Fifty years of Index
An appeal is published in The Times from Pavel Litvinov, grandson of the former Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, and his wife Ivy, alongside Larisa Bogoraz, the former wife of writer Yuli Daniel. The appeal is organised by the poet Stephen Spender. It asks the world to condemn the rigged trial of two young writers and their typists on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. It prompts a telegram of support and sympathy from 16 British and US luminaries, including W H Auden, A J Ayer, Maurice Bowra, Julian Huxley, Mary McCarthy, Bertrand Russell and Igor Stravinsky. A further letter is written by Litvinov, who asks for the creation of an “international committee or council that would make it its purpose to support the democratic movement in the USSR. This committee could be composed of universally respected progressive writers, scholars, artists and public personalities from England, the United States, France, Germany and other western countries, and also from Latin America, Asia, Africa and, in the future, even from Eastern Europe…. Of course, this committee should not have an anti-communist or anti-Soviet character. It would even be good if it contained people persecuted in their own countries for pro-communist or independent views…. The point is not that this or that ideology is not correct, but that it must not use force to demonstrate its correctness.”
Stephen Spender takes up Litvinov’s idea first with Stuart Hampshire (the Oxford philosopher), a co-signatory of the telegram, and with David Astor (then editor of the Observer). They set up a committee along the lines suggested by Litvinov. Among its other members are Louis Blom-Cooper, Edward Crankshaw, Lord Gardiner, Elizabeth Longford and Sir Roland Penrose, and its patrons included Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Sir Peter Medawar, Henry Moore, Iris Murdoch, Sir Michael Tippett and Angus Wilson. The chosen name for the new organisation is Writers and Scholars International. This process takes approximately three years.
In March the first ever issue of the magazine is published under the title Index (“on Censorship” is later added). From the beginning, Index declare its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere. It is particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America, but is clear that censorship is not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The first issue includes a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year. Articles are published from across the globe, including Bangladesh, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, USA, the Soviet Union, with poems from Natalya Gorbanyevskaya, a poet who had been confined to a mental hospital. It also includes the first publication in any language of a story by Milovan Djilas, who was unable to publish anything in his own country since his trial in 1963. Also included in the first issue is the Index “Index”, which is round-up of the main and most recent free speech issues around the world. Index Index runs in every issue until 2008. In the September issue, Nadine Gordimer, a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, writes her first article for Index. Gordimer stands firmly against apartheid in South Africa. She goes on to write for Index many times.
As part of a special report on Iran, Index is one of the first magazines to denounce the Shah.
US playwright Arthur Miller writes in Index: “The sin of power is to not only distort reality but to convince people that the false is true, and that what is happening is only an invention of enemies.”
The unofficial and banned Polish journal Zapis, mouthpiece of the writers and intellectuals who paved the way for the liberalisation in Poland, is published by Index. A translation of the Czechoslovak Charter 77 manifesto drafted by Václav Havel and others is also published this year. Tom Stoppard’s play, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, is first performed with the London Symphony Orchestra. It is set in a Soviet mental institution and is inspired by the personal account of former detainee Victor Fainberg and Clayton Yeo's expose of the use of psychiatric abuse in the USSR, published in Index on Censorship in 1975. Stoppard becomes a member of the advisory board the following year and remains a patron of Index.
At the start of the year Index publishes the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal before he becomes Minister of Education in the revolutionary government. The winter issue of the magazine reports on a controversy in the USA in which the Public Broadcasting Service has heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and has gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version.
Ursula Owen appointed as both editor and chief executive. Owen increases the circulation of the magazine threefold and wins several awards. She presides over many important debates, for example on violence, pornography and hate speech.
The Freedom of Expression Award for advocacy is given to Bahraini human rights activist Nabeel Rajab. Rajab is later imprisoned, in 2016, convicted of offences including “spreading fake news”. Index are part of several campaigns to free Nabeel, including writing open letters to governments around the world and protesting outside London’s Bahrain embassy. In June 2020 Nabeel is eventually freed.