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# 12 January 1970## Underground PressBy normal city-desk standards, Karel van het Reve wasn't much of a news-hound in his days as Moscow correspondent for the Dutch daily Het Parool. "I kept forgetting to ask names and ages," he recalls. But then, van het Reve was really a scholar of Russian literature who had only signed on with the newspaper as a way of spending a year or so in the Soviet Union. And now, back at his lecture at Leyden University, the mild-man-nered, 48-year-old ex-reporter is scoop-ing the world by breaking the story of a vocal liberal opposition movement in Russia. Through a foundation named after Aleksandr Herzen, the nineteenth-century Russian writer who printed censored Russian manuscripts abroad, van het Reve has begun releasing a flood of underground political documents and memoirs for publication in the West.Acting only as agent and translator, van het Reve made headlines with the bitter, apocalyptic pamphlet "Will the U.S.S.R. Survive Until 1984?" by youthful historian Andrei Amalrik, which appeared in the fall issue of the British quarterly Survey. And last week, van het Reve gave Newsweek's Robert J. Korengold an exclusive look at his latest triumph over Soviet censorship: a 400-page dossier on the closed-door trial of four Russian dissi-dents-Yuri Galanskov, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Aleksei Dobrovolsky and Vera Lastikova-that took place in Moscow's grim Kolomthovka Street courthouse in early 1968.Van het Reve, as it happens, "covered" that trial himself, shivering with the rest of Moscow's foreign press corps in subzero cold on the street outside the court. The charges were, in essence, publicity in the production of a "white book" of allegedly anti-Soviet documents concerning the 1966 trial of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky plus alleged collusion with NTS, a counter-revolutionary Russian émigré group in Frankfurt, Germany. Friends of the accused smuggled out thumbnail accounts of each day's proceedings, and when the trial ended, van het Reve, through his friendship with one of the self-appointed court recorders, came into possession of the 120 different manuscripts which make up the book that Longmans Green will publish in Britain later this year.Time: Though much of the material is technical, courageous voices like that of Ginzburg bring the combative atmosphere of the trial to life. "I thought and I continue to think now," he declared to the judge, "that if I don't agree with something I should express my disagreement openly. . . . I know that you will convict me because not one person charged under Article 70 [anti-Soviet activity] has ever been acquitted. I will go off to the camp calmly to serve my time."Van het Reve naturally isn't eager to reveal how he smuggled out this mass of documentation. "Let's just say I managed," he smiles. Probably through the time-honored methods of the plain brown envelope and the luggage of departing foreigners, he and the Herzen Foundation, which ironically occupies the former headquarters of the Dutch Communist Party in Amsterdam, have "managed" to receive not only the Amalrik pamphlet and the Ginzburg trial records, but a steady flow of other anti-regime works including a sharp attack on Soviet politics by Andrei Sakharov, the noted nuclear physicist, and a factual account of life in the U.S.S.R.'s labor camps by Anatoly Marchenko, who is still serving time for "agitation."A lapsed Stalinist turned democrat, van het Reve insists that the Herzen Foundation is apolitical. "Our only aim is to give these people a chance to publish and that's all," he says. And if he can keep his foundation clear of damaging outside support and free of any profit motive, as it now is, then he will have gone a long way toward insuring the immediate and effective distribution of Russian social criticism abroad.