Dancing on Thin Ice: Travails of a Russian Dissenter

Arkady Polishchuk (1935-2020) was a Russian Jewish dissident and former journalist who authored articles, essays, and satires for leading Russian periodicals, as well as two books about Africa. He also wrote two books in English, Dancing on Thin Ice (DoppelHouse 2018) and While I Was Burying Comrade Stalin (MacFarland 2020). His writings appeared in many publications in Europe and the United States including the National Review, Chicago Tribune, and Witness. Polishchuk was a broadcaster and correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 1985-2008 in Washington, D.C.; Munich; and Prague. For many years in Soviet Russian and later in the West, Polishchuk was heavily involved in human rights, including as a testimonial speaker for Amnesty International and working on behalf of 30,000 Russian Evangelicals trying to escape decades of persecution under communist rule. In 1981 he was awarded the British McWhirter Human Rights Foundation Award and, throughout his life, received numerous travel grants for his human rights activities as well as being covered by Life, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Nightline with Ted Koppel, and international publications.

Polishchuk became a dissident in 1973 and spent several weeks in prison as part of a four-year campaign in support of Jewish and Christian emigration. When the Christian Emigration Movement was born after the Helsinki Accords in 1975, Polishchuk concentrated his human rights efforts on helping persecuted Christians - which included the dangerous smuggling of witness testimonies out of the USSR. Over several years he successfully petitioned for the right of Russian Evangelicals to emigrate and traveled to many European countries, to Canada and across the United States on their behalf. For two years he was the managing editor and spokesman for Door of Hope International, an Evangelical human rights organization focusing on religious persecution. He held an advanced degree in Philosophy from Moscow University. Some of his experiences as a dissident in Moscow were covered internationally, for example, in this article by the New York Times from October 20, 1976.