“I Reserve the Right to Criticize My Friends”: The International Committee for Political Prisoners and Its Letters from Russian Prisons

Abstract

Campaigns on behalf of Russian political prisoners stretch from the revolutionary “nihilists” of the 1880s to the dissidents of the 1970s. While the efforts of political émigrés and their Western sympathizers – to promote awareness, raise funds, and pressure governments – met with decidedly mixed success, there were several watershed moments. This article examines how one such breakthrough, the compilation and publication of Letters from Russian Prisons in 1925, resulted in the formation of the International Committee for Political Prisoners (ICPP) as the first ever transnational amnesty NGO. Along with 300 pages of harrowing accounts of Soviet prisons, camps, and exile, the book featured endorsements by “Twenty-Two Well-Known European and American Authors”. The disputatious process of this volume's compilation and the controversy greeting its issuance show the challenges of extending civil liberties advocacy to include criticism of the Soviet Union among left and liberal figures in the interwar period. In establishing a new field of endeavor – universalist transnational activism to aid political detainees – the ICPP navigated a complex network of relationships among a diverse array of political and intellectual figures.