Gdy państwo depce prawo…

Abstract

The above text is an old, but still valid conversation with the famous Russian writer in exile Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–1997) and his wife Maria Rozanova (born in 1921) – in 1983–2001 editor-in-chief of the magazine “Sintaxis” (published in Russian in Paris). This interview, recorded in Krakow at the end of 1993, by two associates of Krakow’s “Tygodnik Powszechny,” and philologists from the Jagiellonian University, mainly concerns the dramatic situation in the Russian Federation after the bloody conflict between President Boris Yeltsin and the Supreme Council in October 1993. Contrary to the majority of the representatives of the then democratic Russian intelligentsia, both in Russia and in exile, the Sinyavskys were strongly against Yeltsin in this conflict. They accused the president of the time that, by fighting with cannons against the opposition, even the communist one, he unforgivably trampled the law and contributed to the growth of contempt for all democracy on the part of the nascent Russian society.