Vladimir Dremliuga

Vladimir Dremliuga with his son. Source: www.colta.ru.

Saratov, 1940–Jersey City, 2015

25 August 1968. At the stroke of noon eight people gathered on Red Square at the Lobnoe mesto to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Among them, waving a banner with the slogans “Freedom for Dubchek!” (Svobodu Dubcheku!) and “Down with the invaders” (Doloi okkupantov), there was 28-year-old worker Vladimir Dremliuga.
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dremliuga was born in 1940 in Saratov into a family of humble origins. His childhood was characterized by a turbulence which was to become a constant in his adult life.
Following his expulsion from the Komsomol, and having lost all hope of admission to the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Institut Mezhdunarodnykh Otnoshenii), Dremliuga enrolled in the history faculty of Leningrad State University (Leningradskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet). However, his academic experience was short-lived, as he was expelled in 1964 after being accused of  collecting signatures for a letter criticising N. Khrushchëv (cf. “Ėto priamo zdes'” 1). During his trial Dremliuga attributed his expulsion to a practical joke he played on his roommate, a KGB officer, saying that he had had his friends send him a letter provocatively addressed “to KGB Captain Vladimir Dremliuga” (cf. Gorbanevskaia 2007: 122). From an early age, Dremliuga’s attitude to life was rebellious. For Aleksei Makarov, Dremliuga considered protest a natural act (cf. Makarov 2015). After learning about the Siniavskii-Daniėl’ trial (1966), he left Leningrad for Moscow, where he became active in dissenting circles: his participation in the ‘demonstration of the seven’ (demonstratsiia semerykh)[1] on 25th August 1968 to protest against Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, illustrates in his commitment to challenging the Soviet regime.
As a rebel against a government that felt entitled to trample on the freedom of its citizens, Dremliuga was defined by the Western media as “one of those seven reasons why we cannot hate the Russians” (Makarov 2015). The Soviet authorities, however, thought differently and Dremliuga was charged under Article 190-3 of the Criminal Code for “organizing group actions that disturb public order”. During his trial in October 1968 (cf. Clementi 2007: 89), Dremliuga displayed an ironic and irreverent intolerance towards representatives of the law and made sharp criticisms of the Soviet judicial system. He told the judge that it was not important to know whether the demonstration had been agreed between the participants before hand or not, because Article 190 could have convicted them in both cases (cf. Gorbanevskaia 2007: 119). In his defence speech, Dremliuga explained the motivation behind his actions, which he described as a desperate attempt for justice within an unjust state: “All my life, ever since I became aware of it, I have wanted to be a citizen, a man who expresses his thoughts peacefully and with dignity. For ten minutes I have been a citizen. I am well aware that my voice will sound out of tune against the background of the general silence, known as ‘national support for party policy and government’. […] If they [the other protesters] had not been there, I would have gone to Red Square alone. If there had been other methods, I would have used them” (ibid.: 212). Such freedom of expression could not be tolerated and Dremliuga’s speech was interrupted, but as soon he realised that the judge and the prosecutor were trying to exploit what he said, he refused to conclude his defence in protest. The prosecutor asked for three years hard labour and Dremliuga was sent to the camp in Murmansk in November 1968.
Information on the years Dremliuga spent in prison can be found in the “Khronika tekushchikh sobytii” (Chronicle of current events) [2]. The prisoner spent only a few months in Murmansk, before being transferred to Iakutsk where he was subjected to harsh treatment at the hands of the lager administration which deprived him of letters from family and friends and punished him with solitary confinement. The intervention of his lawyer was of no help as his requests to see his client were refused.
At the beginning of July 1970 Dremliuga went on hunger strike in protest, but on 25th August 1971, when his three-year sentence expired, instead of being released, he was held on a new charge. Accused of making anti-Soviet speeches about the lack of freedom in the USSR, he was convicted under Article 190-1 for “deliberately spreading false information that defames the Soviet state”.
Dremliuga was sentenced to a further three years of hard labour. In 1974, at the end of his second term of imprisonment, he was told that if he did not change his behaviour, he might even get a third sentence. Sensing his powerlessness in the face of the Soviet system, Dremliuga wrote a letter in which he recanted his position, which was published in the journal “Sotsialisticheskaia Iakutiia” with the title Nachat’ zhizn’ snachala (Starting Life Over). The letter begins: “I am 34 years old. At this age, it is difficult to start life over again, but it is even harder to change one’s ideas and habits, to renounce those misleading opinions that until recently I considered to be my convictions. However, I have found the strength to recognise and to state frankly that I have become deeply and completely aware of the erroneousness of the positions I had previously taken, of the injustice of my actions, of the harm they represented for the Soviet people, of their incompatibility with its ideas and policy” (Dremliuga 1974). Thanks to this public repentance, Dremliuga was granted parole in June 1974, one and a half months before his term of imprisonment expired. After leaving the lager, the dissident never returned to Moscow. After joining his mother in Melitopol’, he emigrated to the United States (cf. “Ėto priamo zdes'” 2).
When he arrived in America, Dremliuga really did seem to want to start a new life. He had no contact with dissident circles in the USSR and stayed away from other activists who had emigrated to the United States. In the forty years he spent in Jersey City, Dremliuga devoted himself mainly to business, starting a construction company specialising in historical preservation (cf. Makarov 2015).
Dremliuga’s apparent renunciation of activism should not be read as a retraction of his ideals; on the contrary, it was a painful but necessary choice. Recently, an article that Dremliuga wrote at the time of his emigration in 1975 has been found – it summarises the painful course of his life: “The fact that a small part of the population, indeed I think a large part, does not accept and scoffs at the idea of the construction of the Soviet paradise, I have ascertained more than once […] The Western reader, however, cannot even remotely imagine the all-encompassing system of control to which man is subjected in Russia from birth. The result is that the creation of any form of legally organised opposition is actually impossible because it means condemning oneself to death” (“Uroki istorii”). Determined to preserve the memory of his past, in 2005 Dremliuga participated in the documentary Oni vybirali svobodu (They Chose Freedom)[3], dedicated to the protagonists of Soviet dissent. In 2008, he also gave a long interview to the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague in which he proudly recalled his long struggle against the Soviet authorities.
Vladimir Dremliuga died on 26th May 2015 in Jersey City.

Notes:

[1] The demonstration on 25th August 1968 actually involved eight participants: V. Dremliuga, V. Delone, N. Gorbanevskaia, L. Bogoraz, P. Litvinov, K. Babitskii, V. Fainberg, T. Baeva. The latter, however, was immediately released and the other protesters later avoided talking about her involvement. Therefore, the event in question went down in history as the “demonstration of the seven” (cf. Ermol’tsev 2009).

[2] News about Dremliuga’s incarceration, trial and imprisonment can be found in the following issues of the “Khronika”: 4 (1968), 5 (1968), 8 (1969), 10 (1969), 15 (1970), 20 (1971), 21 (1971), 22 (1971), 32 (1974), 34 (1974). The archive of the bulletin is available at http://hts.memo.ru/, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).

[3] Oni vybirali svobodu is a four-part documentary film directed by Vladimir Kara-Murza and broadcast by RTVI in December 2005. The film attempts to retrace some key moments in the history of dissent in the USSR. Among the film’s protagonists are: E. Bonner, V. Bukovskii, N. Gorbanevskaia, V. Dremliuga, A. Esenin-Vol’pin, P. Litvinov, S. Kovalëv, N. Korzhavin, E. Kuznetsov, Iu. Orlov, A. Podrabinek, V. Fainberg, A. Shcharanskii. The episodes can be viewed on Youtube at the following addresses: first episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly6olJjjJ38, second episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BlY39J3Hpo, third episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyHqgVctGg, forth episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfaofpDxiKY (last accessed: 30/06/2021).

Beatrice Bindi
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Cecilia Martino

This article was produced as a result of the seminar “Civil Rights Movement in the USSR”, held by Ilaria Sicari (Course of Russian Literature, Master’s Degree in Euro-American Languages and Literatures, University of Florence, a.y. 2019-2020).

Bibliography

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