Taken from the New York Times Obituary Section, December 26, 1990

On December 25, 1990, Anton Nikolayevich Sobakchik, one of the chief opponents of the Soviet Communist regime, passed away in his Fifth Avenue penthouse. He was found by his children early on Christmas morning lying in front of the fireplace in his living room. Coroners reported the cause of death to be a stroke, most likely brought on by the aggravation of an already advanced case of emphysema. The smoke created by Mr. Sobakchik's attempt to burn a sheaf of papers in his ornamental fireplace is believed to be the cause of this aggravation.

Both Russia and the United States can mourn the passing of this heroic figure. First imprisoned for his political activities in 1968 in the wake of the Khrushchev thaw, Mr. obakchik divorced himself from his former terrorist background, survived a Communist smear campaign aimed at proving that he had been imprisoned for rape rather than political crimes, and emerged as one of the most radiant figures in the democracy/peace movement. His intense spirituality and utter meekness caused many to compare him to Ghandi. In 1976 his growing popularity within Russia and intense western pressure for his release forced the Communist regime to free him and allow him to emigrate. The last fourteen years of his life he spent writing and lecturing in an attempt to spread his vision of a peaceful Russian revolution throughout the world.

He is survived by his wife Natasha, three sons, two....

Taken from CIA files: Case #19761109 -- A. N. Sobakchik
Item: Translation of A. N. S.'s journal, found partially destroyed by fire
Status: Top Secret

March 2, 1968

This is preposterous! I can't believe that I am actually behind bars. The idiocy and dumb chance involved in the whole business is amazing. First of all, why did I drink so heavily after my fight with Natasha? Why did I go with Anatoly to that club of his? I didn't fit in. At forty-five I have twenty years on all of them. So why did that girl begin to come on to me, old and drunk as I was. I have no need to be excused for what happened next. She asked for it, and I know that she wanted it. And if the little tramp got cut up when she tried to pull a knife on me, who cares? She didn't die, and her kind come cheap.

The militia wouldn't even have brought me in if they hadn't come upon her friends beating me up, and I doubt it will even go to court. Look at their word against mine. Me, a married man of respectable, proletarian origin who rose from the working class to become an engineer and a member of the Party. A man who has always understood the value of obedience. Against my word stands a band of urchins and a street rat of a girl. I'll be free tomorrow.

March 22, 1968

Who wold have thought it. The little brat had relatives!!! More than that, she is the daughter of General Lebchin. So that's it. I have offended the wrong people, and have little hope for the future.

March 25, 1968

Hope!!! According to the reports which my friends have smuggled to me, someone in the foreign intelligence networks has gotten confused. I'mm on Radio Free Europe's list of imprisoned dissidents. I know that the girl won't testify against me at the trial, so if I claim that I'm really being tried for belonging to a democratic movement...

November 22, 1968

My account of what placed me in prison was smuggled out today by one of the guards. I'm quite proud of it. I think I struck exactly the right note between admission of guilt, and a firm stand on principle. Of course the girl had no part in the story. In my version I was arrested for attending meetings of an embryonic terrorist group. This has advantages over portraying myself as a democratic intellectual because it explains my former cooperation with the government. I was conforming in order to create good opportunities in which to commit sabotage. Also, it gives me a false guilt to admit. Through admitting my mistake in belonging to such a group, I build a reputation for honesty, thus making the rest of my story all the more believable.

In my self-justification, I further go on to say that I have experienced a spiritual awakening here in the Gulag, and now understand that the true salvation of Russia lies in the Slavic Soul and its capacity to take the suffering which tyrants deal us, and destroy them with love. I call upon Alyosha Karamazov, Yuri Zhivago, and the thousands of gentle souls like them to throw off the chains of the communist state with passive resistance (someone smuggled a book on Ghandi into our barracks) and to paint a bright new future for the world.

Of course I made it all up for the sound of it, but still, even to me it has a very compelling element to it. I think they will....

October 19, 1969

The authorities are very worried. This is the first chance that I have had to write in over three months. After my second work was published in a samizdat edition and my self-justification was published abroad I've been watched like a hawk. If they ever found this journal with those incriminating first entries I would be doomed, but I cannot bring myself to throw them out. Somehow I feel that this message, which I began to vocalize out of pure self interest, has changed me. It really does, in some ways, seem to be what I believe and what I have always believed, though I forced myself to live in a system in which I really had no place. I cannot afford to forget that person who I was. On another level, I wish to keep it for its sheer amusement value. A case study in how to fool the world.

According to my sources outside of prison, Russians have little idea who I am and what I stand for. What is keeping my from harsh treatment and death is the pressure brought to bear on the Party by the U. S. Government (because I am a dissident) and the American peace movement (because I am a pacifist). Somehow I must spread my message further. My survival depends on a broad support base, but there is something more than that. It is strange, but I think I am beginning to feel that somehow what I am saying contains some real truth and....

December 12, 1974

I have been in the camps for five years now, and I think that they realize that I am not going to die naturally and let them all off the hook. My popular support abroad is receding slightly, but I have a core of followers there, and a growing number in Russia, but everyone has failed in their attempts to free me.

I fully expect to spend the rest of my life in the Gulag, but am reconcilked to it now. It is strange, but that dissident manifesto which I created to keep myself alive still performs that function, if in a radically different manner. Somehow it has become the sun around which my life revolves. I live for those moments in which I can snatch my manuscript from one of its hiding places and jot down a few paragraphs which have been mulling inside my head through the hours, days, or even weeks of mind-numbing labor. I continue to live....

June 23, 1976

I'm out!! I can't believe they let me out! I was awakened at midnight two nights ago and barely given time to pack before they forced me into a truck, and we jolted away across the steppe. "Ah, the firing squad," I thought, but instead there was an airfield, a plane, and another airfield with my family waiting to embrace me. Natasha grown so grey and the boys so tall. Another plane, another runway, and suddenly here we are in New York. I have been deported. The Communists want no more of me and the unrest which I stir up with my publications. Knowing my background, no doubt they expect me to shut up, now that I have achieved my freedom. They are wrong.

December 24, 1990

I just discovered this journal again tonight. I put it in a drawer soon after we arrived in New York, and there it stayed. I know what I must do with it if I wish to preserve the legacy that I have built. Destroy it. To have the origins of my ideals brought into question would jeopardize the whole movement that I have labored so long, so hard, and so sincerely to create. A young Chinese dissident who I met at a reception last year greeted me almost worshipfully, and told me that it was not only my message, but my personal purity, that had won him to my side. I have no right to destroy that belief, or to destroy the good work which that young person will do.

And yet I feel great sadness, for as I look through these yellowing entries I realize that I always intended them to be read. This is not propaganda, this is my life. I have created something fine and wonderful. In these pages I change from a confused and evil man, to one who brings good and truth to his fellows. I am the author of over twenty works which seek to awaken the beauty and love in the human soul, and to show each individual person what it is possible to accomplish with that love. Does it matter where or how this theory was conceived? Perhaps it was always there, and the fact that it was a criminal and diseased mind which seized upon it makes it no less true.

Into a world of hate and fear and Cold War I brought something warm and alive, and I made people feel it. They chose to follow the message because it was beautiful and it made them feel its truth in their souls. This greater being used the imperfect me as surely as I used my followers and the Holy Spirit used Christ.

Does the fact that I am a rapist make me any less a hero?

Taken from CIA files: Case 19761109 -- A. N. Sobakchik
Item: Follow-up investigation re journal translation
Status: Top Secret On May 22, 1970 Olga Semyonovna Lebchina committed suicide in a sanitorium outside Moscow. She had been confined to this establishment following a brutal sexual assault which left her physically scarred and plagued by paranoid delusions that her attacker was still stalking her. She slashed her wrists in one of these frequent fits of paranoid depression.