A note on Angela Davis before we begin. Her contributions to exposing racial and social injustice in the United States are significant and worth stating upfront. She built an incisive framework connecting race, class, and gender in the fight for justice, and her critique of mass incarceration (particularly its devastating impact on Black and marginalized communities) made her one of the defining voices of the American left. She fought a powerful, unjust system, and she deserves full credit for it.
What she did not do, despite her radical politics, was extend meaningful solidarity to victims of Soviet-style totalitarianism. This isn’t an attempt to demonize her. It’s an examination of a pattern that runs deep through Western progressive thought and fails to reckon with the experiences of leftists and dissidents from Central and Eastern Europe. That failure has a long history. And one of its most striking illustrations is a letter written in 1972.
who was jiří pelikán?
Pelikán is an unlikely figure to hold up as a dissident hero because after all, he was a committed communist for most of his life. He joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1939 at just 16, was arrested by the Gestapo a year later, and spent 5 months in Nazi captivity before joining the underground resistance.
After the war, he rose quickly through Communist ranks, leading the Central Union of Czechoslovak Students and becoming the youngest member of the National Assembly. His record wasn’t spotless as he participated in the post-1948 purges of non-Communist students from universities, something he later came to deeply regret. But Pelikán evolved.
By 1963, he became the head of Czechoslovak Television, a move celebrated by reformists whose ideas eventually led to the Prague Spring: the movement that sought “socialism with a human face,” meaning less censorship, greater freedom of expression, and real space for dissent. Essentially, socialism on Czechoslovak terms rather than Soviet ones. When Soviet tanks ended that experiment in August 1968, Pelikán refused to endorse the invasion or the changes that followed. He was removed from his post, fled to Italy in 1969, and was stripped of his citizenship.
From exile, he kept fighting and founded Listy, a magazine that gave voice to dissidents and critics of the regime back home.
why did he write to angela davis?
The connection began with a memory. During Davis’s imprisonment and 1972 trial in the United States, solidarity campaigns had poured in from across the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. There were letter-writing drives calling for her release, orchestrated largely by Communist governments eager to score propaganda points against the West.
Pelikán and other exiled Czechoslovak dissidents remembered those campaigns. They thought that perhaps Davis would understand the value of solidarity in return, especially given the fact that she had lived through state persecution herself. So they wrote to her.
The letter drew a direct line between her struggle and theirs. Davis’s “victory against a powerful bureaucratic system” had inspired their own. They also named a painful irony: her trial had drawn global attention and international support, while dissidents in Prague and Brno languished in silence and were denied even basic legal rights.
The appeal grew. Pelikán expanded it into an open letter, published in the New York Review of Books in August 1972, right as Davis arrived in the Soviet Union on her post-acquittal “thank you tour,” visiting the very Eastern Bloc governments that had championed her freedom while imprisoning theirs.
the letter
Here are a few excerpts from the letter. It’s jarring to see how similar the points made in this 1972 are to what activists from the Central-Eastern European region find themselves repeating in 2026:
Dear Angela Davis,
You will perhaps be surprised that a Czechoslovak political exile should feel the need to write to you. You must have had many messages from Czechoslovakia, but you missed those from the people who would have liked to express their solidarity but could not do so because their voices are stifled, because they are in prison, condemned or awaiting trial.
I am sending you this letter in their names. I can speak and write because I have chosen, like many of my compatriots, to continue the struggle in exile. But I’m also writing to you because, in spite of our different experiences, we have a lot in common and I think that you will understand me. You say that you became a communist because after seeing the people suffer you understood that society must be changed. So did I.
I joined the Communist Party in September, 1939. I was a student and I had seen my country occupied by the German Nazis. I wanted to fight for freedom and to change a system which produces wars and oppression. You have lived through the painful experience of prison. So have I. While the Gestapo hunted me, my parents were taken as hostages: and my mother never came back from prison. I know as well as you what is meant by repression, discrimination, and suffering. Like you, I went into the revolutionary movement convinced that socialism can create a more just society for the majority of men.
The difference between us consists only in the fact that after thirty years as a militant, in October, 1969, I was expelled from the party along with some half million Czech and Slovak communists simply because we refused to consider the occupation of our small socialist country by a foreign power, itself “socialist,” as “fraternal aid.” You may say that there is a big difference between American military aggression in Vietnam and the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. I agree, and that is why our people did not defend itself in arms. But the substance of the two interventions is the same: to prevent people from deciding their own destiny. You are for the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. So am I.
But why, four years after the intervention, are there still 80,000 Soviet soldiers in Czechoslovakia, in spite of the agreements between Bonn and Moscow and Warsaw, in spite of the “consolidation” many times proclaimed by Husak and Brezhnev?
I was delighted to read that after your release you said you would fight for the freedom of all the political prisoners in the world. I hope you will do so for political prisoners in capitalist countries, but also in East European countries, especially Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. You may object that here too there is a difference: that in the United States and other Western countries it is “progressives” who are persecuted, whereas in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia it is mainly “antisocialist” elements, to use the language of official propaganda.
But Angela, ask for the list of political prisoners in Czechoslovakia and read their biographies: you’ll find the overwhelming majority of them are communists or socialists.
But, Angela, you above all have the moral duty to demand of the Czech authorities what has been until now denied to all journalists: permission to visit the Ruzyně Prison in Prague and to interview Karel Kyncl and Jiří Hochman, both of whom speak English. Listen to them and draw your own conclusions; but above all try to help them so they can defend themselves against their accusers as you have been able to do in your own country.
But among the Czech political prisoners there are also noncommunists; you will find Catholics, Evangelists, Jews, and also those opposed to socialism. This must not be a pretext for indifference to their fate. In Czechoslovakia we have paid dearly for our failure to understand that liberty is not divisible and that injustice toward opponents will in the end turn itself back on those who commit injustice. If liberty is taken away from some of the people it will soon die for the rest.
They have no contact with the outside world, inadequate medical care, no chance to choose or to consult their lawyers, no knowledge of when they will be tried. Their families, like those of most other political prisoners, are in a particularly difficult situation because their wives are prevented from working. Moreover, to collect money for the families of prisoners is considered “approval of criminal acts” and is therefore punishable by imprisonment.
Do you, Angela, consider this situation normal in a country that calls itself “socialist”? I have read about and seen on television the many messages of solidarity you received in prison and after your release. I was proud to think that there were people who were not indifferent to the fate of others; at the same time I had to think with sadness and bitterness about my friends imprisoned in Prague who cannot receive expressions of solidarity and are deprived of moral encouragement.
But prison is not the only or the main form of repression in Czechoslovakia.
Tens of thousands of communists and other citizens have nothing to live on, being deprived of work for their political convictions. The best writers are condemned to silence, theaters that disobey are closed, the directors who made the fame of the new Czechoslovak cinema are out of work or are forced to leave the country. The theaters do not know what to put on apart from the classics and escapist comedies; the Ministry of Culture does not recommend antifascist works because the public might find “dangerous parallels” which would lead to “provocative applause.”
Hundreds of thousands of citizens have been eliminated from public life. For the “sins” of their parents children may no longer study, and parents are punished for the negative attitudes of their children. Investigations are carried out as far as three generations back, to encourage denunciations.
When I describe all that, without the slightest pleasure but with shame and sorrow, to my Western friends, they reply that of course it’s a disagreeable situation but that one mustn’t say so too openly so as not to “play into the hands of socialism’s enemies,” and that one must start from “a class position.” But what “class” can benefit if people are arrested without trial, if trade unions are enslaved, if all free discussion is suppressed, if socialist countries accuse each other of imperialism, betrayal, revisionism, and invade each other by turn?
If they mean the working class, then that of Czechoslovakia has made it clear that it does not consider the present regime socialist.
That is precisely why you, Angela, and the millions of people who supported you and believe in a more just socialist society with more freedom, can no longer be silent about the violation of human rights in the countries that call themselves “socialist” and by their behavior discredit socialism more than any reactionary propaganda.
That is why I suggest to you and to those who supported you sincerely, not just for easy demagogic propaganda:
- Demand the release of all political prisoners in the world, in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Iran, the United States, and also in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union;
- Protest against the violation of human rights—especially the right to freedom of expression and organization, to strike, to emigrate, to work and to study without discrimination—throughout the world;
- Demand the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam and of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia.
I assure you, Angela, that not only I but many other people are waiting for a reply, or better still for you to act. I don’t say that on it depends the fate of our imprisoned comrades and the struggle for the freedom and independence of our people. We learned in 1938 that at the moment of foreign aggression we are always alone and must count above all on our own strength. But we should be happy to have you with us, as we have been with you.
how did angela davis respond?
She didn’t, at least not directly. Davis was still touring the Soviet Union when the letter reached her, and the reply that came back within days wasn’t from her at all. It came from Charlene Mitchell, her close associate and fellow communist, speaking on Davis’s behalf.
The response was a dismissal. Mitchell argued that Davis saw no legitimacy in the Czech exiles’ position and that choosing to leave a socialist country for a capitalist one was not an act of conscience but a “retrograde step.” As for the dissidents back home, the message was blunt: stop undermining your government. Stop attacking your own country.
The letter asking for solidarity between victims of state repression had been answered with a lecture about which victims deserved sympathy.
and the pattern continues
What makes this exchange so worth examining isn’t that it’s shocking, but that it’s so familiar. The same logic Mitchell deployed in 1972 still circulates today, with different names and different regimes filling the roles.
When Eastern Europeans express alarm about Russian expansionism, they are too often told by voices on the left that their fear is NATO propaganda, or a product of Cold War conditioning, or evidence that they’ve sided with the wrong camp. When Ukrainians or Belarusians describe what life under authoritarian pressure actually looks like, the response from certain corners is a condescending deflection: what about US foreign policy? What about Western hypocrisy?
These aren’t inherently bad questions, but they’re being used as escape hatches to avoid engaging with inconvenient testimony from people whose suffering doesn’t fit a simple worldview or framework.
This is the definition of campism: the tendency to assess state violence not on its own terms but based on which bloc the perpetrating state belongs to.
Pelikán and his fellow signatories weren’t asking Davis to endorse NATO or abandon her politics. They were asking her to recognize that a prison is a prison, that a show trial is a show trial, and that solidarity cannot be conditional on the ideology of the jailer. That’s not a conservative argument. It’s an argument the left should be best positioned to make.
The left has always been at its most powerful when solidarity was its organizing principle, and not solidarity with governments, not solidarity with systems, but solidarity with people. The uncomfortable work of transcending campism is the work of taking that principle seriously, even when it leads somewhere inconvenient.
radical dumpling: screaming into the void about anti-fascism and anti-imperial consistency, from somewhere between east and west.
This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack.
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