“The Noise of the City Cannot Be Heard” was the title of a very popular song in the Soviet Union just after World War II. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the song was so much in demand that “no singer, even the most mediocre, could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause.” The Soviet Chief Administration of Thoughts and Feelings was puzzled by all this, yet permitted performance of the song until “suddenly they discovered what it was all about—and they immediately crossed it off the permitted list.” It seems that the songwriter had treated the theme of the “doomed prisoner” in the Gulag with a sly allusiveness quickly decoded by the masses but initially escaping detection by the literal-minded censors. The successful honest writer in Eastern Europe resembles Leo Strauss’s Maimonides: his works have one message on the surface, but here and there encoded messages are inserted to alert the cognoscenti. Today the struggle to express forbidden truths continues in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and Nicaragua, as well as in many noncommunist states. Monitoring these courageous efforts are a number of magazines and newsletters deserving wider attention and influence.

Index on Censorship might well be considered the flagship of this doughty fleet of periodicals. Edited by George Theiner and published by Writers & Scholars International Ltd. (a nonprofit institution headquartered in London), every monthly issue of the Index exposes repression of writers, intellectuals, and believers throughout the world—in Russia and China, in Yugoslavia and Poland, in Pakistan and Taiwan. The litany of oppression —of writers imprisoned years for a single poem or short story, of trials in which the verdict is decided before the charges, of abductions and torture, of veiled threats and mysterious deaths—is unquestionably grim. On the other hand, it is not depressing: even in the worst of circumstances there are men and women who dare to affirm the supreme worth of liberty and truth, even if expressed only in crudely typed manuscripts circulated furtively among friends. In a typical issue of the Index, we can read a poem by the Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert (“In Lenin’s Mausoleum”) that has been banned in his native Czechoslovakia, we are privy to an anonymous report documenting the pervasive state coercion of thought in Saudi Arabia, and we can learn of the methods employed in Nigeria, Uganda, and Thailand to censor their news. If anything, the Index is evenhanded to a fault in its coverage of state controls on expression. Considering the record of unmitigated tyranny compiled by communism, readers may wonder about the Index’s decision to publish interviews and articles sympathetic to the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador in recent issues. As the dismal chain of events in Nicaragua has shown, the triumph of such guerrillas could only mean another samizdat nation.

Reports of artistic, intellectual, and religious repression may also be found in the bimonthly Freedom at Issue edited by James Finn. Included are appeals from Cuban political prisoners and informative accounts of forced labor in the growing Soviet nuclear industry, of the numerous abductions and deaths linked to Nicaraguan authorities, and of the harrassment and imprisonment of Christian priests and laymen in Russia. But because Freedom House, the institution that publishes Freedom at Issue, aims at “strengthening democratic institutions,” the magazine is broader in focus than Index on Censorship. Articles on the health of democracy in India, on the need for civic education in America, or on the proper strategy for arms negotiators dealing with the Soviets appear alongside the reports describing the threats in various countries to free inquiry and expression. Unique to Freedom at Issue is an annual survey of “Freedom Around the World,” in which every state is rated on seven-point scales for political and civil freedoms and then classified as “free,” “partly free,” or “not free.” Results are tabulated in a useful comparative chart and translated into a schematic map. (The most recent survey pointed to “two of the most important trends in recent years: the erosive decline of freedom in most of Africa and the progress of freedom in the Americas.”)

Freedom House also assists in the production of Survey: A Journal of East & West Studies, published quarterly in London in cooperation with the Institute for European Defence & Strategic Studies. Here American scholars such as Edward Rozek and Carl Gershman join with such leading European thinkers as Alain Besangon, Giuseppe Are, and editor Leopold Labedz in analyzing political and cultural issues in the West and East, with particular emphasis on the challenge of Soviet communism. Though devoted less to investigative exposure of state oppression and more to scholarly reflection than either Index on Censorship or Freedom at Issue, Survey turns frequently to the themes of “the repression of the individual” and “the struggle . . . to create pluralist forms of social existence within a totalitarian system,” especially in the USSR and Eastern Europe.

Like Survey, The South Slav Journal serves primarily as a journal of serious scholarship, drawing upon distinguished Western authorities on Yugoslavia and outstanding emigre writers from Yugoslavia, including editor Nemanja Marcetic. But besides scholarly articles. The South Slav Journal does regularly publish factual accounts of abuses of intellectual freedom in Yugoslavia and of protests against these abuses. A recent issue, for instance, details the detention, interrogation, and beating of Yugoslavian intellectuals legally assembled to hear an essay on Milovan Djilas.

Even more narrowly focused and nearer the cutting edge of the protest against intellectual repression are such publications as the Bulletin of the Democracy International Committee to Aid Democratic Dissidents in Yugoslavia (CADDY) or the Voice of Solidarity. Published irregularly in New York City, the CADDY Bulletin provides the most up-to-date information on political arrests and imprisonments, police harassment of writers and priests, and press campaigns against dissident intellectuals. Other CADDY publications provide transcripts of the farcical judicial proceedings against Yugoslav dissidents and lists of the numerous Yugoslavians imprisoned for long sentences on charges of “falsely and maliciously presenting socio-political conditions in the country” to foreign journalists or even promulgating “hostile propaganda” (in an article written for and at the request of Kommunist!).

Published bimonthly in London, Voice of Solidarity takes a more populist and labor-oriented approach to communist oppression in Poland. In its reports on the continuing fight for free associating and free expression in Poland, the Voice documents the brutal police measures the government covertly employs. “Special police squads . . . inflict selective terror,” beating up 10-year-olds who flash the V-for-Victory sign and murdering those recalcitrant adults who will not learn from beatings: “The technique is always the same. The victim is first beaten up and then . . . thrown out of a high window, so that the new injuries cover up the earlier ones. The inquest is conducted in a perfunctory manner, and the victim’s family is intimidated by vague threats.” Voice of Solidarity also offers a rare look at how the war in Afghanistan is fueling dissent, especially in the predominantly Moslem regions in southern USSR. The Voice reports an epidemic of infectious hepatitis in the western Ukraine caused because young conscripts “drank the urine of those having hepatitis and thus landed in the hospital” rather than being sent to Afghanistan. Such things make it into American newspapers only infrequently. Indeed, anyone reading Index on Censorship, Freedom at Issue, the CADDY Bulletin, or Voice of Solidarity may wonder why the American media—source of exhaustive information of the latest unrest in El Salvador or the Philippines—provides such spotty coverage of the tyrannous acts of communist regimes.

But censorship in America is almost never a matter of government decree. It is, instead, a gentleman’s agreement on what is fit to print, review, and discuss. The agreement is not exclusively political, since it applies even to exclusively aesthetic questions, but if anything, it is even more effective. While the Soviet Union and her “allies” have produced a host of martyrs and witnesses to the truth—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the USSR, Mihajlo Mihajlov in Yugoslavia, Milan Kundera in Czechoslovakia—in America we are too gentlemanly (or too well schooled) to point the finger. Here, in a sense, it is the writers who are the censors, and that has made all the difference.

The publications here under review are not always available at bookstores and libraries (without the help of Momcilo Selic, an emigre writer from Yugoslavia and a Chronicles contributor, we could not have located them all). So we here provide mailing addresses for these invaluable periodicals:

Index on Censorship, 39c Highbury Place, London N5 IQP, UK ($25/ year);

Freedom at Issue, 20 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018 ($10/ year);

Survey, Ilford House, 133 Oxford Street, London WIR ITD, UK; available in the U.S. through Expediters of the Printed Word Ltd., 527 Madison Avenue, Suite 1217, New York, NY 10022 ($39/year);

The South Slav Journal, 7 Chesterford Gardens, London NW3 7DD, UK;

CADDY Bulletin, Room 911, 36 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036;

Voice of Solidarity, 215 Balham High Road, London SW17 7BN, UK; available in the U.S. through the Study Group Network for Political Economy, P.O. Box 891, Buffalo, NY 14240 ($20/year);

Organizations which occasionally publish information on intellectual and artistic repression also include: International PEN, Writers in Prison Committee, 38 King Street, London WC2E 8JT, UK;

Amnesty International, 1 Easton Street, London WCIX 8DJ; UK;

PEN, American Section, Freedom to Write Committee, 568 Broadwav, New York, NY 10012.