Heinrich Boll in the circle of Soviet dissidents: on the way to signing the Moscow treaty

The object of this article is the relationships between Heinrich Böll and Soviet dissidents - the German literary critic Lev Kopelev and his wife Raisa Orlova, Vladimir Admoni and his wife Tamara Silman, the translator and literary critic Efim Etkind - within the broad context of the new Eastern policy. One of the main questions posed in the article is as follows: what united Catholic Böll and the Soviet intelligentsia and how these friendly relations influenced Willy Brand’s policies. The author argues that the rapprochement did not take place on the basis of universal humanitarian values, but on a deeper Christian level. For Böll, the political and Christian rhetoric were inextricably linked, and gave rise to a mixed religious and political discourse that attracted the Russian intelligentsia. The main concept here was radicalism, bringing together the Christians and the Communists. By analogy with the Communist International, Böll calls this radicalism “the International of Spiritualism”. Böll opposed the policy of rapprochement of apparatus of different countries to the policy of rapprochement of individuals and believed that the change in the Eastern policy was not least connected with his personal influence on Willy Brandt, whose socialist attitudes he also tried to fit into the Christian context. Böll saw the possibilities of a real rapprochement between Germany and the USSR not on the political arena, but on the level of personal relationships and culture.