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The love of freedom and the English language, . . . and the love of my life


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By Lev Navrozov
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
Lev Navrozov

Monday, March 26, 2007

What is dictatorship, with its mass communication media and all educational institutions at the dictator’s beck and call? It is a country-size puppet theater in which every human being from early childhood and up to his or her death plays in public the role of the happiest dweller of the best of all possible societies and its defender against all “internal and external enemies.”

In many languages there is an expression: “a learned fool.” Some children in a dictatorship begin to understand at a certain age what is going on, while others learn trades and sciences to a high extent of expertise, but remain in general “learned fools.” These are the ones whom the dictator needs. To increase the percentage of “learned fools,” he has to do destroy not only anything written against dictatorship (to say nothing of HIS dictatorship), but everything outside the knowledge he needs, viz. the development of weapons able to annihilate his enemies.

Fortunately for me, my father had, as a writer, two wall-to-wall shelves of books in philosophy, sociology, and history, written in, or translated into Russian, before 1917 or before 1933, when Russians had been permitted, due to Bukharin (later shot by Stalin), to read, for example, Henri Bergson’s “Creative Evolution,” ridiculing Darwin and unknown as of 2007 to those American “learned fools,” arguing about Darwin versus God, without having heard of Henri Bergson (1859-1941).

By the time I was finishing school, I knew that the humanities “in our country” were cultural prostitution, and I joined the Moscow Institute of Energy—propaganda cannot be made out of nuts and bolts—or of calculus. Oddly enough, I did not think of the dictator’s use of science and technology for the attainment of world power. In 1941, the country was nearly defeated by Germany, the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons up to 1949, and Stalin’s global ambitions were put at rest for a while.

One foreign language was taught to future engineers to enable them to read Western books in their fields. Before WW2, that language was German, and now it was English.

And here I discovered why different nations stick to different political systems, be the latter as anti-human as was the Soviet dictatorship (for which a majority of the population of Russia expresses preference in public polls—in 2007!). A language is the world in which its speakers live.

By “studying English” I was emigrating into a free beautiful English-speaking country.

Finally, instead of working as an engineer, I found myself working as an editor of the Moscow Publishing House of Literature in Foreign Languages. Of course, in a free beautiful English-speaking country there must be an English beauty to fall in love with. My colleague (Russian, according to her bio) was such a beauty, who shared my passion to know English “as to the language born.”

Unfortunately, it was not only I who found her beautiful—she had been elected Miss Publishing House.

I was sure I stood no chance because I have never considered myself handsome except when I was six and received a prize in a contest of children’s photographs at my mother’s Medical Institute.

Besides, my colleague was married to an artist who had an apartment and a car, while my mother and I shared one room in a six-room apartment tenanted by six families, sharing the facilities, intended before 1917 for one family. As for a car, the Western social status equivalent would be a private airliner.

But, of course, no one could forbid me to see my colleague home. We were discussing the English language. Nothing is more proper for two English editors. Actually, we were spiritually emigrating into an English-speaking country,

Finally, her husband caught us walking. In Russian, “he walks with her” means “he courts her.” Her husband said: “If he does not marry you NOW, I will kill him!”

Possibly, he later explained to his friends: “That bastard seduced married women and jilted them! But not in this case! He had to marry her to save his hide!”

Since we could not emigrate to an honest-to-goodness English-speaking country, we had to create living conditions that would resemble it. A three-storied country house, with an orchard and a birch-tree coppice, was on sale. When we had bought it, we had at our dinners members of the British Parliament, and our son did not spend a single day at Soviet school, because the local police assumed that residents of such a mansion were important enough to be above all laws for ordinary Soviet inhabitants.

But the money? Where had the money to come from?

Yes, I had written a book that I later smuggled out and published in the United States. But in Soviet Russia, such a book, had it been printed, would have led me to a concentration camp, not a countryside mansion.

I had proposed to the chief of the English Department of the Publishing House to translate Russian classical literature into English. He said that his translators who were natives of English-speaking countries said that never anyone would be able to translate literature into a language that is not his mother tongue. Then I suggested to make 20 copies of my translation sample and distributed them anonymously among his 20 translators for a public discussion. This was done. None of them guessed that the translator had not spent a day in an English-speaking country. So a stream of money sprang up.

In the late 1960s, we learned that those wishing to emigrate to Israel could do so. To Israel? Well, those who found themselves beyond the Soviet border could emigrate even to Mars, given the transportation facilities. Some applications said: “I am Russian, but I feel myself Jewish. Hereby I request my emigration to Israel. . . .”

Whatever had happened? The Soviet dictatorship had been developing post-nuclear super weapons. What if the West had learned about it? Recall all those international agreements the Soviet dictators signed? The Soviet dictatorship wanted to conciliate the West in case the West had learned about the Soviet super weapons.

Ironically, I was probably the first person to inform about the Soviet super weapons the West—the “New York Times,” the CIA, and later, President Reagan, who met with me and made a public statement on the basis of my “input.” But it was only in 1992, when Yeltsin opened to international inspection the former Soviet archipelago of development of super weapons, that the “New York Times” and the CIA took notice, but forgot “the incident” ere long and for ever.

Lev Navrozov can be reached by e-mail at navlev@cloud9.net.

Monday, March 26, 2007

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