A Dissident’s Dilemma: Albert Maltz’s Rediscovered Novel

Patrick Chura

Albert Matz saw his desire for freedom and artistic integrity as similar to those of Soviet dissidents.

THE CULTURAL-POLITICAL movement known as the Prague Spring came into being on January 5, 1968, when reformist statesman Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

Dubček’s liberalizations — freedom of speech, multi-party elections, an uncensored media, and constraints on the dreaded secret police — amounted to an ambitious program that promised to reinvigorate democratic socialism and offer citizens “a fuller life of the personality” than was possible in the capitalist West or in the increasingly illiberal Soviet Union.

Exactly seven months, two weeks and two days after its birth, Dubček’s dream of “Socialism with a human face” died a violent death, crushed by half a million Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops. Dubček was arrested, 137 civilians were killed, and 70,000 Czechoslovakians fled immediately to the West.

So ended a brave experiment. But as the New York Times predicted, the tyrannical crackdown was “certain to provoke an outcry not only from non-Communists but also from Communists around the world.”

In Moscow, the fledgling Human Rights Movement was energized. Since that April, Natalya Gorbanevskaya (1936-2013) and a group of activists had been circulating carbon copies of The Chronicle of Current Events, an underground samizdat newsletter that exposed human rights abuses by the Soviet government.

On the night of August 21, while caring for her three-month-old son and listening to Soviet media reports of the “fraternal intervention” in Prague, Gorbanevskaya typed notes for the Chronicle, then fashioned a home-made Czech flag and mounted it on a stick.

The next morning she made two more cloth banners, one of which read, “Long live free and independent Czechoslovakia.” The other carried her favorite slogan: “For your freedom and ours.”

On August 25, a Sunday, Gorbanevskaya folded the flag and the banners, slipped them under the mattress of her baby carriage, and wheeled the carriage toward Red Square. On the way she saw people she knew and smiled at them. Her little boy slept peacefully.

She came to the agreed-upon meeting place, the old Execution Ground monument, just as her friends Pavel Litvinov and Larissa Bogoraz and several others were approaching. The clock struck twelve.

Natalya Gorbanevskaya

It took a few seconds to unfurl the banners. She gave hers to comrades and kept only the Czech flag for herself, holding it in one hand with her other hand on the stroller. Then, in a single movement, the eight demonstrators sat down on the raised parapet encircling the monument and displayed their outrage: “Hands Off Czechoslovakia” “Down With The Occupiers.”

Almost immediately they heard shouts of anger and saw people racing toward them. The first to be assaulted was Viktor Fainberg (1931-2023), a literature student recently arrived from Leningrad, who was tackled and kicked in the head.

Gorbanevskaya saw him on the ground as the banners were torn away and her flagstick broken. She would always remember the sound of ripping cloth.

Fictional Character, Factual History

Readers of Albert Maltz’s long-buried novel The Eyewitness Report will learn what happened to Gorbanevskaya and her comrades after their banners were destroyed.

The protagonist and titular “eyewitness” is 42-year-old Daniil Petrovich Barkov, a prize-winning Soviet writer whose life is at a crossroads. As the novel begins, his wife Anna is slowly dying in a hospital bed, and his faith in his country is shaken by the shameful violation of Czech sovereignty four days earlier.

Standing at the Execution Ground near St. Basil’s Cathedral, Barkov is approached by a sightseer and asked about the significance of the monument. It had been built in the 16th century, Barkov pro­fessorially explains, and “had served as a place of execution, but also had been used for the proclamation of edicts and the announcement of the call to arms.”

Within the novel each of these historical purposes will metaphorically recur and resonate. Barkov witnesses, but does not join, a peaceful protest with violent consequences. He has been reading samizdat literature, but in order to protect Anna from anxiety, he has not become a member of the Human Rights Movement.

Stirred by the bravery of the demonstrators, Barkov shouts, “Why beat them?”— a naïve question that underscores his lack of genuine political commitment.

The first point of direct contact between Maltz’s fictional character and factual history (there will be many) is when Barkov, sensing physical danger to one protestor in particular, whispers urgently to the young mother, Gorbanevskaya: “Please, girl, go away. Why should you sit if you don’t have to?”

Her clear and confident rejoinder, “A public demonstration is needed!” stuns Barkov and stokes his inner turmoil.

The second point of contact between Barkov and an actual demonstrator symbolizes his potential for growth. The most brutal moment in the August 25 protest was the beating of Fainberg, the lone Jewish participant:

“Was it five or a dozen times they kicked him?” Barkov wonders, “before everyone heard the sickening crack as his upper front teeth snapped off at the gum line.”

Viktor Fainberg

On his way home, the celebrated Soviet author examines his conscience. He rationalizes that the net value of the protest did not equal the price the protestors would pay for it, but he can’t shake off more difficult questions: Did he have the moral right to keep silent in the presence of political evil? Were his mental gymnastics no more than an effort to comfort himself because he had not had their courage?

Barkov returns to the Execution Ground. There is something he must retrieve. Fearing detection, he furtively bends down and rescues from the bloody pavement “two of the jagged, crimson teeth that had dropped from the mouth of the man with a hooked nose and a strong character.”

Instead of being the kind of writer whose works are taught in Soviet schools, he will now go the way of the dissident, with Feinberg’s upper incisors as his talisman. He is unaware that he is already a target of the State.

Keeping Faith

The strangulation of the Prague Spring has inspired visual art, music, drama and prose, including the novels of Milan Kundera and the plays of Václav Havel. With this first-ever publication of The Eyewitness Report, released by Alma Books on October 21, Albert Maltz (1908-85) joins Kundera and Havel among world-class artists moved by the Prague spirit.

In a journal Maltz kept while working on the novel, he committed himself to an art that would “keep faith” with political victims. He cited as inspirations Viktor Fainberg and Pavel Litvinov of Red Square, but also singled out Petro Grigorenko, the Red Army General who was locked away in a psychiatric hospital and stripped of his citizenship for telling the truth.

Maltz named antifascist literature professor Eduard Goldstücker, a leader of the Prague Spring who was forced into exile when the Soviet tanks rumbled in. Andrei Sakharov and Mstislav Rostropovich, who endured harassment and exile after speaking out for Prague and for civil liberties, were likewise in Maltz’s thoughts.

And in the case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose persecution is a key background factor in The Eyewitness Report, Maltz had already demonstrated solidarity. In December 1972, Maltz learned that the dissident novelist, expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union and denied his royalties, was cash-strapped and desperate.

Identifying with Solzhenitsyn’s plight as an author “suffering from blacklisting in its most acute form, . . . in his own country, Maltz publicly offered to donate to Solzhenitsyn his uncollected Soviet royalties (about 34,000 rubles) to relieve the banned writer’s hardships. U.S. media celebrated the gesture, but retaliation from the USSR was swift. All of Maltz’s contracts with Moscow publishers were quickly canceled.

In the context of The Eyewitness Report, this is important for several reasons. Maltz completed the novel in 1973 and was unusually excited about it. After two decades on the Cold War blacklist, he had finally found a commercial publisher for a collection of his short stories in 1970, but he believed this new novel would be his true return to relevance, if not prominence.

In letters to friends, he solicited coaching for his planned appearances on the TV talk-show circuit when The Eyewitness Report would hit the bookstores.

Double-Blacklisted Artist

From late 1973 through 1975, at least a dozen American publishers rejected Maltz’s novel. Some felt that, with Solzhenitsyn in vogue internationally, Maltz’s manuscript was ill-timed: “The problems of current oppression and tyranny in the Soviet Union have been too recently treated,” explained an editor at Bobbs-Merrill in 1974.

But the real problem with The Eyewitness Report was the nationality of its author. One U.S. publisher wrote, “I find it difficult to accept fully the idea of an American novelist assuming the guise of a Soviet writer.” Maltz’s London agent Robert Harben explained that editors were “reluctant . . . because the book has not been written by someone living in Russia.”

Though Harben dubbed this “a foolish argument,” it was insurmountable. At Doubleday, the largest U.S. publisher, a senior editor mused, “if only it had been written by one who had lived through it.”

Of course, Maltz had lived through it. As one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of film-industry figures who challenged the constitutional legitimacy of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, he was fined, jailed for 10 months, and thwarted as a writer for 20 years.

His crime? Refusing to cooperate with the congressional investigation into alleged Communist subversion.

Like his character Daniil Barkov, winner of a Stalin Prize and a Lenin Prize, Maltz was a gifted artist — “a man whose talent made a contribution to the cultural life of his country” — who was eventually shunned in the country of his birth. And in Maltz’s extraordinary case, he had just been blacklisted by the Soviet Union as well.

In The Eyewitness Report, Maltz registers with precision Barkov’s frustration at being reduced to a non-person — because he has felt that frustration himself. The editors who rejected the novel on the basis of Maltz’s American identity failed to see that it was, in part, a work of autobiographical fiction about the soul of a banned artist.

As early as April 1969, Maltz claimed a connection with Soviet dissident writers, going on record at a public forum in support of Yuri Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, who were sentenced to hard labor for publishing works satirizing Soviet society. Here is how Maltz explained their persecution:

“I cannot avoid the observation that to a considerable extent they behaved as did the members of the Hollywood Ten when they were blacklisted by the film industry. They were prosecuted under a law prohibiting ‘agitation or propaganda’ for purposes of ‘subversion’ — does this or does it not sound like a hearing before the Committee on Un-American Activities? I cannot, out of my own personal history, fail to make common cause with these imprisoned Russian writers.”

The Novel’s Fate

In the summer of 1973, Maltz sent the half-completed manuscript of The Eyewitness Report to Eduard Goldstücker, the former President of the Czech Writers’ Union, and to a number of former Soviet citizens who had been living in Moscow in 1968. He asked whether the pages seemed “valid” to them. explaining, “I would not have undertaken this novel unless I felt that my own experiences, and the various sources of information available to me, would allow me to write it with verisimilitude to the Soviet scene, history and experience.”

Maltz did not foresee the wall he would hit among parochial U.S. publishers who apparently felt that only a Soviet citizen could write convincingly about political tyranny. He did anticipate what he called “the flak” that would come from doctrinaire leftists.

Long accustomed to being vilified by the political right, who would not forgive him for being a communist, Maltz would now have to explain himself to the radical left, who might well vilify him for being a former communist.

Before he’d even finished the novel, he recognized this dissident’s dilemma and made ready: “I must be prepared for many good people who will consider my book harmful,” he wrote in his journal, “as well as for the vituperation and slanders that will hit me from the socialist countries and from rigid Communists everywhere.”

In answer to expected charges that his novel was anticommunist, he rehearsed counterarguments:

“Were The Grapes of Wrath and Native Son anti-American books? Why should we protest the U.S. war in Vietnam, the murders at Kent State, the fascist takeover in Greece, and keep silent about the Soviet Union?

“However, my book cannot lend itself to the support of capitalism.”

In the same set of notes, Maltz acknowledged that he came of age as an artist as a member of the CPUSA, a political culture in which criticism of the Soviet Union was suppressed: “But if we had known that the Stalin trials were frame-ups and that millions of people were imprisoned, tortured, shot, under his tyrannical rule, would we have remained silent then? I wouldn’t have!”

Clearly, Maltz understood that fascism was fascism, whether it came from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or the United States. He knew it when he saw it. In The Eyewitness Report, he called it out. Fifty years later, the novel is more relevant than ever.

January-February 2026, ATC 240