When to Leave the Country

A Study of George Grosz

My question is simple: is it possible for a man to know if his society is heading for a disaster he would just as soon avoid?

The history of the 20th century shows this to be a rather practical question. The 30 years that remain are uncertain, and not even the optimists are predicting clear sailing. Crisis and conflict will define our immediate future just as they defined our immediate past. It follows that at certain times and in certain places the pressures will coalesce and erupt into social disasters, in the guise of revolutions, rightist coups d’etat, civil wars. These hypothetical events need not be as dramatic as the invasion of Czechoslovakia or the war in Pakistan. The arrest of Andrei Amalrik, the author of Will the Soviet Union Survive Unitil 1984?, is just as good a case in point; the disaster happened, just to him alone. When another Soviet writer, Anatoli Kuznetsov, chose to defect and seek freedom i...