Alexander Herzen Foundation
Encyclopedia
The Alexander Herzen Foundation (in Dutch: Alexander Herzenstichting) was a non-profit foundation, legally established in 1969 in Amsterdam, dedicated to publish samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...

 manuscripts from dissidents in the former Soviet Union in the original language or in translation. The Alexander Herzen Foundation was the first to publish accounts of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial
Sinyavsky-Daniel trial
The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial was a trial against Russian writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, which took place in the Supreme Court of the RSFSR in Moscow between September 1965 and February 1966...

 and the works of Andrei Amalrik
Andrei Amalrik
Andrei Alekseevich Amalrik , alternatively spelled Andrei or Andrey, was a Russian writer and dissident....

, Yuli Daniel
Yuli Daniel
Yuli Markovich Daniel was a Soviet dissident writer, poet, translator and political prisoner.He frequently wrote under the pseudonyms Nikolay Arzhak and Yu. Petrov .-Early life and World War II:...

, Larisa Bogoraz
Larisa Bogoraz
Larisa Iosifovna Bogoraz was a dissident in the Soviet Union....

, Andrei Sinyavsky
Andrei Sinyavsky
Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky was a Russian writer, dissident, political prisoner, emigrant, Professor of Sorbonne University, magazine founder and publisher...

, Pavel Litvinov
Pavel Litvinov
Pavel Litvinov is a Russian physicist, writer, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident. He is the grandson of Maxim Litvinov, Joseph Stalin's foreign minister during the 1930s, and as such was born and raised amongst the Soviet elite...

 and others in the West. The Foundation was ended legally in 1998.

History

The Alexander Herzen Foundation was legally established May 19, 1969 in Amsterdam. The Dutch
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 slavist and essayist Karel van het Reve
Karel van het Reve
Karel van het Reve was a Dutch writer, translator and literary historian, teaching and writing on Russian literature....

 (1921–1999) took the initiative and was one of the trustees. The other trustees were the Dutch historian Jan Willem Bezemer (1921–2000) and the British-American politicologist Peter Reddaway (1939). Frank Fisher
Franz Jakubowski
Franz Jakubowski was a Marxist theorist. Born in Poznań, Poland, he grew up in what was then the Free City of Danzig. His father was a doctor. From 1930 to 1933 he studied law in Heidelberg, Berlin, Munich and Breslau, before completing his studies in political science at Basel University...

 and his wife Elisabeth Fisher-Spanjer were also involved in its founding. The date of establishment of the foundation is mentioned in the obituary written by Robert van Amerongen after Van het Reve's death. The Foundation is named after Alexander Herzen
Alexander Herzen
Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian pro-Western writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism", and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism...

, the Russian philosopher and writer who founded in 1853 an independent publishing house in Russia.

Karel van het Reve was in 1967-1968 foreign correspondent in Moscow of the Dutch daily newspaper Het Parool
Het Parool
Het Parool is an Amsterdam-based daily newspaper. It was founded as a resistance paper during World War II by Frans Van Heuven Goedhart and Jaap Nunes Vaz...

. He considered, quite unusual at the time, collecting samizdat documents as one of his journalistic tasks. He published, among other pieces, the famous Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...

 memorandum Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. This was the overture to the Alexander Herzen Foundation.

The Foundation was established to publish samizdat manuscripts in the West and to preserve the revenues for the authors of the manuscripts. The annotated texts being published in the original language was also important to counteract corrupt editions and bad translations.

The foundation ended in 1998 because the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

and the strong repression of the press in Russia and Eastern Europe were over.

Published (selection)

  • Andrej Amarik, Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984 (1969)
  • Pavel Litvinov, The Trial of the Four. A collection of Materials on the Case of Galanskov, Ginzburg, Dobrovolsky & Lashkova (1972)

Further reading

  • Peter Reddaway, 'One of the CIA's most zealous agents', in: Uren met Karel van het Reve. Liber amicorum (1991), p. 138-144
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