Natan Sharansky On Robert Bernstein:The Dissident’s Best Friend The publisher’s moral and practical support was exceptional and profoundly encouraging to those of us trapped behind the Iron Curtain.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dissidents-best-friend-1462919685
With his boundless energy and optimism, Mr. Bernstein has succeeded over the course of his lifetime in turning Random House into the world’s biggest publisher—bringing the works of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Dr. Seuss to the world—and Human Rights Watch (originally Helsinki Watch) into the leading international NGO in its field. His memoir, “Speaking Freely,” is a flowing account of the people with and against whom he worked on these two great projects. Mr. Bernstein, now 93 years old, tells his stories with great detail and good humor, finding ways to laugh at life while communicating his deep love for the friends he made along the way.
Even more remarkable than the life Mr. Bernstein recounts, however, is how he chooses to portray himself—not, as many autobiographers do, by emphasizing his role in various events but if anything by understating his own significance. At least this is very much the case with respect to the events I know well, those surrounding the struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, in which he played a much more central role than he in his modesty is willing to let on.
Mr. Bernstein vividly recounts his visits to the Soviet Union in the early 1970s with delegations from the Association of American Publishers. The official purpose of these trips was to meet with leaders of the Soviet publishing industry, but Mr. Bernstein made a point of meeting Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents while he was there. He explains that afterward he was haunted by the thought of what it would be like to be a writer behind the Iron Curtain and of what happened to anyone who crossed the government’s “tight and arbitrary” party line. He became convinced of the importance of supporting those whose voices were suppressed under Soviet tyranny, and he proceeded to do so in meaningful ways, from making repeated visits to dissidents, to mobilizing prominent authors such as Robert Penn Warren and Arthur Miller to speak on their behalf, to becoming the publisher of Sakharov’s books and essays.
ENLARGE Speaking Freely
By Robert L. Bernstein
The New Press, 341 pages, $27.95
Then, in 1976, during another one of his visits to the Soviet Union, Mr. Bernstein resolved to take his involvement in the dissident cause a step further, marking a major turning point in his life. It was in the wake of this visit that he founded Helsinki Watch, a group dedicated to monitoring the Soviet Union’s human-rights violations in the spirit of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the founding members of which (myself included) had just been exiled or arrested. Mr. Bernstein saw it as a moral obligation to amplify dissidents’ voices and generate public awareness of their plight. This was a way for those in the free world to help instigate change within the Soviet regime. CONTINUE AT SITE
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