page_title: Index on Censorship
section_title: An Appeal from the USSR
hierarchical_section_title: Index on Censorship / Founding history / An Appeal from the USSR
caption_attribution_description: English: Soviet dissenters Bogoraz (l) and Litvinov in a Moscow kitchen
context_page_description: Index on Censorship is an organization campaigning for freedom of expression, which produces a quarterly magazine of the same name from London. It is directed by the non-profit-making Writers and Scholars International, Ltd. in association with the UK-registered charity Index on Censorship, which are both chaired by the British television broadcaster, writer and former politician Trevor Phillips. Index is based at 1 Rivington Place in central London.
  WSI was created by poet Stephen Spender, Oxford philosopher Stuart Hampshire, the publisher and editor of The Observer David Astor, and the writer and expert on the Soviet Union Edward Crankshaw. The founding editor of Index on Censorship was the critic and translator Michael Scammell, who still serves as a patron of the organisation.
context_section_description: The original impetus for the creation of Index on Censorship came from an Open Letter addressed "To World Public Opinion" by two Soviet dissenters, Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz. In the words of the samizdat periodicial A Chronicle of Current Events, they described "the atmosphere of illegality" surrounding the January 1968 trial of Ginzburg and Galanskov and called for "public condemnation of this disgraceful trial, for the punishment of those responsible, the release of the accused from detention and a retrial which would fully conform with the legal regulations and be held in the presence of international observers." (One of the accused Alexander Ginzburg resumed his dissident activities on release from the camps, until expelled from the USSR in 1979; another, the writer Yuri Galanskov, died in a camp in November 1972.)
  The Times (London) published a translation of the Open Letter and in reply the English poet Stephen Spender composed a brief telegram:
  “We, a group of friends representing no organisation, support your statement, admire your courage, think of you and will help in any way possible.”
  Among the other 15 British and US signatories were the poet W.H. Auden, philosopher A.J. Ayer, musician Yehudi Menuhin, man of letters J. B. Priestley, actor Paul Scofield, sculptor Henry Moore, philosopher Bertrand Russell, writer Mary McCarthy and composer Igor Stravinsky. 
  Later that year, on 25 August, Bogoraz, Litvinov and five others demonstrated on Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. 
  A few weeks before, Litvinov sent Spender a letter (translated and published several years later in the first May 1972 issue of Index). He suggested that a regular publication might be set up in the West "to provide information to world public opinion about the real state of affairs in the USSR".
caption: Larisa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov, late 1960s
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