Lev Zalmanovich (Zinovyevich) Kopelev (, German: Lew Sinowjewitsch Kopelew, 9 April 1912 – 18 June 1997) was a

Soviet The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

author and dissident.

Early life

Kopelev was born in

Kyiv Kyiv, also Kiev, is the capital and most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city of Ukraine. Located in the north-central part of the country, it straddles both sides of the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2022, its population was 2, ...

, then

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...

, to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1926, his family moved to

Kharkiv Kharkiv, also known as Kharkov, is the second-largest List of cities in Ukraine, city in Ukraine.

. While a student at Kharkiv State University's philosophy faculty, Kopelev began writing in Russian and

Ukrainian language Ukrainian (, ) is an East Slavic languages, East Slavic language, spoken primarily in Ukraine. It is the first language, first (native) language of a large majority of Ukrainians. Written Ukrainian uses the Ukrainian alphabet, a variant of t ...

s; some of his articles were published in the '' Komsomolskaya Pravda'' newspaper. An idealist

communist Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, di ...

and active party member, he was first arrested in March 1929 for "consorting with the Bukharinist and Trotskyist opposition," and spent ten days in prison.

Career

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

NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) se ...

's forced grain requisitioning and the

dekulakization Dekulakization (; ) was the Soviet campaign of Political repression in the Soviet Union#Collectivization, political repressions, including arrests, deportations, or executions of millions of supposed kulaks (prosperous peasants) and their familie ...

. Later, he described the

Holodomor The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a mass famine in Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–193 ...

in his memoir ''The Education of a True Believer''. Robert Conquest's '' The Harvest of Sorrow'' later quoted him directly (see also Collectivisation in the USSR). He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages in 1935 in the German language faculty, and, after 1938, he taught at the where he earned a PhD. When the German–Soviet War broke out in June 1941, he volunteered for the

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by a decree of the Council of People ...

and used his knowledge of German to serve as a propaganda officer and an interpreter. He was tasked with subverting and indoctrinating Germans, and on one occasion persuaded the German garrison of Graudenz (Grudziądz) to mutiny. When he entered

East Prussia East Prussia was a Provinces of Prussia, province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1772 to 1829 and again from 1878 (with the Kingdom itself being part of the German Empire from 1871); following World War I it formed part of the Weimar Republic's ...

with the Red Army throughout the East Prussian Offensive, he sharply criticized the atrocities against the German civilian population and was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to a ten-year term in the

Gulag The Gulag was a system of Labor camp, forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word ''Gulag'' originally referred only to the division of the Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies, Soviet secret police that was in charge of runnin ...

for fostering "

bourgeois The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and Aristocracy (class), aristocracy. They are tradition ...

humanism" and for "compassion towards the enemy". In the sharashka Marfino he met

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and Soviet dissidents, dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag pris ...

. Kopelev became a prototype for Rubin from '' The First Circle''. He was released in 1954 and in 1956 was rehabilitated. Still an optimist and believer in the ideals of communism, during the

Khrushchev Thaw The Khrushchev Thaw (, or simply ''ottepel'')William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, London: Free Press, 2004 is the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s when Political repression in the Soviet Union, repression and Censorship in ...

he restored his

Communist Party of the Soviet Union The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),. Abbreviated in Russian as КПСС, ''KPSS''. at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (RCP), All-Union Communist Party and Bolshevik Party, and sometimes referred to as the Soviet ...

(CPSU) membership. From 1957 to 1969 he taught in the Moscow Institute of Polygraphy and the Institute of History of Arts. It was Kopelev who approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, editor of the top Soviet literary journal, the ''

Novy Mir ''Novy Mir'' (, ) is a Russian-language monthly literary magazine. History ''Novy Mir'' has been published in Moscow since January 1925. It was supposed to be modelled on the popular pre-Soviet literary magazine ''Mir Bozhy'' ("God's World"), w ...

'' (New World) to urge publication of Solzhenitsyn's '' One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich''. From 1968 onward Kopelev actively participated in the human rights 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 and Yuli Daniel and actively denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He also protested Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Writers' Union and wrote in defense of dissenting General Pyotr Grigorenko, imprisoned at a psikhushka. Kopelev's books were distributed via samizdat (underground publishing), smuggled out of Russia and published in the West. For his political activism and contacts with the West, he was deprived of the right to teach or be published in 1977.

Germany

As a scientist, Kopelev led a research project on the history of Russian-German cultural links at the University of Wuppertal. In 1980, while he was on a study trip to

West Germany West Germany was the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. It is sometimes known as the Bonn Republi ...

, his Soviet citizenship was revoked. After 1981 Kopelev was a professor at the University of Wuppertal. Kopelev was an honorary PhD at the University of Cologne and a winner of many international awards. In 1990 Soviet General Secretary

Mikhail Gorbachev Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country's dissolution in 1991. He served a ...

restored his Soviet citizenship.

Personal life

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.

Death

Lev Kopelev died in

Cologne Cologne ( ; ; ) is the largest city of the States of Germany, German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with nearly 1.1 million inhabitants in the city pr ...

, Germany on 18 June 1997 at the age of 85, and was buried in the New Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow.

References

Lev Kopelev. Open letter to Solzhenitsyn. Magazine "Syntax" № 37

Bibliography

;Books *''We lived in Moscow'' (Мы жили в Москве), 1974 *''The Education of a True Believer'', lit. ''And madest thyself an idol'' ("И сотворил себе кумира"), 1976 *''To Be Preserved Forever'' ("Хранить вечно"), 1976 *''Ease My Sorrows: A Memoir'', lit. ''nourish my sorrows'' ("Утоли моя печали"), 1981 *''No jail for thought'', lit. ''about truth and tolerance'' ("О правде и терпимости"), 1982 *''Holy Doctor Fyodor Petrovich'' ("Святой доктор Федор Петрович"), 1985 ;Articles * * * * *