Victor Herman, RIP

National Review, May 3, 1985

VICTOR HERMAN was born in America and, on March 25, he died in America. For most of his countrymen this would be an accomplishment hardly worth mentioning; for Victor Herman it was a towering achievement.

Herman was the younger son of a Michigan socialist who, in 1931, took his family to live in the brave new world of the Soviet Union. By 1938, Herman's mother was dead and his father was bitterly disillusioned. The father had but one wish left: that his three children would be able to return to the United States. Only Victor made it back--but no before enduring years of unimaginable horrors. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in the Gulag; Herman spent ten, followed by eight years of internal exile in Siberia, which he wrote about in NR ("Going Nowhere," April 16, 1982). But wherever he was, Herman never gave up his one dream. Victor Herman, an American citizen, was going back to America.

Rehabilitated during the Khrushchev thaw of the Fifties, Herman immediately began seeking ways to return to the U.S.A. It wasn't until 1976, with his Bicentennial passport clutched in his hand, that the finally succeeded, after having given 45 years of his life, from the age of 16 to 61, to the Soviet Union. A couple of years after his return, Herman managed to obtain the freedom of his Russian wife and two daughters. The Soviet Union may have gotten the prime of his life, but Victor Herman was finally free.

First came Coming Out of the Ice, published in 1979 by Harcourt Brace, Herman's breathtaking account of his years in the Soviet Union. Later made into a television movie, Coming Out of the Ice offers an unforgettable view of the Gulag through the eyes and heart of an American. Then came two other books about the Soviet Union, both of which Herman published himself: The Gray People and Realities: Might and Paradox in the Soviet Union (written with Fred E. Dohrs). Neither one reached a large audience--in contrast to Russia, there is no market in America for samizdat. Herman accepted this disappointment as stoically as he accepted his years in the Soviet Union. But he never ceased trying to tell his fellow Americans about a world and a government so utterly unlike like anything they have ever experienced. Anyone who has read his books or, even better, has heard him speak will never forget this heroic man who fought to valiantly to die in the land of his birth.