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tle Russian, she was allowed to emigrate again in
November 1986, settling first in the United
States, before moving to the United Kingdom,
where she still lives.
mainland Russia from the northwestern end of
Sakhalin Island. The Amur is formed by the
junction of the Shilka and Argun Rivers in east-
ern Siberia and flows southeast for about 1,000
miles, forming the border between Russia and
China, before making a sharp turn to the north-
east into Russian territory and emptying into the
Tatar Strait near the city of Nikolayevsk-na-
Amur (Nikolayevsk-on-the Amur). The Amur is
navigable throughout its entire course, but it is
closed to navigation during the winter months.
Although the modern history of the Amur River
and its basin has often been written in terms of
the competing interests of Russia and China in
the region, the Amur also holds great significance
for the Gilyaks (Nivkhi), one of the indigenous
people of the region who historically populated
the river's mouth.
Russian explorers first reached the Amur
region and charted the river in the 17th century,
at which time they clashed with China. The
Treaty of
NERCHINSK
(1689) settled the boundary
between the two countries, leaving most of the
Amur basin under Chinese control. By the mid-
19th century the importance of the Amur River
and basin for Russia's presence in eastern Siberia
had increased significantly at a time when Chi-
nese power in the region was declining. With the
appointment of Count Nikolai Muraviev—later
known as Muraviev-Amursky in recognition of
his contributions to Russian power—as gover-
nor-general of Eastern Siberia, Russia advanced
its interests in the region more aggressively. In
1858 Russia received the left bank of the Amur,
and two years later China ceded the adjoining
Ussuri River under the terms of the Treaty of
Peking.
Amalrik, Andrei Alekseevich
(1938-1980)
writer
A historian by training, Amalrik became an influ-
ential member of the Soviet dissident commu-
nity. He was born in Moscow, where his father
worked as a historian. His critical plays and
essays, circulated clandestinely in
samizdat,
led to
his expulsion from Moscow University in 1963.
Two years later he was arrested and sent to
Siberian exile on the charge of “parasitism,” a
Soviet-era legal term that made those without a
full-time job liable to prosecution. Back in
Moscow in 1968, his exile experience provided
the material for his underground book
Involun-
tary Journey to Siberia
(1970). He was arrested
again in 1970, a year after the publication in the
West of what became his best-known work,
Will
the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?
Playing on the
title of George Orwell's
1984,
Amalrik raised
questions about the durability of the Soviet sys-
tem that were vigorously debated among dissi-
dents in the 1970s, even though at the time it
seemed almost inconceivable that the Soviet
Union could collapse. (As is turned out, Amalrik
was off by only seven years.) Amalrik was sen-
tenced to three years in the
GULAG
and a further
three years in exile. He was released in 1976 after
repeated international protests and allowed to
emigrate to Paris. He died in an automobile acci-
dent in Spain while traveling to Madrid to attend
the 1980 International Conference on Human
Rights, where the Soviet record on human rights
was a prominently featured topic of discussion.
anarchism
A political philosophy that holds the source of
oppression in human societies to derive from
compulsory laws and states and government,
anarchism advocates the creation of a stateless
society through revolutionary action. Tracing its
roots to the French Revolution, anarchism
Amur River
The eighth-longest river of the world, the Amur
River flows 2,744 miles from its headwaters
until reaching the Tatar Strait that separates
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