Lev Kopelev

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Lev Kopelev

Lev Zalmanovich Kopelev (also Lev Zinovevich Kopelev; Russian

Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
: ??? ?????´????? ??´????? or ??? ????´?????? ??´?????, German

German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
spelling Lew Kopelew: April 9, 1912 – June 18, 1997) was a Soviet author

Author

An author is defined both as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created....
and a dissident

Dissident

A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When individual dissidents unite in a common cause they may become known as a dissident Political movement....
.

Kopelev was born in Kiev

Kiev

Kiev, also known as Kyiv , is the Capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River....
, Ukraine

Ukraine

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Lev Zalmanovich Kopelev (also Lev Zinovevich Kopelev; Russian

Russian language

German language

Author

An author is defined both as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created....
and a dissident

Dissident

Kiev

Kiev, also known as Kyiv , is the Capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River....
, Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south....
, to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1926, his family moved to Kharkov. While a student at Kharkov State University in the philosophy faculty, Kopelev began writing in the Russian and Ukrainian language

Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic languages of the Slavic languages. It is the official language of Ukraine. In some areas of Russia there are dialects, Balachka or Surzhyk, which are the Ukrainianized versions of the Russian language....
s; some of his articles were published in the Komsomolskaya Pravda

Komsomolskaya Pravda

Komsomolskaya Pravda is a Russian tabloid newspaper. It was the All-Union newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Komsomol between 1925 and 1991....
newspaper.

An idealist Communist and active Bolshevik

Bolshevik

Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists were a faction of the Marxism Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 and ultimately became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union....
, he was first arrested in March 1929 for "consorting with the Bukharinist and Trotskyist opposition

Opposition (politics)

[Image:Stand in opposition city hall boston.jpg|thumb|right|220px|Stand in Opposition In politics, the opposition comprises one or more Political party or other organized groups that are opposed to the government, party or group in political power of an area, county, or state....
," and spent ten days in prison.

Later, he worked as an editor of radio news broadcasts at a locomotive factory. In 1932, as a correspondent, Kopelev witnessed the NKVD

NKVD

The NKVD or People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the leading secret police organization of the Soviet Union that was responsible for Soviet political repressions during the Stalinism era....
's forced grain requisitioning and the "liquidation" (the Bolshevik term) and deportation of the kulaks. Later, he described the Holodomor

Holodomor

The Holodomor refers to the famine of 1932?1933 in the Ukrainian SSR during which millions of people were starved to death because of the Soviet policies that forced farmers into Collectivization in the Soviet Unions....
in his memoirs The Education of a True Believer, quoted in Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest

Dr. George Robert f Ackworth Conquest , United Kingdom historian, became a well known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication, in 1968, of his account of Joseph Stalin Great Purge of the 1930s, The Great Terror....
's The Harvest of Sorrow (see also Collectivisation in the USSR

Collectivisation in the USSR

Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy pursued under Joseph Stalin, between 1928 and 1940, to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms ....
).

He graduated from the Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital and the largest types of inhabited localities in Russia of the Russian Federation. It is also the largest European cities and metropolitan areas, with the Moscow metropolitan area ranking among the largest urban areas in the world....
State Institute of Foreign Languages in 1935 in the German language faculty, and, after 1938, he taught at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History where he earned a PhD.

When the Great Patriotic War broke out in June 1941, he volunteered for the Red Army

Red Army

The Red Army was the armed force first organized by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War in 1918 and, in 1922, became the army of the Soviet Union....
and used his knowledge of German to serve as a propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda is the dissemination of information aimed at influencing the opinions or behaviors of large numbers of people. As opposed to Objectivity providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience....
officer and an interpreter. When he entered East Prussia

East Prussia

East Prussia refers to the main part of the Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Sea from the 13th century to 1945. From 1772?1829 and 1878?1945, the Province of East Prussia was a province of the Germany state of Prussia....
with the Red Army

Red Army

The Red Army was the armed force first organized by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War in 1918 and, in 1922, became the army of the Soviet Union....
throughout the East Prussian Offensive

East Prussian Offensive

The East Prussian Offensive was a strategic offensive by the Red Army against the Germany Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front . It lasted from 13 January 1945 to 25 April 1945, though some German units did not surrender until 9 May....
, he sharply criticized the atrocities against the German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
civilian population and was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to a ten-year term in the Gulag

Gulag

The Gulag was the government agency that administered the penal labor camps of the Soviet Union. Gulag is the Russian acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies of the NKVD....
for fostering bourgeois humanism and for "compassion towards the enemy". In the sharashka

Sharashka

Sharashka was an informal name for secret research and development laboratories in the Soviet Union Gulag labor camp system. Etymologically, the word sharashka is derived from a Russian slang expression sharashkina kontora , an ironic, derogatory term to denote a poorly organized, impromptu, or bluffing organization....
Marfino he met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russians novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labour camp system, and for these efforts Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974....
. Kopelev became a prototype for Rubin from The First Circle
The First Circle

The First Circle is a novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn released in 1968.The novel details the life of the occupants of a gulag prison camp located in the Moscow suburbs, the Marfino sharashka....
.

Released in 1954, in 1956 he was rehabilitated. Still an optimist and believer in the ideals of Communism, during the Khrushchev Thaw

Khrushchev Thaw

Khrushchev's Thaw refers to the period from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when political repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were partially reversed, and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps, because Nikita Khrushchev initiated de-Stalinisation of Soviet life and the policy of peaceful coe...
he restored his CPSU membership. In 1957–1969 he taught in the Moscow Institute of Polygraphy and the Institute of History of Arts.

It was Kopelev who first urged Aleksandr Tvardovsky

Aleksandr Tvardovsky

Aleksandr Trifonovich Tvardovsky was a Soviet Union poet, chief editor of Novy Mir literary magazine ....
, editor of the literary journal Novyi mir, to publish Solzhenitsyn's short novel about the Gulag, "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich." The appearance of the work in "Novyi mir" in November 1962, with approval of the Soviet leadership, caused a sensation.

Since 1966 Kopelev actively participated in the human rights

Human rights

Human rights refer to the "basic rights and freedom to which all humans are entitled." Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of speech, and equality before the law; and social, cultural and economic rights, i...
and dissident movement. In 1968 he was fired from his job and expelled from the CPSU and the Writers' Union for signing protest letters against the persecution of dissidents, publicly supporting Andrei Sinyavsky

Andrei Sinyavsky

Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky was a Russian writer, dissident, gulag survivor, emigrant, Professor of Sorbonne University, magazine founder and publisher....
and Yuli Daniel

Yuli Daniel

Yuli Markovich Daniel was a Soviet dissident writer, poet, translator, political prisoner and gulag survivor.He frequently wrote under the pseudonyms Nikolay Arzhak and Yu....
and actively denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe that existed from October 1918 until 1992 . On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia....
. He also protested Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Writers' Union and wrote in defense of dissenting General Pyotr Grigorenko

Pyotr Grigorenko

Petro Grigorenko or Petro Hrihorovich Hryhorenko or Pyotr Grigoryevich Grigorenko was a high-ranked Soviet Army commander of Ukrainians descent, later a prominent Soviet Union human rights activist, dissident and writer....
, imprisoned at a psikhushka

Psikhushka

In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was used for punitive purposes. Psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally; as such they were considered a form of torture....
.

Kopelev's books were distributed via samizdat

Samizdat

Samizdat was the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature or other media in Soviet-bloc countries. Copies were made a few at a time, and those who received a copy would be expected to make more copies....
and were published in the West

Western world

The term Western world, the West or the Occident can have multiple meanings dependent on its context . Accordingly, the basic definition of what constitutes "the West" varies, expanding and contracting over time, in relation to various historical circumstances....
.

For his political activism and contacts with the West, he was deprived of the right to teach or be published in 1977.

As a scientist, Kopelev led a research project on the history of Russian-German cultural links at Berg

Berg

Berg is the word for mountain in various Germanic languages, and may also refer to:In Germany:*Berg , a medieval territory in today's North Rhine-Westphalia...
University. In 1980, while he was on a study trip to West Germany

West Germany

West Germany was the common English name for the Germany , from its formation in May 1949 to German reunification in October 1990, when East Germany was dissolved and its States of Germany became part of the Federal Republic, ending the more than 40-year division of Germany....
, his Soviet citizenship was revoked. After 1981 Kopelev was a Professor at Wuppertal

Wuppertal

||-||}Wuppertal is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located on the Wupper river south of the Ruhr area. Population 361,333 ....
University.

Kopelev was an honorary Ph.D.

Doctor of Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated Ph.D. or PhD for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", is an postgraduate academic degree awarded by University....
at the University of Cologne

University of Cologne

The University of Cologne is one of the oldest University in Europe and, with over 44,000 students, one of the largest universities in Germany....
and a winner of many international awards. In 1990 Gorbachev restored his Soviet citizenship

Citizenship

Citizenship refers to a person's membership in a political community such as a country or city. It has different legal definitions in different countries....
.

Kopelev was married for many years to Raisa Orlova, a Soviet specialist in American literature, who emigrated with him to Germany. Her memoirs were published in the United States in 1984.

Lev Kopelev died in 1997 in Cologne

Cologne

Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants....
, Germany

Germany

Bibliography

We lived in Moscow (?? ???? ? ??????), 1974
The Education of a True Believer, lit. And madest thyself an idol ("? ???????? ???? ??????"), 1976
To Be Preserved Forever ("??????? ?????"), 1976
Ease My Sorrows: A Memoir, lit. nourish my sorrows ("????? ??? ??????"), 1981
No jail for thought, lit. about truth and tolerance ("? ?????? ? ??????????"), 1982
Holy Doctor Fyodor Petrovich ("?????? ?????? ????? ????????"), 1985