris was fired. He was forced to find work in film studios in the USSR republics outside Russia, finally landing a job in Estonia, where the boss took his firing as a recommendation.

I MET Boris in 1990 thanks to my co-worker, Yuri Yarmolinsky, who had maintained a close friendship with Boris, despite emigrating more than a decade earlier. Boris--"Bob" to his friends--was a generous and conscientious host, walking with me around town for more than an hour in an unsuccessful effort to find a place that served coffee at a time when shortages of consumer goods were the norm.

When I neglected to buy a ticket on the sold-out overnight train from Leningrad to Moscow, Boris had a quiet word with the conductor, discretely passed something into his hands and, suddenly, I had a seat in a private sleeping car.

Boris was cordial but skeptical that a young Trotskyist could be sympathetic to his work for human rights. Still, we discovered more common ground than we expected in hours at his kitchen table, sipping tea and discussing the possibilities and dangers that could come as the USSR unraveled.

Widely read in several languages and in constant contact with a broad network of political activists, Boris somehow combined the refined Russian intellectual with the rough-and-tumble politico who couldn't be cowed by the KGB or bought off by oligarchs. He was formidable in any argument, his case always reinforced by his sense of urgency and justice.

Moreover, Boris was a defender of human rights not just in Russia, but internationally. Unlike some dissidents who uncritically backed Western foreign policy, Boris spoke out against injustice, no matter what government was carrying it out.

Then there was the music. Boris had somehow amassed a collection of rare jazz LPs that would have been very hard to come by in New York, let alone Russia. His delight in the music was infectious, conveying a love of life that sustained him in tough times while in prison and when, blacklisted from permanent employment, he traveled Central Asia looking for short-term jobs in films.

It was a great pleasure to accompany Boris to a New York City jazz club on his first trip to New York, more than 40 years after he first encountered the music on shortwave radio waves that made it to Russia from across the Pacific Ocean.

Boris' last years found him back where he began as a young man: opposing the actions of an increasingly authoritarian government. He'd accepted an appointment to the Presidential Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights in the hope of using the position to advocate for democracy. But after Putin supporters manipulated the electoral system to ensure him a third presidential term in 2012, Boris resigned.

With Russian nationalism on the rise, Boris' voice will be sorely missed. But the example he set will continue to inspire others who stand for human rights.