In this article, appearing almost 25 years after the fall of the BerlinWall, the author examines the positions taken by Italian intellectuals and newspapers in relation to questions of intellectual and human rights in the Soviet Union and, in this context, the position of Sciascia as it emerges from articles, correspondence and statements, with particular regard to the case of the dissidents Andrej Sinjavskij and Julij Daniel’.

The famous 1977 “Biennial of Dissent” of Venice was preceded and followed
by a high number of contrasts and controversies. Carlo Ripa di Meana, by
then president of the Biennial, has recently published (together with
Gabriella Mecucci) the book L’ordine di Mosca. Fermate la Biennale del
Dissenso [The Order from Moscow: Stop the Biennial of Dissent]. It shows
specific dynamics of the Italian politics of the time, particularly the
contrasts between the newborn Socialist Party headed by Bettino Craxi
(main political sponsor of the Biennial) and the Communist Party headed by
Enrico Berlinguer, by then striving for finding a way to the so-called
‘Euro-communism’. Moreover, it sheds light on the International political
scenarios and on the many initiatives required by Moscow in order to stop
the Biennial of Dissent. One of the chapters, whose title is particularly
significant (“The Cowardice of the Intellectuals”), is dedicated to the
absence of many Italian intellectuals, both politically engaged and not.
Half of this chapter is dedicated to the brief but venomous controversy
between Vittorio Strada, Italian scholar of Russian Studies, and the
future Nobel Prize laureate Iosif Brodsky. It took place in December 1977
on the pages of two Italian newspapers, La Repubblica and Il Corriere
della Sera. The absence of Strada, who was then professor of Russian
Literature at the University of Venice and also an Italian Communist Party
member, was particularly remarkable. Moreover, Strada was famous for his
sympathy towards the dissidents, as shown by his 1977 book Dissenso e
socialismo. Una voce marxista del Samizdat sovietico (Dissent and
Socialism. A Marxist Voice from Soviet Samizdat). Strada intervened on 
behalf of the Biennial during the odious attacks by Giulio Carlo Argan,
who in an article on the magazine “Espresso” (27 February 1977) defined the
Biennial as “a sort of odd Solgenitsin-parade” inspired by “Red-Cross
nurse like zeal”. The refusal by the Soviet state to admit Strada and the
publisher Giulio Einaudi to the first International Book Fair of Moscow
(opened on the 6th of September, 1977) added tension to the whole
situation.
This paper aims at analyzing, through the articles published on the press
of the time, the “Strada case” (and his contrasts with Brodsky, Indro
Montanelli, Paolo Flores D’Arcais, Alberto Moravia and others), seen as
the emblem of the position of Italian intellectuals towards Dissent in the
countries of the Eastern bloc.