Search Results for: criminal code

Piotr Suda, The Novocherkassk Tragedy, June 1-3 1962 (1988)

Piotr Siuda was one of the participants in the workers uprising in Novocherkassk in 1962. After several years of imprisonment he devoted himself to investigating tha tragedy and bringing information about it to the public. This became possible only after the beginning of glasnost. This article is part of a longer piece which appeared originally in 1988 in samizdat magazine, “Obschina”.

In the 1950’s industrial wages in the USSR were arbitrarily lowered almost every year. These decreases allowed officials to publish statistics indicating increases in labor efficiency, automation and mechanization, decreases in the cost of production without corresponding new capital investment, and improvements in organization and in technology. In capitalist countries, if a corporation tried to improve its financial showings by lowering wages, the workers would respond with protests and strikes. In the USSR, however, the working class was unable for decades to struggle in defence of its own interests. The democratization of the late 1950’s was really a way for the authorities to fool the working masses into hoping for a genuine dialogue with state and party officials. The Novocherkassk tragedy exposed the fraud and hypocrisy of the criminal totalitarian regime.

On January 1, 1962, wages were lowered by 30 to 35 percent at the largest electrolocomotive plant in Novocherkassk (NEVZ). The last shop in the plant where wages were scheduled to be lowered was the steel shop. By that time workers in the other shops had somehow become accustomed to the constant infringement on their rights but for the workers in the steel foundry the cut in wages was a fresh insult.

On the morning of June 1 the government radio announced that there would be a sharp “temporary” increase in the price of meat and dairy products (up to 35%). It was an unexpected and severe attack on the standard of living of all working people in the USSR and was bound to produce general discontent. But there were other circumstances which also contributed to the strike at NEVZ.

City and factory authorities had long been neglecting the severe housing problem at NEVZ. What construction that had taken place was grossly inadequate and the cost of lodging in the private sector amounted to about 30 percent of a worker’s monthly wages.

Because Novocherkassk was, at that time, considered a city of students, very little meat and butter were delivered to the government stores and they were too expensive at the market. The new increase in state prices led to an increase over the already very high prices for food at the market. On the way to the plant that morning the workers discussed the price increases with great indignation and in the steel shop the workers gathered in small groups and feverishly discussed the announced price increases but also the recent lowering of wages. No one, however, thought at that time of protests, meetings, or strikes. The workers had neither organization nor leadership and were afraid of the very idea of trying to liberate themselves from the political and social slavery imposed on the working people of the USSR by Stalinism.

It is probable that the discontented grumblings of the workers reached the ears of the party committee and the plant director, because the director, Kurochkin, and the party secretary visited the steel shop to speak to the workers. It was not, however, a business-like dialogue but an arrogant, lordly monologue. As the director spoke to the group of workers surrounding them, a women approached holding meat pies and Kurochkin, trying to be clever, said to the workers: “You don’t have any money, so eat meat pies with liver.” This remark was the very spark that brought about the tragedy of Novocherkassk. This event concentrated and reflected the whole spectrum of the social, political and material situation of the working people of the USSR. The workers were outraged by the director’s insensitivity and they divided into groups and began shouting: “Bloody swine, they are jeering at us!” One group went to the plant compressor shop and switched on the plant whistle. V.I. Tchernykh and V.K. Vlasenko were in that group. Another group went round the shops of the plant with appeals to stop all work and to call a strike.

It is necessary to note that neither at the beginning of the strike, nor during the ensuing events of June 1-3, were any groups formed that could have taken responsibility for the organization and direction of the workers’ actions. All the events took place on the spot, spontaneously. The initiative bubbled up from below, from the mass of workers. No outsiders had anything to do with the events. This testifies to the absence of workers representation in the face of the unlimited power usurped by the stalinist officialdom. And from this we must conclude that a situation in which the working class lacks the will to struggle is intolerable.

There was no need to campaign for the strike among the workers of the plant. It was enough for the group which called for a strike to appear, and work stopped immediately. The mass of strikers was growing like an avalanche. At that time there were about 14 thousand workers at the plant. The workers went out to the plant grounds and filled the square near the plant management office. The square could not hold all the strikers.

A group of workers removed some bars from the fence surrounding the square and used them to barricade the railway line leading to the plant; they hung some red cloth over it. Thus the Moscow-Saratov train was stopped, and railway traffic on that part of the line was interrupted. By interrupting railway traffic the workers were trying to spread information about their strike along the railway line.

On the initiative of the plant metal craftsman V.I. Tchernykh, his comrade, the shop painter V.D.Koroteev, painted posters with demands like: “Give us meat and butter,” “We need apartments.” These posters were fastened to one of the trolley posts at the railway which was being electrified. Someone wrote on the locomotive of the passenger train: “Make meat from Khrushchev!” This slogan also appeared in some other places. The second and third shift workers and the inhabitants of the workers’ villages began to flow towards the plant.

Neither the party organs nor administration of the plant or the authorities tried to negotiate with the workers. The leading engineer at the plant, S.N. Yolkin, tried to speak to the workers on his own initiative; he had no authority to hold negotiations and made neither promises nor assertions, but only tried to convince the workers to stop the riot and begin working. The indignant workers dragged him into the back of a truck and tried to demand a real solution to the problems from him. I also asked him questions and this was later used against me at my trial.

At about noon the word spread amongst the strikers: “The militia has come!” All the people rushed to the railroad and towards the militia. I was at the front of the crowd and when I reached the railroad, I looked around. What I saw was very impressive. About 350-400 metres of the railway were submerged beneath a menacing and dense wave of people and about 200-250 metres beyond the railway line more than 100 militiamen were forming two ranks. The vehicles which had delivered them were turning around on the vacant lot. On seeing the menacing wave of people the militia ranks dissolved immediately. The militiamen rushed after the vehicles which were turning around and jumped in confusion into the moving trucks. Only two militiamen failed to escape; their knees were shaking, either with fear or from running. The wave of strikers did not overtake the militiamen who managed to make a cowardly escape and who left their two comrades at fate’s mercy. But wrathful as they were, the workers were not violent; they did not even touch the remaining militiamen and saw them off with the advice not to poke their noses into strikes. I was an eye- witness, so I can confidently assert that the author of the article “Days of Darkness, Days of Enlightenment” is lying when he declares that “several militiamen were wounded”.

They could only have been wounded by themselves during their panic-stricken attempts to board the trucks. Neither should the strikers be slandered today. This episode showed both the unlimited cowardice of “the law and order service” and the working people’s hatred towards them. This episode also showed the noble spirit of the working people who did not touch their enemies when they saw their impotence. We later learned that the militiamen were given plain clothes to wear instead of uniforms and they were sent into the crowd of strikers. These cowards are inevitably mean and insidious, so they were sent into the crowd of workers as to make better use of their nature. KGB men were also sent there; they were supplied with miniature cameras, built into lighters, cigarette cases, and who knows what else. Photos were also taken from the fire-tower. Later, during the inquest, I saw piles of photos of thousands of strikers. The well-oiled machinery of the police state worked almost perfectly.

Attempts were also made to provoke the strikers. June 1 was a clear, hot day. There were no sources of water near the plant grounds. I remember the painful thirst felt by everybody but nobody left the square. The people were united by their faith in their power and in the fairness of their demands. At that moment a truck heavily loaded with boxes of lemonade, approached the square. The temptation was immense for everybody but not a single bottle was taken from the truck. Railway traffic was paralyzed completely, but the truck with the lemonade was allowed to go through the whole crowd of many thousands of thirsty people. The provocation failed.

By the end of the work day the first military detachments of the Novocherkassk garrison arrived at the square but they were not armed. Having approached the people, the soldiers were immediately absorbed by the crowd. The soldiers and the strikers began to fraternize, to embrace and kiss each other. Yes, they kissed each other. It was difficult for the officers to separate the soldiers from the people, to gather them and to take them away from the strikers. After some time, the first secretary of the Rostov district CPSU committee Basov tried to speak from the balcony of the plant management office wing which was being built. He was surrounded by officials. The cowardice of the party officials was not only obvious to everyone, but also insulting. Nobody wanted to speak to the strikers on equal terms, which testified to their extreme subjugation and lack of any rights. The strikers threw various objects at Basov and his toadies but they were, literally, high above the mass of the working people, so it was impossible to hit them.

Then the armoured carriers with officers began to arrive at the square. The authorities had determined that the soldiers of the Novocherkassk garrison were unreliable, and decided to rely upon the officers. It was a small-scale civil war. The officers literally felt the strength of the workers’ hands. The workers were swinging the armoured carriers from side to side with amazing ease. The colonels and majors rocking on their seats and trying to keep self-control presented a pitiful sight. The confusion and fear on their faces showed that they could not stop the people’s wrath either. The armoured carriers left the square. The unarmed, disorganized workers were so far winning one victory after another with seaming ease, due only to their numerical strength and the unity of their outrage, without any direct violence or extremism. This very fact frightened the “leaders” and rulers, the party and state officials, most of all. The people had risen from their knees!

The strikers’ enthusiasm did not decrease; on the contrary, it increased with each new attempt to suppress their actions. A spontaneous meeting sprang up. The peak of a pedestrian tunnel served as a platform. At the meeting there were appeals to send workers to other cities, to other enterprises, to seize the city post-office and telegraph in order to send appeals for support for the strike of electric locomotive builders to every city. It was then that we first heard that the roads to the city were blocked by the militia and the troops.

I did not intend to speak at the meeting but I was alarmed by the appeals to seize government offices. I remembered all to well the accounts of those who had taken part in the events in Hungary and in Georgia. Attempts to capture government offices in the city could have terrible consequences. Later the authorities characterized these appeals as calls to seize power in the city and this absurd assertion worked so magically that up until recently I did not even try to dispute such nonsense. On hearing the calls to seize government offices, I appealed to the workers to continue the strike and to maintain discipline. I suggested that the next day everybody should go hold a demonstration in the city, work out common demands and present these demands to the authorities. The appeal to seize government offices was rejected completely. It was decided to have a demonstration in the city the next morning. This fact alone shows that the events in the city were not accompanied by any kind of extremism or violence against the authorities. Later, neither the investigators nor the court could find (hard as they tried) any proof of extremism or violence aside from two insignificant cases. The first case concerned the chief engineer of the plant, S.N. Yolkin, who was forcefully dragged into a truck, but was not beaten. The second case concerned the communist Braginsky, who received a few earboxes from his subordinates; but they did not inflict any trauma and it was not necessary for him to see a doctor.

Late that evening, when the workers’ wrath had reached its highest level but they still had no concrete means of expressing it, they took Khrushchev’s portrait down from the facade of the plant management office. Then they went through all the rooms, took down all the portraits and threw them into a heap in the square and made a large, smoky fire. The crowd near the plant began to break up as it was beginning to get dark. At that time a group of workers headed by a wonderful man, Sergei Sotnikov, went to the gas- distributing station in order to block the delivery of gas to the industrial enterprises of the city but they were unable to do it.

At 5 o’clock in the morning I was awakened by the noise of tanks and left for the plant. About 400-500 metres from the railway, the villagers began to gather in small groups of 5- 15 people. I came up to the group standing nearest to the railway, about 300-350 metres from it. We all observed that the railway along the plant and the plant itself were surrounded by soldiers with sub-machine guns. Near the plant and the Locomotivstroi railway station there were tanks. The people told me that at about midnight the troops and the tanks had been brought into the city, the village and the plant. They said that during the night the inhabitants had tried to build barricades from improvised materials in front of the tanks, but that the tanks had overcome them easily. Then the workers began to jump onto the moving tanks and to cover the observation slits with their clothes as to blind them.

An officer and a soldier armed with a sub-machine gun approached our group. The group dissolved quickly except for 5 to 7 people who remained. The wrangling with the officer began. He demanded that we go to the plant. We refused, saying,”let the troops which have seized the plant do the work”. During this heated exchange we failed to notice that two sub-machine gunners had appeared behind us. We were arrested and delivered to the plant management office. Around us there were many soldiers from the Caucasus, officers, civilians, and KGB officers. The latter met me with malicious joy, saying they had long been “waiting” for me and were glad to meet me. I was soon delivered to the GOVD (City Department of Internal Affairs) by car, escorted by three men as well as the driver; there a large staff of officials was busily engaged in suppressing the uprising. During the drive the men in the car swung their fists in front of me, threatened me, and insulted me.

More and more arrested people were brought to the GOVD. I was led to a room where about six officials were seated. A brief interrogation was held. They demanded a promise from me that I would not take part in the “mass riots”. I answered that I would do the same as the majority of workers. They suggested that I think it over and dismissed me. I heard the tension and nervousness increase behind the door. The telephones were ringing incessantly. The order was issued that no large assemblies be allowed. I understood that I had made a mistake and gotten into trouble, so I asked to see the officials again and began to tell them that I had thought it over and would not take part in the disturbances. But, due to my young age, I failed to keep back a malicious smile, and that gave me away. I was brought to the cell, and after 15-20 minutes put into a Black Maria together with five other men and sent to Bataisk, a town 52 kilometres from Novocherkassk. From that moment my participation in the Novocherkassk tragedy ended. I spent long months and years under investigative isolation in the cells of the KGB, in the Novocherkassk prison and in a concentration camp together with the active participants of the further events. I did all I could to reconstruct little by little the course of the ensuing events. I checked and re-checked, compared all the facts, the smallest details, so I can vouch for the accuracy of this account.

In the morning the workers of the first shift, and of other shifts as well, came to the plant. The plant was crowded with soldiers. Tanks were standing near the gates. There were outsiders in the shops – soldiers and civilians, evidently KGB men. In spite of the demands to disperse, the workers were gathering in groups. Their indignation and wrath were growing. A group of workers began to leave the work area, to leave the shops. Everybody was seized by elemental rage. The small groups began to merge into large ones. This process could not be stopped by anyone. The larger groups began to move towards the entrance of the factory. The courtyard of the plant could not hold all the workers. The pressure on the gates was increasing. The workers swung the gates open by force and flooded the square. They remembered the meeting the day before and the appeals for a demonstration. Many thousands of people started for the city. The way was long: it was 12 kilometres from the plant to the city centre. Some of the workers went to other plants with appeals to support the strike. The appeals were readily answered by the builders, the workers of the electrode plant, the Neftemash (oil industry machine) plant and some smaller enterprises. Columns of marchers were converging on the city from everywhere and there appeared red flags, portraits of Lenin. The demonstrators were singing revolutionary songs. Everybody was excited, full of belief in their power and in the fairness of their demands. The column of demonstrators was becoming larger and larger.

While approaching the bridge across the railway and the Toozlov river, the demonstrators noticed a cordon of two tanks and armed soldiers on the bridge. The column slowed to a standstill and the revolutionary singing died down. Then the dense mass of people moved slowly forward. Outcries were heard: “Give way to the working class!” Then the shouts merged into a powerful, unified chant. The soldiers and the tankmen not only did not try to stop the column of marchers, but actually helped the people get over the tanks. The stream of people flowed on both sides of the bridge cordon. The excitement grew. The revolutionary songs grew louder, more harmonious and more powerful.

The demonstration reached Moskovskaya Street, the main street in the city. I will not even try to estimate the number of demonstrators but everyone agreed that the large city square in front of the CPSU committee (the former palace-office of the ataman of the Don Army), the most part of Moskovskaya street, and part of Podtyolkov Prospect were crowded with people.

The demonstrators were seething in front of the city CPSU committee building. The building itself was full of soldiers from the Caucasus. The demonstrators exchanged heated remarks with the soldiers through the door. One Caucasian lost his temper, broke the glass of the door with the butt of his sub-machine gun and through the hole struck a woman with it. Under the pressure of the indignant demonstrators, the door of the building swung open. The crowd broke through and scattered the soldiers. The one who had struck the woman appeared under the staircase. According to some reports he was beaten black and blue. It was the only case of beating a representative of the state or of the armed forces that had captured the city. The City Committee building was completely occupied by the demonstrators. They rushed into one of the rooms. On the table there was cognac and rich refreshments, and the table was set for two. Nobody could escape from the room, although, according to some stories, during the seizure of the committee by the demonstrators many civilians jumped out of the second floor windows; evidently these were the KGB men. There was nobody in the room and the workers began to search it. Behind the sofa they found the public prosecutor from the district prosecutor’s office and A.N. Shelepin was hiding in the bookcase. Wasn’t it his guard that had jumped out of the window so courageously? The demonstrators began to drag Shelepin and the prosecutor to the balcony, demanding that they speak before the people but they refused. Then the demonstrators took the cognac and the refreshments and showed them from the balcony for everybody to see. A rally began.

Y.P. Levchenko spoke at the rally. She reported that at night and in the morning the arrests of the strikers had taken place and that the arrested had been beaten. She was telling the truth but she could hardly know that many of those arrested were already far from the city. The demands to liberate the prisoners became more and more persistent. A group of workers went to the offices of the city militia. It was also full of Caucasian soldiers. The demonstrators began to push themselves into the building. The door swung open and the demonstrators rushed into the building. At that moment one of the soldiers brandished a sub-machine gun at a worker in blue overalls. The latter grabbed the gun and a struggle began. The sub-machine gun appeared in the worker’s hands but the soldier had the sub-machine gun’s ammunition clip. The gun in the worker’s hands could serve only as a cudgel but he did not use it even in that capacity yet the soldiers were commanded to open fire and the worker was killed on the spot. Not a single bullet is likely to have been wasted: the crowd was too dense. And the crowd in the city department building was seized with panic. One of the participants in these events who was later imprisoned, Alexander Teremkov, who was wounded in the shoulder-blade by a ricochet, told me in the concentration camp that they had been compelled to pile up the bodies in the cellar of the neighbouring State Bank, and that they were still alive, jerking their arms and legs. Who knows, maybe some of them could have been saved. None of the participants could give even an approximate number of the dead.

The soldiers near the party committee building were also ordered to open fire, though there had been no assault, no violence there. Curious children were sitting high in the trees in a small public garden in front of the party committee. Behind them stood a monument to Lenin…

Several witnesses reported that the officer who had been ordered to open fire, refused to give the order to the soldiers and shot himself in front of the formation. But nevertheless the soldiers opened fire. First upwards, at the trees, at the children who fell down, killed, wounded, frightened. In such a way the party, the state and the army were eradicating different trends of thought, asserting the unity of the party and the people, proving the democratic character of the socialist state. Then the machine guns were pointed at the crowd.

People have told me: an elderly man was running by a concrete vase on a pedestal. A bullet struck his head and his brains were instantly splashed all over the pedestal. A mother was walking by a store carrying a dead baby. A hairdresser was killed at her work-place. A girl was lying in a pool of blood. A dumbfounded major stepped into this blood. Somebody said to him: “You swine, look where you are standing!” The major shot himself on the spot. People have told me a lot but I will stop here.

Trucks and buses were driven to the site. The corpses were hastily thrown and thrust into them. Not a single body was given to the family to be buried. The hospitals were crowded with wounded. Nobody knows what became of them. The blood was washed from the streets by fire engines but dark stains of blood remained on the asphalt for a long time. I have heard about this shooting more than once. People have told me: the soldiers are opened fire, the panic-stricken crowd began running. The firing stopped – the crowd stopped too and crawled slowly back. The soldiers began firing again. Everything was repeated. Up till now the number of dead, crippled and wounded is unknown.

No, the uprising was still not suppressed. The crowd in the square continued to seethe. Terrible rumours were spreading all over the city. Some people were leaving the square, others were entering. Information was received that members of the Political Bureau of the CPSU and the government had arrived at the city. Among them were A.I. Mikoyan, and F.R. Kozlov. Without any elections, spontaneously, a delegation from the demonstrators was formed. The representatives of the Central Committee and the government were afraid of the working masses. They were hiding near the tank unit. The delegation went there. Delegate B.N. Mokrousov recited a poem by Nekrasov called ” Who lives well in Russia” to the representatives of the Central Committee and the government modified so as to concern Khrushchev’s rule, Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s. This was the main reason that the Supreme Court of the RSFSR, under the chairmanship of L.N. Smirnov, sentenced him to be shot.

It has been reported that on hearing about the tragedy Kozlov wept. Possibly, but these were crocodile tears. Mikoyan demanded that the demonstrators allow the tanks to leave the square, after which he would speak. When this demand was told to the demonstrators they answered clearly: “No! Let them look at their handiwork!” They did look at their handiwork – in the light of a helicopter which was flying over the square and the adjoining streets.

Mikoyan spoke on the municipal radio station. The newscasters, even the local one, uttered not a single word about the events. A curfew was imposed. Rumours began to spread about a possible banishment of all the citizens. But the tragedy was not over. A period of trials followed. The most blatantly cruel was the trial of 14 of the participants in the strike and rallies. This trial was held in the military garrison KKUKS. Seven of the fourteen were sentenced to be shot – sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of the RSFSR with L.I. Smirnov presiding and with the participation of prosecutor A.A. Kruglov. They were prosecuted for banditism according to Article 77 of the RSFSR Criminal Code and for mass riots according to Article 79 of the RSFSR Criminal Code.

The tendency of such prosecutions was obvious. People with previous convictions were picked out from the participants first of all. At another trial a person with evident mental defects was convicted. The only goal was to compromise the Novocherkassk uprising by any means.

Already in the prison cells after the trials we made attempts to figure out the number of convicts by counting them by name. It amounted to no less than 105 people. The exact number remains unknown. The trials were lavish considering the sentences; the most common were for 10 to 15 years.

It should be admitted that in the KGB cells we were treated with extreme politeness but the isolation from the external world was absolute: No radio, no newspapers. In the carpeted corridors the warders’ steps were noiseless and the dead silence was oppressing. An electric light was burning day and night. The food, however, was plentiful and substantial, better than we had outside where the situation with food was very hard.

At first they demanded evidence on the Novocherkassk tragedy, but they stopped on realizing that they would get nothing from me. Then they began to insist on a “little thing” – that I should admit that the events were criminal and that my participation in them was a mistake. But by that time I had already got to know about the terrible tragedy in Novocherkassk. It was impossible to give in then. It was I who had called for continuing the strike and for a demonstration, and I fully realized my responsibility for the deaths. Giving in would have been the vilest treason. I refused to be freed at such a cost. Then they began to work on me.

I repeat that in the KGB I was neither beaten nor tortured, they treated me with extreme courtesy and spoke in a polite manner. The other people under investigation were at first strongly convinced that their cases were coming to an end and each of them would soon be set free. Then the person under investigation who had been fooled in such a way was placed in my cell. Such neighbours could think about nothing but their coming freedom. And when they were called upon with baggage, they were happy. I must point out that the cells were designed for two. Then another fooled neighbour was brought. It is terrible for a young man to stay alone, completely isolated from the external world, and to see that all the participants of the Novocherkassk tragedy are returning safely to liberty, that liberty was quite accessible — it was enough to weaken one’s resolve a bit.

The only trouble was that all the dreamers who had believed the KGB appeared later as convicts in the prison cells and concentration camps where I met them. But at that time it was also hard on me; I also believed. I was in my 25th year and I could not bear it any more. In the cells we were allowed to have an abundance of cigarettes and matches. I had heard that it was possible to poison oneself with a sulphur match. Secretly, so that even my neighbour noticed nothing, I crumbled the sulphur from 20 match-boxes. I waited till he fell asleep, dissolved the sulphur in the water and took the mug to my lips. But the warders turned out to have seen what the neighbour had not seen. Before I managed to make a gulp, the door opened noiselessly and the mug was on the floor. I need not describe the further scenes. Let everybody imagine them in their own way. They stopped working on me and in order to give me a psychological rest, they sent me to the Novocherkassk prison, to a common cell. The meeting with the Novocherkassians was really a treat for me but the warders in the prison were boorish and rude.

One day a guard sergeant rushed into the cell. He began to insult all Novocherkassians in hysterical tones, shouting something about the troubles with the weavers from Ivanovo- Voznesensk before the revolution. I got indignant, refused to take any food and demanded to speak to a prosecutor. After dinner I was taken to the prosecutor and sharply protested our treatment by the guard. After that I heard nothing more about boorishness and rudeness towards the Novocherkassians on the part of the guard. I was sent back to the KGB cells.

In September 1962 in the Lenin district court of Rostov-on- the-Don under the chairmanship of member of the board of the Rostov court, N.A. Yaroslavski, and with the participation of the prosecutor A.I. Brizhan, there was a trial of seven Novocherkassians including me. Formally, the trial was open, but nobody in Novocherkassk knew about it. That is why there was nobody at the trial except the relatives of the defendants and the witnesses. The court sentenced one of us to seven years, three to ten years and three, including me, to twelve years. Soon after the trial I was sent to the Novocherkassk prison again. This time I met a lot of acquaintances there.

I do not remember in which month the first transport of Novocherkassians was sent to the Komi ASSR. I was sent with the second transport in winter. The concentration camp to which the Novocherkassians were sent to serve their terms, was about 40 kilometres from the Sindor railway station in the Komi ASSR.

Our meeting with our fellow-townspeople was joyful but from the very first we were overwhelmed by the news that the first Novocherkassians had been organized by the guards into some kind of internal police force to maintain order inside the camp. This news aroused our extreme indignation. We (V. Vlasenko, V. Tchernykh, V. Globa, myself and others) managed to convince them that the existence of something like this and the participation in it of Novocherkassians was unacceptable. So the guards’ plan failed. All the prisoners of our concentration camp worked at timber-cutting and the building of a narrow-gauge railway designed to transport timber. Camp life went its usual way. Periodically small and sharp conflicts with the camp administration sprang up. Once, a dispute with a guard resulted in sub- machine gun fire being directed at me but at the very last moment another guard struck the gun upwards and the fire went into the air. We managed to insist on dismissing a brutal officer from the organs of the MVD (the Ministry of Internal Affairs), and to open an evening school with the teachers from the number of prisoners. At the same time we did not listen meekly to the deceptive lessons on political science. Once the major in charge of these studies lost his temper and called me to his room and forbade me to attend these lessons.

Even among the officers of the guard there were people who were friendly towards the Novocherkassians. Once, on a day off, I was standing near the small camp football ground. A guard lieutenant stopped near me. When he was sure that there was nobody about, he told me through his teeth, without moving his lips, that a tragedy similar to the Novocherkassian one had taken place in Murom. In this way the Novocherkassians got to know about one more crime committed by the party and the state.

There were cases of the entire brigade refusing to work as a form of protest. They resulted only in prisoners being punished with solitary confinement.

After some time the cases of the Novocherkassians started to be reviewed in Moscow. I was one of the last whose term was shortened to 6 years. The Novocherkassians began to be freed in the spring of 1965. As for me, no freedom was in sight. I felt depressed and dejected.

My mother, who had passed through all the circles of the stalinist hell, who was sentenced in 1943 according to Article 58.10 of the Criminal Code of the USSR, part two, who had served her full penalty in the concentration camp in the Kirov district, had remained “stoic”. In those years she lived in Novocherkassk less than in Moscow; she lived also in Sindor. She was a reliable postwoman for the prisoners; I remember not a single failure of communication, not a single misfortune with the mail. She bribed everyone possible, considering that everyone sold themselves cheap. It was due to bribery that she managed to get a good reference for me and I was liberated before time in July 1968.

Source: Russian Labour Review (Moscow).

Criminals Punished. May 21, 1978

Original Source: Pravda, 21 May 1978, p. 6; Izvestiia, May 23, 1978.

In accordance with the Russian Republic Code of Criminal Procedure, on May 15-18 the Moscow City Court heard in open session the criminal case against Yu. F Orlov, who had been charged with crimes under Part 1, Art. 70, of the Russian Republic Criminal Code …

After hearing the testimony of numerous witnesses and studying the material evidence and the findings of panels of experts, the court determined that Orlov’s guilt in carrying out subversive anti-Soviet activity aimed at weakening the Soviet system had been fully proven. For a number of years he had systematically disseminated anti-Soviet materials in the USSR. Orlov had contacts with representatives of foreign states, and through them he sent to anti-Soviet centers abroad materials of a slanderous nature defaming the Soviet state and social system.

The court sentenced Orlov to seven years’ deprivation of freedom, to be followed by five years of exile.

On May 19 the trial in the case of Z. K. Gamsakhurdia and M. I. Kostava, against whom criminal charges had been brought under Art. 71 of the Georgian Republic Criminal Code, ended in Tbilisi.

General Grigorenko and his Friends.

Original Source: Chronicle of Current Events (Possev-Verlag, Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 495-97.

Pyotr Grigorevich Grigorenko was born in 1907 in the village of Borisovka in Zaporozhe Province [south Ukraine], His father was one of the organizers of the collective farm there, and Pyotr Grigorevich himself was the first in his village to enroll in the Komsomol. From the age of fifteen he worked as a metalworker in Donetsk, where he also completed a course at the workers’ higher education college. In 1929 Grigorenko entered the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute, but in his third year he was transferred to the Kuibyshev Military Engineering Academy by party directive. After completing his studies at the academy, he served four years in military units, then studied in the Voroshilov General Staff Academy. Grigorenko participated in the battle of Khalkhin-Gol [on the Manchurian border in 1939 against the Japanese] and in the Second World War. As a result of a hip wound Grigorenko became a second-category War Invalid.

He was awarded the Order of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Flag, the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Patriotic War, and six medals. After the war Grigorenko spent seventeen years working in [Moscow’s] Frunze Military Academy, first as Head of the Research Department, and later Head of the Cybernetics Department. In 1948 he defended his thesis and was awarded the degree of Master of Military Sciences. In 1959 he was given the rank of Major-General.

In 1961 Grigorenko spoke at a Party Conference of the Lenin District in Moscow, calling for the restoration of Leninist principles. Following this, he received a party reprimand, was suspended from his job, and six months later was demoted and sent to Ussuriisk [near Vladivostok]. The defense of his doctoral dissertation, fixed for November 1961 was cancelled.

Even in Ussuriisk, Grigorenko did not cease his open protests against the erratic policies of the party leadership then in power, and in February 1964 he was arrested by the K.G.B. To prevent him opening his mouth at a trial Grigorenko was declared insane and put in a prison psychiatric hospital in Leningrad, from which he emerged only fifteen months later. Meanwhile he had been reduced to the ranks and expelled from the party, although a sick man should not be considered legally responsible for his actions, and he should not have to bear responsibility before party and administrative organs either. The taking of these repressive measures is just one more proof that the tale of Grigorenko’s ‘insanity’ is pure fiction.

After coming out of hospital, the war invalid Grigorenko was reduced to working as a porter to earn his keep. But despite this painful existence, and despite the threat of new internment in a hospital, General Grigorenko never ceased his struggle against arbitrary acts. He protested against the trials of Khaustov and Bukovsky, of Ginzburg and Galanskov, and of those who took part in the demonstration of August 25th, 1968. He was one of the twelve co-authors of the appeal to the Budapest meeting, and spoke out in support of Anatoly Marchenko when the latter was arrested. He protested at the arrest of Irina Belogorodskaya, and later compiled a record of her trial. He also compiled a collection of materials on the funeral of A. E. Kosterin, a very close friend, who had been carrying on the struggle with him against all manifestations of arbitrariness, especially arbitrary policies towards national minorities. Together with Ivan Yakhimovich he sharply condemned the continuing occupation of Czechoslovakia.

As time passed, Grigorenko became increasingly occupied with the fate of the Crimean Tatars, a people deprived of their homeland. His numerous actions in support of the Tatars earned him the respect of a large section of the Tatar people. Two thousand Tatars appealed to Grigorenko to act as public defense spokesman at the trial of ten activists of the Tatar movement which is shortly to take place in Tashkent. Grigorenko sent this letter, together with a declaration of his own, to the Uzbek Supreme Court, but got no reply.

Meanwhile Grigorenko was caught up in an ever-thickening web of slanderous gossip and provocations. The story was circulated at various meetings and discussions that Grigorenko had ‘sold himself to the imperialists for the sake of fame’. Declarations were put out, calculated to appeal to people’s baser feelings, to the effect that Grigorenko was a Jew but was registered as a Ukrainian when he joined the party. An anonymous letter was circulated, supposedly written by the Crimean Tatars, explaining to their fellow-Tatars that Grigorenko was a madman and an ‘anti-Sovietist’. In April this year the K.G.B. tried to organize a provocation by arranging a meeting between Grigorenko and a complete stranger who telephoned him; they possibly hoped to catch him ‘red-handed’ at the moment when some material of a truly anti-Soviet nature would be handed to him. Grigorenko came to this ‘meeting’ accompanied by a large group of his friends; K.G.B. cars were parked all around, and the whole place was thick with K.G.B. men. But at the sight of undesirable witnesses the K.G.B. had to call off their provocation. The ‘stranger’ never approached the General, and only later, after Grigorenko’s arrest, did he pay a visit to Grigorenko’s wife and stage a crude provocation. The police watch on Grigorenko himself, and his house, went to extraordinary lengths; they followed him in their cars, making no secret of it and even trying to provoke him to an open clash. In April 1969 Grigorenko appealed to Yu. V. Andropov [the head of the K.G.B.] in a second letter,but as with the first, sent in February 1968, he received no reply.

Even this very brief sketch of Grigorenko’s life up to early 1969 should suffice to reveal an interesting point: if one person had to be singled out as having inspired the different groups within the Democratic Movement more than anyone else, then it would surely be he. Indeed he became, while free, in an informal way the movements leader. And not surprisingly. A prolific scholar, a champion of Dubcek socialism, a legend among the Crimean Tatars, an exposer of the ‘mental hospital-, treatment of dissenters, an admirer of Anatoly Marchenko and his book My Testimony, a writer and signer of cogent petitions, the forthright leader of the crowds barred from political trials, rebuffing provocations and once even dragging a K.G.B. ruffian of to the police-station to report him – Grigorenko was all these things, and thy all grew naturally out of his large and remarkable personality. It is hard, therefore, to see the K.G.B. ever releasing him, except perhaps to die.

Grigorenko considered himself a communist, but was also-a rare combination in the Soviet Union-a humanist, As with many Czechoslovak communists in 1968, communism came to mean for him above all social and individual justice. This held true, however much it might mean sharing the party’s power with other people. And it would mean a lot of this, for the Soviet system had become ‘a bureaucratic machine … moved by our hands and heads, crushing us mercilessly, destroying the best people of our society, relieving everyone of guilt, of responsibility for the crimes it commits, freeing its servants from their consciences: a terrifying, cruel and heartless machine.’ As for ‘the work of breaking down this machine’, ‘”that is a long task which … involves in the first place a revolution in people’s minds, in their consciousness, all of which is unthinkable in the conditions of totalitarianism.’ In going about this task Grigorenko worked harmoniously with non-communists, Christians Muslims and Yews, all of whom were his friends.

But his closest friend was Aleksei Kosterin: ‘I have known Aleksei Kosterin for a very short time. Less than three years. Yet we have lived a whole life together. While Kosterin was still alive, a person extremely close to me said, “‘You were made by Kosterin.” And I did not object. Yes he made me: he turned a rebel into a fighter. I will be grateful to him for this to the end of my days.’

Thus spoke Grigorenko at Kosterin’s funeral in November 1968. This remarkable occasion -for which Crimean Tatars, Chechens, even Volga Germans had journeyed thousands of miles, and which, prolonging an old tradition, also became a political demonstration – was recorded in a disappointingly laconic way by the Chronicle:

THE FUNERAL OF A. E. KOSTERIN

The writer Aleksei Evgrafovich Kosterin died on November 10th He had been a member of the Soviet Communist Party since 1916; he was a former prisoner of Stalin’s camps and an active fighter for the rights of men and justice for small nations.

He was buried on November 14th. Between 300 and 400 people were present at his funeral. The samizdat booklet on this event consists of a preface by the chief compiler [Grigorenko]; a description of the funeral (‘Yet another mockery of sacred feelings’) written by P. G. Grigorenko; an obituary written by a group of Kosterin’s friends and read at the morgue of the Botkin hospital by Anatoly Yakobson; speeches at the morgue by Muarrem Martynov (Crimean Tatar poet), S. P. Pisarev (member of the Communist Party from 1920) Ablamit Borseitov (school-teacher) and [Reshat] Dzhemilev (engineer); speeches at the crematorium by Professor Refik Muzafarov (Doctor of Philology) and P. G. Grigorenko (Master of Military Sciences); speeches at the subsequent memorial meeting by Pyotr Yakir (historian), Khalid Oshayev (Chechen writer), Andrei Grigorenko (technician), Zampira Asanova (doctor), Leonid Petrovsky (historian), and an unknown man to whom the compilers of this collection of documents have given the pseudonym ‘a Christian’.

We can only regret that the Chronicle summarizes so briefly a booklet which, after the Chronicle itself is one of the most astonishing samizdat documents we have. Nor does the Chronicle do any better as regards the first document to give the outside world details about Kosterin. This was Grigorenko’s speech at a dinner in honor of his friend’s 72nd birthday, held at the Altai restaurant in Moscow on March 17th, 1968: ‘This speech is about Kosterin’s life, the support which he has given to the cause of the Crimean Tatars, and the tasks which confront their movement’ (No. 5). One would scarcely guess from this that Grigorenko’s fiery words -which urged the Tatars not to request but to demand their rights, and also to use the most militant legally permissible methods of lobbying -repeatedly roused his Tatar audience to a state of near ecstasy.

Unfortunately, however, both the speech and the booklet are too long to discuss properly here, although a few details should be added about Kosterin. He spent three years in tsarist jails, then seventeen (1938-55) both in Soviet jails and in exile. After his release a few of his stories and essays appeared often severely censored- in Novy Mir and elsewhere. He was the father of Nina Kosterina, killed in the war, whose Diary is a Soviet equivalent of The Diary of Anne Frank. Just before his death he resigned in disgust from the party, and was also surreptitiously without his or even his friends’ knowledge – expelled from the Writers, Union.

This squalid episode provoked a memorable attack by Grigorenko on the Union’s officials, who had been hounding Kosterin for some time: ‘They have forgotten, or maybe don’t even know, that neither Pushkin nor Tolstoy belonged to this organization. Thy believe so much in the power of their bureaucratic procedures that thy even tried to take away the title of writer from such an outstandingly great Poet of our county as Pasternak. Nor do they understand that without their Union Solzhenitsyn will remain a great writer and his works will live through the centuries, while their bureaucratic creation without writers like Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn -is a hollow farce of no use to anyone.’

Five days later:

On November 1th there was a new series of house searches [in Moscow]. This time they were carried out ‘at the request of the Tashkent K.G.B.’ and nominally in connection with one of the cases involving Crimean Tatars. There was a search at the home of Ilya Gabai-the second in recent months, and the second time it has been done in his absence. P. G. Grigorenko’s home was searched and practically the whole of his files were seized – that is, everything in typescript or manuscript, although the search warrant gave permission to seize only materials ‘defaming the Soviet social and political system’. According to Grigorenko, the materials confiscated include: The Declaration of the Rights of Man; all the works of A. E. Kosterin; Academician Sakharov’s essay ; ‘The Russian Road to Socialism’ by Academician Varga; ‘Notes of an Intelligence Officer’ by Colonel V. A. Novobranets; My Testimony by Anatoly Marchenko; Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’; verse by Tsvetayeva; a poem by Korzhavin; Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls; various personal letters; materials on the Crimean Tatar and Volga German movements; translations of articles from Czechoslovak newspapers; notes for a work on military history by Grigorenko himself, and many other items.

A large part of these materials were not itemized in the record – they were simply dumped into a sack, sealed and taken away.

On the same day, in the town of Zhukovsky in the Moscow Region, there was a search at the home of Simode Asanova, the sister of Zampira Asanova. In Simferopol there was a search at the house of the doctor Esma Ulanova -all her files, including a large number of documents relating to the Crimean Tatar movement, were seized.

All this happened a few days after the funeral of A. E. Kosterin, and one may assume that the true (and illegal) purpose of these searches was to confiscate the texts of the speeches made at his funeral.

Grigorenko’s reply was simply to compile his booklet again from scratch, in which task, except as regards a few items, he succeeded. But the K.G.B., too, can be persistent, and certainly death does not necessarily remove someone from its purview:

ACTIVITIES AROUND THE FAMILY OF A. E. KOSTERIN

Members of the K.G.B. have paid much ‘attention’ to Vera Ivanovna Kosterina, the author’s widow, since her husband’s death. They keep ringing her up, asking about her health, visiting her at home and inviting her to see them-at the K.G.B. Only a little is known about the details of their conversations: under pressure from her new friends, V. I. Kosterina has signed some sort of statement against her husband’s friends; she is undertaking certain actions to enable the K.G.B. not to return to P. G. Grigorenko, the copies of A. E. Kosterin’s works given him by the author during his life and confiscated during a search; Vera Ivanovna has come to believe the K.G.B. and now herself tells her friends that Grigorenko, sent abroad half of Kosterin’s work. The most important thing with which the K.G.B. officials want to help her is the careful compilation of an archive of the late writer. It is to be feared that A. E. Kosterin’s literary work, covering many years, will fall into the hands of the organization which he most hated.

Simultaneously the K.G.B. has busied itself with the ‘education’ of Kosterin’s grandson, Aleksei Smirnov, a student at the Mining Institute. On March 31st and April 1st this year [1969], members of the K.G.B. twice interviewed Alyosha’s father – a man who has never taken an interest in the upbringing of his son and who has never once seen him over the past two years. At the first interview he was told that his son was mixed up with the ‘fanatical anti-Sovietist’ Grigorenko, and that both of them would soon be arrested. Even if they were not arrested his son would be expelled from the Institute. The following day they changed their tactics: Grigorenko would not be arrested but would be left as a ‘bait for young people’- a note would be made of all those who came to see him; and Alyosha’s father, in league with the K.G.B.’ could save Alyosha from this fate.

They interviewed Aleksei Smirnov himself on April 2nd this year at the Institute’s personnel section. Two members of the K.G.B., calling themselves Vladimir Ivanovich Volodin and Aleksei Mikhailovich, interviewed him in what was basically an illegal interrogation: they questioned him about all his friends and acquaintances, discovered his political convictions, and gave him slanderous information about A. E. Kosterin’s friends. Finally they demanded that he cease all ‘contact with Grigorenko’-with whom, by the way, he is only very slightly acquainted.

THE ARREST OF GRIGORENKO

On May 2nd this year the telephone rang in Grigorenko’s apartment. The caller said he was speaking on Mustafa Dzhemilev’s behalf and that the Tashkent trial was beginning on May 4th. Grigorenko flew out to Tashkent at once, and there he found that the date of the trial had not yet been fixed, and that Mustafa Dzhemilev had not asked anyone to ring him. On May 7th, Grigorenko was arrested with his return ticket in his pocket, and, ill as he was, with a temperature of 38 C [IO0.5 F] they put him in the Uzbek K.G.B. prison. He is charged under article x91-4 of the Uzbek Criminal Code, which corresponds to article 190-1 of the Russian Code.

On the same day, seven Moscow flats were searched in connection with the Grigorenko affair; that of Grigorenko himself, and those of Ilya Gabai, Victor Krasin, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, Andrei Amalrik, Nadezhda Emelkina, and Zampira Asanova. The searches were conducted by investigators of the Moscow Procuracy, on the instructions of the Uzbek Procuracy. The searches were directed by L. S. Akimova, from her desk in the Procuracy. She is known as the investigator of the Irina Belogorodskaya case, and as director of the investigation into both the Pushkin Square demonstration of January 22nd, 1967, and the Red Square demonstration of August 25th, 1968. During these searches not only was all samizdat literature confiscated, with all typewriters, notebooks and scraps of paper with telephone messages and other jottings, but also all personal correspondence, photographs and valuables. From Lyudmila Alekseyeva’s flat they took personal letters written by Anatoly Marchenko, letters from Yuly Daniel to his family, and photographs of Solzhenitsyn, Marchenko, Litvinov and Bogoraz. From Nadezhda Emelkina they removed two savings books belonging to her mother. Emelkina herself was subjected to a body search, and furthermore, in the absence of a woman investigator, her person was illegally examined by a woman witness of the search. Generally speaking, during these searches the witnesses did not behave like people obliged to ensure the observation of legality but like active helpers of those carrying out the search.

P. G. Grigorenko is still in Tashkent. The investigation of his case is headed by investigator Berezovsky, who headed the investigation of the ten Crimean Tatars in whose defense Grigorenko had wished to speak. It was Berezovsky too who conducted the search of Grigorenko’s flat in November 1968. The main questions being put to witnesses are: have they received from Grigorenko documents containing ‘deliberate fabrications’, and have they noticed in Grigorenko any signs of mental derangement? So far only a few witnesses have been called: in Moscow, the wife, daughter and niece of A. E. Kosterin; in Tashkent, Pyotr Grigorevich’s sister, also D. Ilyasov and Z. Ilyasova, at whose flat Grigorenko was arrested.

Grigorenko’s arrest has aroused public indignation. At the gates of the Tashkent prison the Crimean Tatars set up pickets and demanded his release. The same demand was one of the slogans used at the [Tatar] demonstration in Moscow on June 6th this year. In one day fifty-five signatures were collected for an appeal in support of Grigorenko. And his wife, Zinaida Mikhailovna, wrote an open letter about her husband’s life, his misfortunes and his latest arrest.

Other samizdat publications to appear are two significant works about P. G. Grigorenko: ‘Light in the Little Window’ by A. Krasnov-Levitin and ‘The Arrest of General Grigorenko’ by B. Tsukerman. The author of the first, a well-known church writer, quoting the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan, writes that today he sees more of the Christian spirit not in the representatives of the Orthodox Church, but in the Samaritans, ‘people from outside’. One example of a ‘Good Samaritan’ seems to him to be P. G. Grigorenko, who for his bold criticism first ‘paid with his career, condemning himself to journeys from one prison or lunatic asylum to another, to searches and arrests, to humiliations and insults’, and who recently ‘came to the aid of the Crimean Tatar people, not his own kin, and paid for this with his freedom.’ Reflections on P. G. Grigorenko and the fortunes of the Crimean Tatars lead Krasnov to the wider problems of the struggle for democracy and a sense of humanity in our country. The second work contains short biographical notes on P. G. Grigorenko and reveals the objective character of those problems which Grigorenko has devoted his energies to trying to resolve in recent years. Despite the restrained character of the analysis, the author is unable to conceal his feeling of admiration for P. G. Grigorenko’s sincerity and moral stature, and of reverence for his moral heroism.

THE ARREST OF ILYA GABAI

When Ilya Gabai’s flat was searched on May 7th this year, his archive of documents relating to the Crimean Tatars was confiscated. On May 19th Ilya Gabai was arrested and sent to Tashkent to be investigated by the same Berezovsky.

Ilya Gabai is a teacher, poet and scriptwriter, hose main work was as an editor. He was first arrested in January 1967 for participation in the demonstration on Pushkin Square. After four months in Lefortovo prison he was freed for want of a corpus delicti.

Following the appeal ‘To those who work in science, culture and the arts’,” which Gabai wrote with Yuly Kim and Pyotr Yakir after the trial of Galanskov and the others, he was dismissed from his job, found himself unable to get work any here, and tried to get by on casual earnings. Although Gabai was away from Moscow on August 25th, 1968, working as a laborer on a distant expedition, the investigating organs summoned him for interrogation in connection with the inquiry into the demonstration held on that day. The interrogation was to, all intents and purposes about the aforementioned appeal. From October 1968 until his arrest, Gabai’s flat was searched four times. On each occasion the appeal was taken away, Together with copies of letters written by Soviet citizens addressed to governmental and judicial organs, and some poems of Gabai’s. From his archive of Crimean Tatar documents they removed newspaper clippings relating to the brave exploits of the Tatars during the Great Patriotic War, copies of letters written by Tatar laborers demanding to return to their homeland, Academician Sakharov’s brochure, the booklet .The Funeral of A. E. Kosterin’, information bulletins of the Crimean Tatars and so on.

Tarasov, a senior investigator of the Moscow Procuracy, Arrested Gabai without production of a warrant, and had him flown immediately to Tashkent. In Tashkent, investigator Berezovsky refused to answer any of the enquiries of Gabai’s friends there, and also to pass on to him in prison a message from them; he declared that he had never heard of him and there was no one by the name of Gabai in Tashkent. A parcel of food, clothing and money sent by Gabai’s wife never reached him. For a whole month it lay in the Tashkent post ,Office; the remand prison administration, who should by law have collected it and given it to the prisoner, did not do so, but informed Gabai’s wife that her parcels had not reached them. The post office sent the parcels and money back to her. Recently Galina Gabai traveled to Tashkent in order to hand over food, money and clothing to her husband in person.

It Ilya Gabai’s friends have written a letter in his defense and ‘sent it to the Procurator-General of the U.S.S.R. They have also compiled a small anthology of Gabai’s verse, which has Appeared in samizdat.

THE INVESTIGATION OF THE CASES OF ILYA GABAI AND PYOTR GRIGOREVICH GRIGORENKO

-When Galina Gabai, wife of Ilya Gabai, addressed a complaint to the Procurator-General, protesting not only against the unlawful arrest of her husband, but also against his being sent to Tashkent without the slightest reason -according to the law the investigation should be held in the place where the offence was committed, yet Gabai had never been to Tashkent -she was told in reply that the case had been put under the jurisdiction of the Tashkent Procuracy since the majority of the witnesses were in Tashkent. As for Pyotr Grigorevich Grigorenko, it is clear from the information given in the last issue of the Chronicle that he was decoyed to Tashkent so that he could be arrested there.

But in July the interrogation of witnesses began in Moscow first by investigators of District Procuracies, on the instructions of the Tashkent Procuracy, and then by investigator B. I. Berezovsky, who came to Moscow for the purpose.

Berezovsky is in charge of the Gabai and Grigorenko cases. So far it is not clear whether they will be treated as one case or two separate ones.

During his visit to Moscow, Berezovsky interrogated a large number of witnesses, thus proving the untruth of his statement that most of the witnesses were in Tashkent.

The witnesses are being questioned about Grigorenko’s and Gabai’s part in the composition of a number of documents which bear their signatures: among the documents listed are the appeal to the Budapest conference; the appeal ‘To those who work in science, culture and the arts’ written by Kim, Yakir and Gabai; letters supporting the demonstrators [of August 25th], and in defense of Anatoly Marchenko and Ivan Yakhimovich; a letter from citizens of Moscow which was never sent -in support of the Crimean Tatars ; the collection of materials ‘In Memory of A. E. Kosterin’; and others. Questions are being asked also about the preparation and distribution of particular documents, and especially about what part in their preparation and distribution was played by the witnesses. As far as is known, not one of the witnesses has answered the questions concerning the preparation and distribution of documents, on the grounds that the documents are not libelous, and do not come under article 190-1 on which the case is based, and therefore their preparation and distribution cannot be a matter for the evidence of witnesses. Replying to Berezovsky’s provocative statements that ‘you keep on saying that you do everything openly’, the witnesses said that the punitive organs were of a different opinion as to the criminality of the documents, and therefore the witnesses could only confirm their signatures, and not reveal information about other persons, which could be used against those persons. All, or nearly all, the witnesses declared that they regarded the West of Grigorenko and Gabai, and the investigation of their case, as unlawful actions, and some of the witnesses refused completely to testify for that reason.

Incidentally, these were all witnesses who can be described, if not as friends and like-minded people, then at least as sympathizers with the accused. It is known that Berezovsky has also summoned witnesses of another kind. One of them is a K.G.B. official, the head of the central operations squad, known as ‘ Oleg Ivanovich Aleksandrov’. This was the name he gave on an earlier occasion-at the trial of the demonstrators- after he had snatched a letter from a crowd of people outside the courthouse who had not managed to get inside, and the indignant crowd had led him to the police station, where he named himself. People who were at the courthouse for the trials of the demonstrators and of Galanskov and Ginzburg, remember him well, with his black beard: on both occasions it was he who directed the activities of the ‘volunteer police without armbands’. And constantly with him there was a man in a black cap evidently the chief’s right-hand man-he too came in useful for Berezovsky.

Another witness Berezovsky summoned was the ill-famed Aleksei Dobrovolsky, who made slanderous statements about Ginzburg and Galanskov at their trial. Since coming out of his tamp this January, Dobrovolsky has been living in Uglich [north of Moscow]. Unlike most political prisoners, who for months after their release are unable to obtain residence permits or find work anywhere, Dobrovolsky obtained a permit extremely quickly and is now the head of a technical library, even though his only higher educational qualification is half a year spent at an institute of librarianship. As a rule, political convicts with both higher education and post-graduate experience, e.g. Leonid Rendel, or even a higher degree, as in the case of Mykhaylo Osadchy, can only expect to be offered jobs of the most unskilled variety, and certainly not work with books and people. It is known that soon after his arrival Dobrovolsky was already claiming that he would soon be given a residence permit for Moscow. Perhaps his latest perjury will help him with this too.

At the present time, witnesses are still being summoned to investigators of the Moscow Procuracy in connection with the Grigorenko and Gabai case. Most of them are being seen by investigator Obraztsov.

Galina Gabai, who traveled to Tashkent in July and was received extremely rudely by Berezovsky, was later summoned as a witness in Moscow. Now she has written a short essay, ‘Two Meetings with Berezovsky’, which has appeared in samizdat.

The two demonstrations by foreigners in Moscow after the Galanskov Ginzburg trial now had a successor. The leaflets scattered at these demonstrations have since spread quite widely in the Soviet Union: the physicist Lev Ubozhko, for example, was arrested in the west Siberian city of Sverdlovsk in January 1970 for passing copies around.

SCANDINAVIAN STUDENTS’ DEMONSTRATION IN DEFENSE OF P. G. GRIGORENKO

On October 6th, 1969, at five o’clock in the evening, Harald Bristol of Oslo and Elizabeth Lie from Uppsala staged a demonstration in defense of the arrested General P. G. Grigorenko in the largest store in Moscow, G.U.M.

The two young people chained themselves to the second floor guard-railings with handcuffs and threw their leaflets over the edge. The leaflets contained a biography of P. G. Grigorenko and the text of an appeal by the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish SMOG Committees to the Chairman of the U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers, A. N. Kosygin. Among other things, the appeal says:

We condemn equally much the use of arbitrary methods in any country. This is not interference in the affairs of another state, but the moral duty of progressive people.

Only by observing legality and human rights in all countries is it possible to prevent a revival of fascism, which starts with illegal secret police activities. Mr. Chairman of the council of Ministers! Your government speaks out in support of those who fight for human rights in Greece, Vietnam, South Africa and other countries. Why then are those who fight for these rights in the U.S.S.R. being arrested?

At the end of the leaflet Harald Bristol and Elizabeth Lie appeal to Soviet citizens:

We have come to your country to serve the cause of legality and human rights. We are handing you our appeal to A. N. Kosygin concerning the case of Major-General Grigorenko, who has fallen victim to the arbitrary methods of the K.G.B. In support of our appeal we refuse to leave the scene of our demonstration, and we declare a hunger-strike. We will fast until MAJOR-GENERAL GRIGORENKO IS RELEASED OR UNTIL PRIME MINISTER KOSYGIN GIVES US A GUARANTEE THAT MAJOR-GENERAL GRIGORENKO WILL WITHOUT DELAY BE GIVEN AN OPEN AND LEGAL TRIAL.

The leaflets contain portraits of P. G. Grigorenko and A. N. Kosygin.

A large crowd of people gathered below round a fountain, (,reading the leaflets attentively and passing them around to !each other with no comments but with unconcealed interest. ‘Many of them went up to the second floor to get a closer look at the young people. Meanwhile two policemen had appeared on the scene. Seeing the chain of the handcuffs, one of them ‘fan off to get reinforcements. Two workers were sent, and they sawed through the chain. By this time K.G.B. officials had already appeared at the scene of the demonstration. The young people were taken to the nearest police station, followed by most of the crowd which had gathered, but none of the crowd ‘Was allowed into the station.

11 On October 8th, Elizabeth Lie and Harald Bristol were ‘deported from the Soviet Union.

To resume the story:

At the end of October P. G. Grigorenko was transferred from Tashkent to Moscow, where he has been put in the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry for an in-patient examination.

On December 3rd the investigation into the case of P. G. Grigorenko was completed in Tashkent. In August a forensic-psychiatric examination by Tashkent doctors had judged Grigorenko to be of sound mind. The experts also pointed out that, in any case, to confine Grigorenko in a psychiatric hospital at his age and in his poor condition would be wrong. Among the experts were Detengof, Chief Psychiatrist of Tashkent, and Kogan, Chief Psychiatrist to the Turkestan Military District. Dissatisfied with the experts’ findings, the investigation organs sent Grigorenko to Moscow in October for a second medical examination. The 62-year-old Grigorenko was transported there in an unheated railway carriage and, dressed as he was in a light summer suit, he was so affected by the cold that he was delivered to Lefortovo prison in a state of semi-consciousness.

The second examination took place in the Serbsky Institute, where Grigorenko was held in a cell. On October 22nd, he was adjudged of unsound mind. The examination was carried out by Professor D. R. Lunts and doctors G. Morozov and V. Morozov.

The immediate sequel in Grigorenko’s case was intensely dramatic, but also tragic. It can only be briefly summarized here. Somehow or other Grigorenko managed to write a diary for the period May-December, also two analyses of his case, and then to smuggle the 9,000-word manuscript Out of the K.G.B. prison in Tashkent. On March 3rd, 1970, his wife Zinaida wrote a desperate appeal and, with her husband’s manuscript attached, circulated it. It ended: ‘People! Pyotr Grigorevich Grigorenko is threatened by death! I appeal to all democratic organizations which defend human rights, and to all the freedom-loving citizens of the world! Help me save my husband! The freedom of each is the freedom of all!

The manuscript had revealed cruel physical beatings of Grigorenko, but, still worse, his total isolation from the outside world: he had not been allowed to receive a single visit, a single letter, a single parcel, a single telephone call. After honest psychiatrists had pronounced him sane, K.G.B. ones had labeled him insane. In this way his trial could take place – on February 26th-27th – in his absence” and he could be consigned indefinitely to the company of degenerates and genuine madmen. He was eventually dispatched to the prison psychiatric hospital in Chernyakhovsk near the Polish border. Grigorenko’s manuscript -written with a remarkable detachment and humor in the most fearful circumstances -will be an enduring example of man’s capacity for courage.

Meanwhile No. 10 had reported:

The investigation into the case of Ilya Gabai has been completed. Gabai has been charged with compiling various documents, including the appeal by himself, Kim and Yakir, ‘To those who work in science, culture and the arts in the U.S.S.R.’, the appeal of Moscow citizens in support of the Crimean Tatars, and others. The lawyer D. I. Kaminskaya submitted a request that the case against Gabai be quashed. The petition was rejected.

In January 197o Gabai duly got his three years in the camps for anti-Soviet ‘libel’. He pleaded not guilty at his trial in Tashkent and put up a characteristically spirited self-defense.

3: Ever since his arrest his equally spirited wife Galina had defended kim with determination in his ordeal, despite the harassment she had also suffered in her professional life. On this the Chronicle wrote:

Galina Gabai, the wife of Ilya Gabai, is a speech therapist and teacher of literature at the Moscow interregional high school for the deaf and hard of hearing. The party committee of the Sverdlov District of Moscow asked the school administration ‘deprive Mrs. Gabai of her teaching post at the school. The school director Usachev submitted a report to the pedagogical council in which he said, among other things, that G. B. Gabai committed political errors in her comments on pupils’ essays: ,she called Stalin a criminal, and said nothing about his services to the revolution. Moreover, claimed the director, G. B. Gabai appealed in her comments to bourgeois individualism: he was referring to a comment which Mrs. Gabai had written-in Amwer to a pupil’s argument that society alone should bear the responsibility for the fate of Chekhov’s Ionych – about the personal responsibility of every man for his actions. The Director also expressed his dissatisfaction with a speech Mrs. Gabai had made at a meeting of the pedagogical council. She had said that teachers ought to write their comments in literary language, and not descend to the speech level of their deaf-mute pupils. They should teach them to speak in literate, not ‘deaf-mute’ language. The Director added that Mrs. Gabai was an erudite teacher, that her comments were abstruse, and that the pupils had great difficulty in understanding them; therefore (?) she should be transferred to junior teaching. A number of teachers at the meeting of the pedagogical council spoke against these proposals, and the resolution was not carried. The local trade-union committee also opposed the transfer of Mrs. Gabai to junior teaching. But the party organization and the school administration, obedient to a phone-call from the district party committee, passed a resolution transferring Mrs. Gabai to teaching the 6th class, which has only six pupils, and the 7th class, which in practice is non-existent. She was not allowed to take the top class, No. 1 1 through to the end of the school year, and so as to comply with the administration’s decision another teacher lost her duties with the 6th and 7th classes and became partially redundant; this person is due to retire in a year’s time, and a full teaching-load is very important to her as regards her pension.

GRIGORENKO’S FRIEND IVAN TAKHIMOVICH

Let us turn now to a specially close friend of Grigorenko, of whom the Chronicle wrote in April 1969:

Ivan Yakhimovich is thirty-eight. He was born into a family of Polish workers and graduated in the faculty of history and philology of the Latvian State University. After university he worked as a teacher and as an inspector of a District Department of Public Education. In 196o he went to work as the chairman of the ‘Jauna Gvarde’ collective farm in Kraslava District. Whilst working on the farm he enrolled as an external student at the Latvian agricultural academy. A few years ago the paper Komsomolskaya pravda wrote about Ivan Yakhimovich in ecstatic terms.

In January 1968 Yakhimovich wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the party, addressing it to M. A. Suslov, and here he protested at the trial of Yury Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg and the others. In March 1968 Yakhimovich was expelled from the party” and in May 1968 dismissed from his post as chairman of the farm. In violation of the statute on agricultural cooperatives he was dismissed by higher organs without a collective farm meeting being held. Recently he has worked as a stoker in the ‘Belorussia’ sanatorium in Jurmale.

We have already met Yakhimovich in Chapters 3 and 4, but before continuing let Grigorenko shed more light on his personality. In a long statement just after Yakhimovich’s arrest his friend wrote about him:

One had to see how he spoke with people, how they behaved towards him, what a moving friendship he had with his wife, how his three daughters loved their father … to understand what a pure, honest, warm-hearted person he is. I got to know Yakhimovich in March 1968. He had come to Moscow to seek out Pavel Litvinov and Larissa Bogoraz. He had heard their appeal ‘To World Public Opinion’ on the foreign radio. This had made an impression on him and he had written, as one communist to another, a comradely letter to Suslov … The latter, as is normal in relations between high party functionaries and ordinary communists, did not answer. However the letter aroused great interest in samizdat circles, began to be passed around quickly, and soon found its way abroad. After it had been broadcast on the foreign radio Yakhimovich was called to the K.G.B. In the course of a long conversation it was stated to him among other things that Litvinov and Bogoraz had not signed any appeal, that the appeal was a fabrication, an invention of the B.B.C. To find out who was right – the K.G.B. or the B.B.C. -was why he had come to MOSCOW.

In his letter Yakhimovich had condemned the sentencing of ‘the most energetic brave and high principled members of our young generation …

Too bad for us if we are not capable of reaching an understanding with these young people. They will create, inevitably they will create, a new party Ideas cannot be murdered with bullets, prisons and exile.’ Moreover, he continued, I live in the provinces, where for every house with electricity there are ten without, where in winter the buses cant get through and the mail takes weeks to arrive. If information [on the trials] has reached us on the largest scale you can well imagine what you have done, what sort of seeds you have sown throughout the country. Have the courage to correct the mistakes that have been made before the workers and peasants take a hand in the affair.

The first sign that Yakhimovich was in serious trouble came in an item entitled:

A ‘NEW METHOD’ OF CONDUCTING SEARCHES

On September 27th, 1968, Ivan Yakhimovich’s apartment was searched [ … ] He is at present living with his wife and their three children in the Latvian town of Jurmale. He has been illegally deprived of his residence permit -the police simply crossed out the permit stamp in his passport – and so he is, naturally, unable to find work.

The warrant for the search, signed by the Assistant Procurator of Jurmale, Kviesonis, authorized a search on suspicion of Yakhimovich’s involvement in the theft of 19,654 roubles from the Jurmale branch of the State Bank. Of course, the searchers found no money but they did remove a few samizdat materials, also Yakhimovich’s letter protesting about the arrest of the demonstrators on August 25th, the rough draft of his unfinished essay on the post-January developments in Czechoslovakia, his wife’s personal diary, and so on.

After discussing similar searches by the ordinary police concerning rug Gendler and Andrei Amalrik the Chronicle then continues :

These are the three examples of the way in which the organs of state security are conducting searches through intermediaries, using false criminal allegations which are later conveniently forgotten. It was also the ordinary police who conducted the searches of both the demonstrators and several other people in the case of the Red Square demonstration of August 25th. The products of the searches, with a few exceptions, were not used at the trial. As was learnt after the trial, the Moscow City Procuracy, which had conducted the investigations into the case, handed over these products of the searches to, once again, the K.G.B.

In December 1968, the Procuracy of the Latvian Republic sanctioned the conduct of an investigation into material removed during a search at the flat of Ivan Yakhimovich … Yakhimovich is accused under article 183-1 of the Latvian Criminal Code, which corresponds to article 190-1 of the Russian Code, but the concrete substance of the charge is not clear. The investigation is being conducted by a Procuracy investigator of the Lenin district of Riga, Kakitis, although Yakhimovich lives and is registered not in Riga, but in Jurmale. The first, and so far the only, interrogation of Yakhimovich took place on February 5th, 1969. The investigator was mainly interested in the way in which various documents had been distributed: how had Yakhimovich got hold of P. G. Grigorenko’s article on Nekrich’s book? To whom had Yakhimovich oven his letter addressed to Suslov and the Central Committee of the Communist Party? Why had Yakhimovich been distributing the appeal of Larissa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov ‘To World Public Opinion’? And so on. The investigator specifically asked Yakhimovich about an unsent letter to Pavel Litvinov that had been written after the demonstration of August 25th, 1968, and removed during the search: ‘In your letter you wrote, “I feel pride and admiration and, if I had teen in Moscow, I should have been in Red Square with you.” Do you still think this?’ ‘Yes,’ Yakhimovich replied.

It is well known that during the search Yakhimovich’s Unfinished study of post-January events in Czechoslovakia was removed. At the end of the interrogation the investigator warned that next time Yakhimovich should give a theoretical ‘Analysis of his views on the events in Czechoslovakia. This warning ignores the fact that Yakhimovich, as the accused, is A no way obliged to do anything: to provide an explanation is simply his right; ignoring this, the Riga investigator apparently forgot that neither views nor their theoretical foundation are a Matter for criminal prosecution.

THE ARREST OF IVAN YAKHIMOVICH

Ivan Yakhimovich was arrested on March 24th in the town of Jurmale in the Latvian Republic … Three times, on February 5th, March 19th and March 24th, Yakhimovich ‘Was called for questioning by investigator of the Riga Procuracy

E. Kakitis, and after the third time he was arrested. Before his arrest Ivan Yakhimovich wrote an open letter, ‘Instead of a final speech’, in which he spoke about himself and about the investigation, which was based on negative character reports and false evidence. Then he appealed to a number of his friends, to certain public figures, to the workers and peasants, to Latvians and Poles, and to communists from all countries, not to reconcile themselves to injustice.

The end of the investigation in the Yakhimovich case is expected in the middle of May.

The family of Ivan Yakhimovich consists of his wife Irina, who graduated from the faculty of history and philology, for a long time worked as a school teacher, and is now forced to work as a nanny in a kindergarten; and three daughters of five, six and seven years. People recount how during the search, before Yakhimovich’s arrest, his three daughters stood in the garden below the window and sang the ‘Internationale’.

A group of Yakhimovich’s friends have written a protest letter about his illegal persecution. Together with the letters written either by Ivan Yakhimovich himself or in collaboration with likeminded friends, this protest letter is included in a collection of materials relating to him now circulating in samizdat.

At the end of August 1969 the Latvian Supreme Court examined the case of Ivan Yakhimovich. Yakhimovich’s activities had been classified under article 183-1 of the Latvian Criminal Code, equivalent to article 190-1 of the Russian Code. The substance of his activities was as follows: spreading Bogoraz’s and Litvinov’s letter ‘To World Public Opinion’, preparing and distributing a letter to the Central Committee of the party, writing a letter in defense of the demonstration of August 25th the only copy of which had not been circulated and was taken away during a search -and also uttering statements against the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia.

Ivan Yakhimovich had never been on a psychiatrist’s register before. The first conclusion that he was of unsound mind was made by an out-patient commission of experts, who diagnosed , schizophrenia’. The diagnosis of the in-patient commission was completely different: ‘paranoid development of a psychopathic personality, amounting to mental illness’-and they also pronounced him insane. Both commissions recommended that Yakhimovich should be sent to a psychiatric hospital of special type.

The court granted the requests submitted by the defense lawyer S. V. Kallistratova: that additional witnesses be summoned, that additional documents be added to the case, and that Ivan Yakhimovich be called to appear in court. The defense also submitted a request that Yakhimovich be sent to another commission of experts since the conclusion of the second commission was not supported by the evidence it had examined. The woman specialist doctor in court said that she could not argue with the conclusions of the in-patient commission, but that since, during the interrogation of witnesses closely acquainted with Yakhimovich and during the interrogation of Yakhimovich himself, new data had been collected which could help to define his psychological state, she considered it necessary that Yakhimovich be sent Jo a repeat commission. The Prosecutor supported the lawyer’s request for a repeat commission. The court resolved to have Ivan Yakhimovich sent to a repeat commission of forensic psychiatry experts at the Serbsky Institute. judge Lotko, who presided over the trial, conducted the whole of the two-day hearing with a full observance of procedural norms, and with respect for the accused’s right to a defense. According to eyewitnesses, Ivan Yakhimovich aroused the sympathy of all present, not excluding ,the Prosecutor and the escort soldiers.

This rare example of a fair trial in a political case had, however, a more Predictable sequel. No. 11 reported that Takhimovich ‘entered the Serbsky Institute in December, and No. 13 that in April 1970 the Institute’s recommendation of compulsory treatment in a mental hospital of ordinary (but not prison) type had been adopted by the Riga court. So now Grigorenko and his closest friends were all either dead or safely in confinement. However, the seeds they had sown were already Proving their fertility.

Source: Peter Reddaway, comp., Uncensored Russia: protest and dissent in the Soviet Union (New York: American Heritage Press, 1972), pp. 127-149.

Petr Grigorenko, Appeal by Representatives of the Crimean Tatar People to the World Public. June 21, 1968

From the draft for Grigorenko s intended speech at the Tashkent ‘trial of the ten’; followed by reports of official reactions to the Tatar demands.

Original Source: Chronicle of Current Events. Text in NRS, September 19-20, 22, 1969, extracts in Possev 9 (1969), pp. 6-7

In 1944 the whole of our people was slanderously accused of betraying the Soviet motherland and was forcibly deported from the Crimea.

All the adult men were at the front; able-bodied older men and youngsters were in the labor corps. In one single day, May 18th, about 200,000 defenseless women, children and infirm persons were without warning driven out of their homes by K.G.B. troops, loaded on to troop trains and removed under escort to reservations. The operation was directed by Marshal Voroshilov. For about three weeks they were transported in closed trucks, almost without food or clothing, to Central Asia. After the war was over the men who returned from the front were sent to the same destination. As a result of the inhuman deportation and the intolerable conditions in which we found ourselves more than half of all our people perished in these first years. Simultaneously, our national autonomy was extinguished, our national culture completely destroyed, our monuments pulled down, and the graves of our ancestors defiled and wiped off the face of the earth.

During the next twelve years we lived as exiles and were discriminated against. Our children, even those born in exile, were branded as ‘traitors’; slanderous stories were published about us and are to this day still being read by Soviet people, Following the 20th party congress 11956] our people were relieved of the exile regime but the accusation of having betrayed the fatherland was not dropped, and, as previously, we were not allowed to return to the Crimea. From 1957 until 1967, we sent to the party Central Committee and the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet hundreds of thousands of collective and individual letters calling for an end to be put to the injustice suffered. The representatives of our people in Moscow* were, after persistent requests, received on several occasions by the party and government leaders Mikoyan, Georgadze, Andropov and Shchelokov. On each occasion we were, promised a speedy solution of the Crimean Tatar problem, but instead there followed arrests, deportations, dismissals from employment and expulsions from the party.

Finally, on September 5th, 1967, there appeared a Decree of, the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet which cleared us’ of the charge of treason but described us not as Crimean, Tatars but as ‘citizens of Tatar nationality formerly resident in the Crimea’, thus legitimizing our banishment from our home country and liquidating us as a nation. We did not grasp the significance of the decree immediately. After it was published, several thousand people traveled to the Crimea but were once again forcibly expelled. The protest which our people sent to the party Central Committee was left unanswered, as were also the protests of representatives of the Soviet public who supported.

US

The authorities replied to us only with persecution and court cases. Since 1939 more than 200 of the most active and courageous representatives have been sentenced to terms of up to seven years although they had always acted within the limits of the Soviet Constitution. Repressive action against us has been specially intensified recently. On April 21, 1968, in the town of Chirchik, Crimean Tatars who had assembled to celebrate Lenin’s birthday were dispersed by troops and policemen, and more than 300 persons were arrested. In May 800 representatives of the people traveled to Moscow to hand the party Central Committee a letter calling for the people to be returned to the Crimea. On May 16 and 17 almost all the representatives were arrested and deported under escort to Tashkent. At the same time four representatives of our intelligentsia were sentenced in Tashkent to various terms of imprisonment. Every day dozens of people are summoned to appear at their local K.G.B. offices and there pressured by blackmail and threats to renounce returning to our homeland.

The calumny is spread around that we want to return to the Crimea in order to expel those who are now living there. This is untrue. We are a peaceful people and have always lived and will live in friendship with the multi-racial population of the Crimea; we are not threatening anyone – it is we who are constantly being threatened with national extinction.

What people are doing to us has a quite specific name –

GENOCIDE.

In the course of our struggle a total of more than 3 million signatures have been collected on the letters sent by our people to the Soviet Government. This means that each adult Crimean Tatar has affixed his signature to them at least ten times. But the appeal Of 300,000 people, repeated ten times over, has reechoed in vain. Not a single party or government body has ever given us a reply; not a single Soviet newspaper has ever once referred to our fight.

We appeal accordingly to the world public.

We appeal to all the peoples of the Soviet Union as a small independent people appeals to brother peoples. Stasenkov, Deputy Procurator of Moscow, declared: ‘Your problem has been fully and finally settled and will be given no further consideration.’ Demanding the departure of all the representatives, he threatened that force would be used. Force was used: Crimean Tatars were arrested in hotels, private apartments, on railway stations, squares and other points in Moscow, were bundled into a mail- and goods-train and sent under escort to Tashkent. A large group of representatives of the people was arrested at the building of the party Central Committee. Along with them the police arrested also those Muscovites who by their presence were expressing their sympathy for the Crimean Tatar people. The whole operation was led by General Volkov, head of the Moscow Public Order Administration.

We appeal to all the peoples of the world and above all to those who have personally experienced the meaning of national inequality of rights and oppression.

We appeal to all people of goodwill in the hope that you will help us.

HELP US TO RETURN TO THE LAND OF OUR FATHERS!

The letter is signed by the following representatives of the Crimean Tatar people who hold a mandate authorizing them to fight on behalf of the people for the return to the homeland by all lawful methods:

1. Zampira Asanova, doctor Bekabad [Uzbekistan]
2. Rollan Kadiyev, theoretical physicist Samarkand [Uzbekistan]
3. Reshat Bairamov, electrician Melitopol [S. Ukraine]
4. Murat Voyenny, builder Tashkent [Uzbekistan]
5. Zera Khalilova, teacher Namangan [Uzbekistan]
6. Mustafa lbrish, engineer Tashkent
7. Eldar Shabanov, driver Bekabad
8. Aishe Bekirova, teacher Bekabad
9. Ramazan Muratov, worker Bekabad

(and so on – in all, 18 signatures: doctors, engineers, workers of all specialities, pensioners, students, office-workers, housewives from Tashkent, Samarkand, Fergana, Chirchik, Margelan, Sovetabad, Andizhan, Angren, Begovat, Leninabad, etc., from the Kirghiz Republic, from the towns of Leninsk and Novorossiisk).

This document alone reveals that the Tatars have generated a mass movement unprecedented in Soviet history. Such a revelation can be confirmed many times over by those industrious enough to wade through all the documentary evidence from samizdat now available in the West. This already amounts in total to about five hundred pages, and grows steadily. Only some of it can be indicated here. For the historical background to the Tatars’ deportation and subsequent fate, readers are referred to Robert Conquest’s excellent book “The Nation Killers,” which also contains an analysis of the key events described in this chapter.

The general nature of the problem and its relation to the Democratic ‘Movement will already be clear from passages in earlier chapters about Grigorenko, Kosterin, Gabai and Mustafa Dzhemilev. This chapter fills out the picture.

Not quite so clear are the Soviet authorities’ reasons for their – in its effect – racist policy. Here one can only speculate. Fears doubtless exist Oat the Tatars could, under certain circumstances, be more loyal to their ethnic and cultural kin in Turkey than to the U.S.S.R. Such fears would cause worries about military security in the strategically placed Crimea, were the Tatars to return. Probably even more important, though, is me Soviet leadership’s instinctive fear that if it yields to the demands of one aggrieved group, a hundred others will press their claims with renewed energy.

It was in early 1968 that the vital link-up -witness the ‘letter of the 12 to the Budapest conference’ occurred between the Tatars and the radicals of the Democratic Movement in Moscow. An ,individual link had of course existed for a long time with Aleksei Kosterin. Indeed the growth of his friendship with Grigorenko in 1966-7 probably played a big role in the recruitment of the radicals to the Tatars’ cause. But the Tatars’ lobbying tactics must also take credit for the success, as this item shows:

A CLARIFICATION OF NATIONALITIES POLICY

In February 1968 Dmitry Motyl, a student of the physics and chemistry faculty of the Mendeleyev Chemico-Technological Institute in Moscow, showed his friends an appeal by the Crimean Tatars to people of good will. One of the students suggested to the Young Communist League committee that ‘they should express their support for the demands of the Crimean Tatar people. In response to this a lecture on the ‘Position of the Crimean Tatars in the U.S.S.R. was arranged at the Institute on February 25.

P. G. Grigorenko, who has for a long time been interested in this problem, the economist Julius Telesin, and two Crimean Tatars, the engineer Kadyr Sarametov and Mustafa Murtazayev, a latheoperator, came to hear the lecture. The lecture was intended for students of the group in which Motyl was studying and for members of the Young Communist League bureau. P. G. Grigorenko had received permission to attend the lecture but when the lecturer came into the auditorium and saw Grigorenko he immediately turned round and walked oil again. This can only be explained by the fact that the lecturer must in reality have been a K.G.B. official who knew Grigorenko by sight. After this the lecture was transferred to another auditorium and neither Grigorenko nor the student Motyl was admitted. The doors to the auditorium were guarded by a detachment of staff, headed by senior lecturer Chechin. The secretary of the party committee of the Institute, K. M. Tyutina announced that the lecturer from the Central Committee of the party was going to explain the party’s policy on the nationalities question and that the presence of ‘outsiders’ was undesirable J. Telesin and M. Murtazayev, who were in the Institute building, had their documents checked and were forced to leave, and K. Sarametov was held for four hours by the police.

The faculty bureau of the Young Communist League decided to expel Dmitry Motyl from their organization.

Grigorenko’s arrest in May 1969, following soon after Kosterin’s death, was a heavy blow to the Tatars. Their reply was:

THE CRIMEAN TATARS’ DEMONSTRATION ON MAYAKOVSKY SQUARE, JUNE 6, 1969.

On June 6, 1969, the second day of the World Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties, the Crimean Tatars staged a demonstration on Mayakovsky Square. There were five participants: Zampira Asanova, Enver Ametov, Reshat Dzhemilev, Aider Zeitulayev, and lbraim Kholopov. At a quarter past twelve they unfurled banners at the foot of the Mayakovsky memorial, with the slogans HAIL TO LENIN’S NATIONALITIES POLICY!; COMMUNISTS, GIVE THE CRIMEA BACK TO THE CRIMEAN TATARS!; STOP PERSECUTING THE CRIMEAN TATARS!; and FREE GENERAL GRIGORENKO!

The last placard carried a photograph of Grigorenko.

A large crowd of about three hundred gathered round the demonstrators, encircling them but not daring to approach really close. It was a silent crowd. There were two shouts of ‘They shouldn’t have betrayed Russia!’ No one asked the demonstrators to disperse. The policemen on traffic duty left their posts and, after a short consultation, elbowed their way into the crowd and signaled to about ten of the bystanders, using some special signs. These people sprang into action, forced their way through the crowd to the demonstrators, and, supposedly expressing the ‘anger of the people’,” fell upon the demonstrators using physical violence. In a really professional manner they twisted their arms, and two women amongst them beat the demonstrators with their umbrellas. The demonstrators did not resist. Reshat and Aider shouted ‘Long live Freedom!’ ‘So it’s freedom you’re after, eh? That’s a good one!’ said one of the policemen. Irina Yakir, who had been standing near the demonstrators, was detained with them.

Because the traffic police had left their posts, the flow of traffic slowed and a jam built up on [nearby] Pushkin Square. Half an hour later the crowds had still not left the scene, but people had split up into groups and were wandering up and down the square. Most of the conversations revealed attitudes of great-power chauvinism. Some students who tried to voice a different opinion were threatened and left hastily without starting an argument.

Those detained were driven off to 38 Petrovka Street [the Moscow Police Headquarters], where they were interrogated by investigators of the Ministry of the Interior. Irina Yakir was allowed to go later the same day, and the following day the participants in the demonstration were sent home. Very probably they escaped arrest because of the World Communist Conference which was then taking place.

Among the demonstrators the doctor Zampira Asanova from Uzbekistan should be singled out: she signed both the ‘letter of the 12’ and the above-quoted appeal, and also spoke at Kosterin’s funeral. But her fellows subsequently fared worse than she:

At present further repressive measures are being taken against Reshat Dzhemilev. Dzhemilev is thirty eight and a construction engineer. Every year since 1965 the Crimean Tatars have been sending him to Moscow as one of their representatives. He was one of the twenty Crimean Tatars who on June 21, 1967, were received by the Chairman of the K.G.B., Andropov, the Secretary of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet, Georgadze, the Attorney-General of the U.S.S.R., Rudenko, and the Minister of Public Order, Shchelokov. The reception of this delegation was an important step towards the political rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatar people.

On September 2, 1967, Reshat Dzhemilev was arrested as an ‘organizer of the mass disturbances in Tashkent on August 27 and September 2, 1967’- On December 13th, 1967, the Tashkent City Court sentenced him to one year of corrective labor. By ‘mass disturbances’ were understood the numerous meetings held by Crimean Tatars in defense of their rights.

After the demonstration of June 6th, Reshat Dzhemilev was sent under escort to Nizhne-Bakanovka in Krasnodar Province [N. Caucasus] where his family recently came over to join him, and where he has now begun building a house. On arrival he was met by the police, who threatened him with prosecution under article 209 of the Russian Criminal Code, ‘vagrancy and begging’, if he did not immediately obtain a residence permit and a job. One might add that to get his residence permit Dzhemilev needs at least fourteen square meters of living space since his family consists of a wife and three children.

A few days after this, on June 15 an incident was staged at the railway station, as a result of which Reshat Dzhemilev was given fifteen days for ‘petty hooliganism’. Reshat was standing in the queue for tickets when an old man he did not know came up to him, squeezed in front of him, and dropped a glass of yogurt on his feet. Reshat remained calm, but the police immediately rushed up and seized him; the old man vanished and no one tried to stop him; nor did the police approach any witnesses although Reshat demanded that they do so. Most probably Reshat was given his fifteen days ‘for security reasons’; this had already happened to another Crimean Tatar activist in Gulistan. (A copy exists of an official police document which states quite openly that ‘this man has been imprisoned for a period of fifteen days “for security reasons”.’)

Other participants in the demonstration were deprived of their residence permits for the places where they lived in Krasnodar Province.

The Chronicle then carried the following item, since when it has been silent on Dzhemilev:

Criminal proceedings have been instituted against Reshat Dzhemilev, one of the Crimean Tatar demonstrators on Mayakovsky Square in Moscow on June 6th. He has been charged under article 190-1 of the Russian Criminal Code with making a speech at the funeral of A. E. Kosterin, and with helping to compile the collection ‘In Memory of A. E. Kosterin’. Apart from that, he has evidently been charged for signing a letter in support of Ivan Yakhimovich. The investigation is being conducted by the Krasnodar Procuracy, while in Moscow witnesses are being interrogated by Obraztsov, an investigator of the Moscow Procuracy.

In the period after the demonstration, ordinary Tatar delegates were–like the demonstrators–expelled from Moscow. And one of their sympathizers also suffered a reprisal:

Irina Yakir, a student of the evening-course department at the Historical Archives Institute, has been expelled from the Institute ‘for failing to fulfill her study plan, and for conduct unworthy of a Soviet student’. As far as her study plan is concerned, Irina Yakir was in fact ahead of her year. The real reason for her expulsion was her presence on Mayakovsky Square at the time of the Crimean Tatars’ demonstration on June 6th, 1969. She was only informed of her expulsion a month after the order was issued.

THE ‘TASHKENT TEN’

With the Tatars’ cause gaining ever wider support in 1968-9, and their literature circulating in steadily greater volume in samizdat, the authorities evidently felt the need for a decisive counterattack. In autumn 1968 ten Tatar leaders were arrested: by the end of the year the investigation had been concluded” and the ground prepared for a show trial. Then various delays ensued- evidently connected with political expediency-and the indictment was finally signed only in April 1969. Soon after this the Chronicle reported:

There is in samizdat Grigorenko’s last political pamphlet before his arrest- ‘Who are the Criminals?'” He wrote it after, reading the charges brought against the ten Crimean Tatars. In his pamphlet Grigorenko exposes the flimsiness of the, charges; he deals with the question of the Crimean Tatars as a’ minority people, and the genocide of which they are the victims; with their national movement, which has the unanimous support of the whole people; and with the persecution of active participants in this movement. He refers to the decree of September 5, 1967, which withdrew the treason charge brought against the Crimean Tatars but deprived them of their national name and of the right to return to their homeland. P. G. Grigorenko shows that the documents listed in the indictment were based on facts, that these documents were sent to various high authorities, and that those authorities did not reply, nor did they attempt to refute the documents. The right to label them as libelous turned out to belong to the very same Uzbek authorities about whom the Crimean Tatars had complained in the abovementioned documents. ‘Not one of the facts set out in the documents’, writes Grigorenko, ‘was checked by anyone, and the investigating organs are not in possession of any proof that any of the facts used are unreliable. In consequence the investigators were forced to restrict themselves to unfounded abuse of the documents they examined.’ As P. G. Grigorenko shows, the author of the indictment, Counselor of justice Berezovsky, makes use of the word ‘alleged’, and of inverted commas, as his main devices for proving a point: allegedly methods of force- and arbitrariness are being applied, allegedly in exile, are allegedly in places of ‘exile’, and so on. But unsubstantiated allegations and lies are not the only things that Grigorenko discovers:

Sometimes Stalinism suddenly rears its ugly head. Here is what is written, for example, on page 10 of the indictment: ‘This letter casts aspersions on the policy of the Communist Party and the Soviet government towards national minorities. The resettlement of the Crimean Tatars in 1944 is represented by the writers of the letter as “a barbarous crime”. Well, this brutal deportation Of 1944 that was part of the policy of the Communist Party and the Soviet government towards national minorities, and those who call it a “brutal crime” must be tried for slandering this policy.’

Grigorenko stresses that investigator Berezovsky and Procurator Ruzmetov, who countersigned the indictment, are revealed as Stalinists not only through this casual slip, but by the very nature of this whole trumped-up case.

THE TRIAL

From July 1 to August 5 a session of the Uzbek Supreme Court took place in Tashkent. The judge was Saifutdinov; the People’s Assessors, Samoilova and Isfandiarov; the Prosecutor, Enkalov; and the defense lawyers, Monakhov, Zaslavsky and Safonov. The accused were Reshat Bairamov, age 26, a fitter; Aider Bariyev, age 31, a bulldozer-driver, father of two children; Svetlana Ametova, age 28, nurse and mother of a six-year-old son; Munire Khalilova, age 24, a midwife; Riza Umerov, age 49, an electro-welder, father of two; Ruslan Eminov, age 30 a foreman and father of two; Izzet Khairov, age 3 1, a weights and measures engineer [see plate 481, a member of the Communist Party and father of two children; Rollan Kadiyev, a 32-year-old physicist, father of three; Ridvan Gafarov, age 54, a pensioner and second-category invalid; and Ismail Yazydzhiyev, age 49, father of two children, trained as a teacher, fought in the Great Patriotic War, a bricklayer.

The accused had previously made the following requests:

1. that correspondents of Pravda, Izvestiia, and the Crimean Tatar paper Lenin bairagi be called to attend the trial;

2. that the trial be given full press coverage and be broadcast live on television;

3. that a commission of experts be called to attend the trial, to determine the facts about the questions raised in the documents to which the charges related;

4. that observers from the Central Committee of the party and the Soviet government be called to attend the trial;

5. that the accused be given the necessary literature to prepare for the trial;

6. that the conditions of their detention in prison be changed: the accused were living in cells overflowing with criminals, and could not make any preparations for their defence;

7. that they be given the medical help they needed;

8. that they receive a change of sheets and clothing.

Out of all the requests only the last two had been granted. in protest at the refusal of the prison and judicial authorities to make available the necessary legal and political literature, Rollan KadiyeV22 had gone on a hunger-strike on June 20, and he came into court in a condition testifying to this. He called off his strike only when threatened with a separate trial.

The accused declared their objection to the Prosecutor, a man well known from other Crimean Tatar trials, and refused to answer his questions. Rollan Kadiyev declared his objection to the judge also. The objections were not upheld. The Prosecutor was notable for his ill-mannered behavior, his disregard for the law, and his lack of respect for the accused as people. The Prosecutor declared that the accused were not political but criminal offenders, and that was why they were being held in the conditions prescribed for criminal offenders. The Prosecutor repeatedly brought pressure to bear on the defense: he told the lawyers how they ought to advise their clients, cut them short, and demanded that the court rebuke them.

During the whole of the proceedings neither the court nor the prosecution raised the question of having the facts which were described in the indictment as libelous fabrications either corroborated or refuted. The prosecution was concerned only with proving the fact that they were manufactured and distributed -while the accused did not deny many of these facts; on the other hand, they completely denied the libelous nature of the documents, and pleaded not guilty.

The Prosecutor demanded three years in camps for Bairamov, Bariyev, Khairov and Kadiyev; eighteen months each for Umerov and Gafarov; a year each for Ametova, Khalilova and Yazydzhiyev; and one year of corrective labor for Eminov. The defense demanded a verdict of not guilty.

The court passed a verdict of guilty, declaring the accused guilty under the articles brought against them, article 190-1 of the Russian Criminal Code and the equivalent articles 187-1 and 191-41 from the Ukrainian and Uzbek Codes, and sentenced them as follows: Reshat Bairamov and Rollan Kadiyev to three years in ordinary-regime camps; Aider Bariyev and Izzet Khairov to eighteen months; and Ridvan Gafarov and Ismail Yazydzhiyev to one year. The court decided that the term spent in pre-trial imprisonment (about ten months) was sufficient for Svetlana Ametova, Munire Khalilova and Riza Umerov. Ruslan Eminov was given six months’ corrective labor. Yazydzhiyev’s term expires in September, Gafarov’s in October.

On August 5, after the verdict of guilty had been passed, a crowd of about 500 to 700 Crimean Tatars who had gathered outside the courthouse marched in orderly fashion to the Procurator’s office, and then to the Uzbek Communist Party Central Committee building. A sit-in demonstration was organized outside the Procuracy. But two blocks before they reached the Central Committee building, the demonstrators were met by a large force of police, who fell upon them. Some of the demonstrators were dispersed, some detained. After twenty-four hours’ detention in police stations, almost all of them were released, except for four people who were given fifteen days’ imprisonment.

Very soon the Chronicle reported on the appearance in samizdat of Case No. 109

Material from the trial, and part of the pre-trial investigation, in the case of the ten Crimean Tatars. The Chronicle gave a brief report of the trial in the last issue. Among the materials from the pre-trial investigation, the most interesting is a whole series of denunciatory reports from official bodies and public organizations to which the Crimean Tatars had sent material about the tragedy of their people. Instead of replying to the letters from the Crimean Tatars, the heads and other representatives of these organizations passed the letters on to the K.G.B. Denunciations of the Crimean Tatars were written by Tikhonov, a rear-admiral of the Baltic Fleet, K. Voronkov, a secretary of the Board of the U.S.S.R. Writers’ Union, A. Mukhtar and R. Faizi, Deputy Chairmen of the Uzbek Writers’ Union, and Sh. Sagdulla, a literary consultant and secretary of the Uzbek Writers’ Union Party Organization. The director of the Crimean Regional Museum, L. Zhuk, wrote a report about the comments written by Crimean Tatars in the museum’s Visitors’ Book. In their comments they had said that the part played by the Crimean Tatars in the Great Patriotic War and in the struggle for a Soviet victory in the Crimea was not reflected in the museum’s exhibits; on the stand labeled ‘Heroes of the Soviet Union from our Crimean Homeland’ there were no photographs of the Crimean Tatars who had been honored with this high rank. The pages with their comments had been torn out of the Visitors’ Book and added to the case-file.

The investigation into the case of the ten Crimean Tatars was conducted by the Uzbek Republican Procuracy and headed by senior Procuracy investigator B. 1. Berezovsky. It became known that apart from him, the team of investigators included one other Procuracy investigator, B. N. Vorobyov, and eight K.G.B. investigators: B. N. Bobylyov, M. Nabiyev, V. M. Lysenko, K. M. Abushayev, D. R. Mustafayev, S. R. Mukanov, Ya. Shafeyev, and V. Ya. Manshetov.

In some of the Crimean Tatar documents which figured at the trial, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars from the Crimea in 1944 was described as genocide, the destruction of a nation. During the investigation, and at the trial, these assertions were contrasted with official K.G.B. reports, according to which: ‘Of the people from the Crimea who were living under the “special settlement” regime 13,592 died between May 1944 and January 1945, that is, 9-1 per cent’, and ‘for the period from January 1, 1945, to January 1, 1946, 13083 people died, of which 2,562 were men, 4,525 women, and 6,096 children under 16.’ These figures are certainly an underestimate-the people’s statistics put the numbers who perished at 46 per cent. Moreover, they do not take into account all those who died during the journey. Nevertheless, as one of the defendants at the trial, Rollan Kadiyev, stated, even these figures are evidence of a terrible crime, and confirm the allegation of genocide. One of the basic accusations brought against the fascists at the Nuremberg trial, he said, was the great number of people who fell victims to the war – in four years the Soviet Union lost 20 million people, that is, about 2-5 per cent of the population each year, while according even to the K.G.B. statistics, approximately 10 per cent of the Crimean Tatar nation perished in the reservations of Uzbekistan in 1946 [or 1945?] alone.

THE CRIMEAN HOMELAND ITSELF

In the Crimea itself the 1967 decree had led to much police brutality. Thousands of Tatars returned home full of expectation only to be severely disillusioned:

In the Crimea there are periodic police raids on Tatars who have returned home. On July 15th, 1968, eleven Crimean Tatar families were brutally manhandled at the ‘Bolshevik’ state farm in the Krasnogvardeiskii District. Since the publication of the decree of September 5, 1967, only eighteen families and thirteen single persons have been given permits to reside in the Crimea. During the same period twelve thousand people have been expelled from the Crimea. Seventeen Crimean Tatars have been condemned to various prison sentences there, and two more are still being held under investigation.

The deputy head of the Crimean Region police, Lieutenant-Colonel Kosyakov, is reported to have said to the Crimean Tatars: ‘The decree was published not for you, the Crimean Tatars, but for the newspapers, and the foreign ones at that … Turkey-that’s where you belong and that’s where you should go!’ In this he was backed up by Lieutenant-Colonel of the Police Pazin, who added: ‘If tomorrow we get the order to shoot you, we will shoot you.’

These facts, together with others already known to readers of the Chronicle, are quoted in an appeal from the Crimean Tatars to all people of goodwill, to democrats and communists.26 The Crimean Tatars ask that their rights be safeguarded, that they be protected from arbitrary and illegal treatment, and that they be helped to return home to the Crimea. Tens of thousands of people have already signed this appeal and signatures are still being collected. At the same time, signatures are being collected on an appeal from representatives of Soviet public opinion in support of the Crimean Tatars’ demands.

As brutality and trials continued in the Crimea in 1968-9, the Chronicle made regular reports. The following are the most notable:

THE ‘RESETTLEMENT’ OF THE CRIMEAN TATARS IN THE CRIMEA

In 1968 the Uzbek authorities announced that Crimean Tatars would return to the Crimea in a planned way, making work contracts with representatives from the Crimea who had come to Uzbekistan. In this way they tried to avert the planned mass exit of Tatars to the Crimea. In the whole of 1968, through the system of labor recruitment, only 148 families were resettled; resettlement permits were issued only when the blessing of the K.G.B. was forthcoming-and to those who had not taken the slightest part in the national movement.

The Chronicle has already reported how the Crimean regional administration, obeying unwritten-most probably oral instructions, greets the Crimean Tatars who return to their homeland without K.G.B. permits. In this issue a number of further incidents from 1968 are given, based on the recent protest of the Crimean Tatar people addressed to official bodies and Soviet public opinion.

On May 26, 1968, ninety-eight Crimean Tatars put up tents near the village of Marino outside the boundaries of Simferopol. On May 27, at 4 p.m., the tents were surrounded by a ring of policemen, K.G.B. operatives and volunteer police-about two hundred and fifty men altogether. On an order from Lieutenant-Colonel Kosyakov, they began pulling down the tents and grabbing people, beating them up and shoving them into buses. Everyone who was at that moment standing near the tents-including women and children and war invalids -was transported in buses, guarded by police cars and motorcycles, to the Simferopol police headquarters. From there a group of thirty-eight Tatars was sent off to Baku without being given a chance to collect their belongings and clothes. They traveled for four days without bread or water. At Baku they were forcibly put on to the ferry Soviet Turkestan-even women were beaten. The crowd which had gathered were told that enemies of the people were being transported. On May 31 the ferry was met at Krasnovodsk by members of the police; the Tatars were put on to a train and sent off to Tashkent under K.G.B. guard.

On June 26, 1968, a group of Crimean Tatars -twenty-one people – came for an interview with Chemodurov, the president of the executive committee of the Crimean Regional Soviet, with a complaint about the administrators who had not given residence permits to Crimean Tatars. Chemodurov locked himself in his office and called up the police, who threw the Tatars out of the executive committee building and deposited them at the police station. Eleven of them were given fifteen days in prison, whereupon all of them, including the women, went on hunger-strike. The remaining ten were bought airplane tickets with the money taken from them when searched, and then sent to Dushanbe [in Tadzhikistan] where none of them had ever lived. Criminal proceedings were initiated against Mamedi Chobanov -one of those sentenced to fifteen days in prison – on a charge of resisting a representative of authority.

On August 26, 1968, Mamedi Chobanov was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.

On August 27, 1968, Mubein Yusupov and Fakhri Ismailov were sentenced to one year and to six months of imprisonment, respectively, for the same offence. They were arrested during a police attack similar to that staged against the Crimean Tatars at the executive committee building. Mustafa Nebi, Kadyr Sarametov and Muniver Abibullayeva, who tried to attend this trial and appear as witnesses, were detained and given fifteen days in prison.

On September 4, 1968, Zekerya Asanov, arrested as the result of a police provocation, was sentenced to one year of imprisonment.

On July 10, 1968, a group of Crimean Tatar families applied to the executive committee of the Crimean Regional Soviet for permission to settle in any part of the Crimea. Zubenko, an official of the committee, suggested they should move into empty houses on state farms. The Tatars moved into the houses in the first section of the ‘Bolshevik’ state farm in Krasnogvardeisky District. One night lorries were driven up to the houses by uniformed and volunteer police. They grabbed the Tatars’ coats and blankets, threw them into the lorries, then wrenched the children away from their mothers and also threw them into the lorries. They dragged out the rest, twisting their arms and shouting: ‘You sold the Crimea once and now you’ve come to sell it again! Get out! Only Ukrainians arc going to live her!’ The people who had gathered at the noise took the Tatars’ side. ‘So you’ve found someone to take pity on! They ought to be shot!’ shouted the police bullies in reply to the indignation of the local inhabitants. It all ended with the police and the volunteers taking away with them various belongings and four Tatars. The remaining Tatars were taken in for the night by the local inhabitants. But at dawn the police and volunteers returned, fell upon those who were asleep, beat them up, tied their hands and shoved them all into lorries and drove them to a waiting railway-truck in a siding. They were robbed while being beaten up: eight wrist-watches and 1000 rubles were taken. At Novo-Alekseyevka station [Kherson region] four more families, taken from the state farm ‘Plenty’ in Dzhankoisky District, were in exactly the same way put into the same truck. The Russian and Ukrainian workers of the first section of the ‘Bolshevik’ state farm refused to go out to work the day after this incident; also, seventeen Russian and Ukrainian families demonstratively left the state farm, and four immigrant families, recently brought from the Ukraine, refused to settle there.

THE TRIAL OF GOMER BAYEV

On April 23-24 and 28-29, 1969, the trial was held in Simferopol of the Crimean Tatar Gomer Bayev, an engineer accused of distributing ‘deliberate fabrications defaming the Soviet political and social order’- article 187-1 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code. The evidence for the prosecution was: several letters from Crimean Tatars to official departments, unsigned but allegedly distributed by Bayev; one of the Crimean Tatar information bulletins, copied by Bayev into a notebook, an action designated as ‘distribution’ because, according to a witness’s evidence, Bayev read out something from some notebook at a meeting; and letters written by Bayev himself about the position of the Crimean Tatars. In connection with the last mentioned, it is extremely interesting how one of these letters became involved in the trial. A senior research worker of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Senichkina, a Party member, published an article on the nationalities question in which she wrote that the nationalities question in the U.S.S.R. had been completely solved. Gomer Bayev wrote a private letter to Senichkina in which he asked whether she considered the Crimean Tatar question solved as well, and if so, he asked her to explain why he, Gomer Bayev, had been sacked from his job, turned out of his hostel and told to leave the Crimea. Instead of replying, Senichkina sent the letter to the K.G.B., as it ‘contained provocative questions’ judge A. A. Avramenko presided over the proceedings, the prosecution case was argued by Procurator Terentev, and the lawyer N. A. Monakhov defended the accused. The trial was conducted correctly: those who had in fact come to the trial were present in the courtroom instead of a specially chosen audience, as is common in Moscow.

Elkhov, the head of the Simferopol passport office, a witness, confirmed that it was virtually impossible for Crimean Tatars to be registered for residence in the Crimea. The same was said by the senior engineer of a state farm where a work-gang of Crimean Tatars (including Bayev) had been employed and immediately dismissed when their identity was discovered. The Procurator explained that this was so because they lacked specialized knowledge, but the engineer confirmed that the work-gang had the necessary qualifications, that the state farm was still in need of workers-up to a hundred-and that the state farm could provide them with accommodation. To the lawyer’s question ‘And if a similar work-gang were to come to you now, would you employ them?’, the engineer quite frankly answered: ‘But they wouldn’t be given residence permits!’

The Procurator, having taken into account the defendant’s hard-working way of life and the absence of any previous conviction, pointed out that the defendant had pleaded not guilty and had not recanted and therefore represented a danger to society. The Procurator demanded that Gomer Bayev be given three years in a labor camp, i.e. the maximum under the article concerned.

The defense lawyer made no reference to the contents of those documents which Bayev denied having helped to compile and distribute-and he convincingly showed that his client was speaking the truth. As regards the documents which Bayev had compiled, the defense lawyer adopted the following line: the facts set out in the documents are indisputable; strongly worded phrases -the product of the emotions not the mind-, are to be found, but they cannot be called libelous. The defense lawyer asked the court to acquit Bayev, there being no basis for a criminal charge.

Gomer Bayev in his final speech described the deportation of his people from the Crimea, the way they had starved to death in exile, and their struggle for the restoration of their national rights.

The court found Gomer Bayev guilty under article 187-1 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code and sentenced him to two years in a labor camp.

Finally , the Chronicle reports the beginning of an episode on which several remarkable documents written by the participants are available:

In June 1969 four Crimean Tatar families who had come to the Belogorsk District in the Crimean Region under the Organized Labor Recruitment scheme and had bought houses with their own money were forcibly ejected. The Tatars were turned out at night into the rain; half-naked men and women were beaten, wrapped in towels and bundled into the back of a lorry. Their children were thrown in with them, and also a small part of their belongings.

After this thy were put on a train, to be taken of it again when if reached Ust-Labinsk in Krasnodar Province. From here, penniless, they made their way back to the Crimea: they found their homes boarded up.

Towards the end of 1969 the Tatars resorted to yet another tactic in what had by now become one of history’s most remarkable campaigns of non-violent mass lobbying, one organized, moreover, on impeccably democratic lines.

Representatives of the Crimean Tatars have handed in to the Central Committee documents which record the initial findings of a referendum now being held among the Crimean Tatars. They are asked to answer two questions: do they long to return home to the Crimea and do they want to see the restoration of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic? The Crimean Tatars were rehabilitated as a people in a decree issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on September 5, 1967, and officially cleared of the unfounded and libelous accusations which were originally used to justify their deportation. However, the decree also states that the ‘Crimean Tatars have settled down in their present places of residence’, and so, even though they have been rehabilitated, they are not being given an opportunity to return to their homeland. The referendum is an attempt to establish once and for all whether the Crimean Tatars really feel that they have ‘settled down’ outside the Crimea.

The initial findings have shown that a vast, indeed overwhelming, majority of those asked (with only a few isolated exceptions) yearn to return to their homeland and to see the restoration of their autonomy. The referendum is still going on, in Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Kazakhstan, in Krasnodar Province everywhere where Crimean Tatars are living. The poll will include the whole adult population, to a man, and the results of the referendum will be passed to the highest party and government authorities.

In 1970 the Tatars continued to have the full support of the Democratic Movement. In particular thy must have rejoiced at a plea on their behalf by two Ukrainian scholars, who argued like this: as an immigration target of 500,000 people had been officially planned for the Crimea – to eliminate the labor shortage – and as this was currently the size of the Crimean Tatar people, the latter should be allowed to provide the problem with a neat solution.

Source: Peter Reddaway, comp. Uncensored Russia: protest and dissent in the Soviet Union; the unofficial Moscow journal, a Chronicle of current events (New York: American Heritage Press, 1972), pp. 249-318.

Chronicle of Current Events, Invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Red Square Demonstration. 1968

Original Source: Chronicle of Current Events (Possev-Verlag, Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 495-97.

Since the Siniavskii-Daniel trial, since 1966, not a single arbitrary or violent act by the authorities has passed without a public protest, without censure. This is a valuable tradition, the start of people’s self-liberation from the humiliation of fear, from connivance in evil … If Herzen a century ago, by speaking out in defense of Poland’s freedom and against its great power suppressors, alone saved the honor of Russia’s democrats, then the seven demonstrators on Red Square have undoubtedly saved the honor of the Soviet people. The significance of the demonstration of August 25th cannot be overestimated.’

Anatolii Iakobson, September 1968

The dramatic Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on the night of August 20th-21st, 1968, introduced a new dimension into the Soviet civil rights movement. Previously the movement had been little if at all concerned with criticizing Soviet foreign policy, so preoccupied was it with its own problems vis-a-vis the authorities. But this particular aggressive act at once aroused many of its members to outraged protest. First, the Soviet government’s action was so blatant, so crushing and so universally condemned that few liberally minded people could fall to be indignant, however passive or even approving many other Soviet citizens might be. More important still was the fascination which the democratization in Czechoslovakia had naturally held for Soviet liberals, giving them the hope that the same process might one day occur in the USSR These hopes, as some had foreseen would happen, were now dashed.

The demonstration of August 25th and other acts of protest by Soviet citizens form the core of this chapter. Further such acts feature, for various reasons, in different chapters, while Chapter 5 records the trial of the demonstrators and the circumstances surrounding it. All this material gives a vivid preview of Nataliia Gorbanevskaia’s remarkable book Midday: the Case of the Demonstration of August 25th, 1968, on Red Square, which covers the same historic events in greater detail.

No. 3 of the Chronicle came out only ten days after the invasion an reported thus:

On August 21, 1968, the forces of five member-countries of the Warsaw Pact carried out a treacherous and unprovoked attack on Czechoslovakia.

The aggressive actions of the USSR and her allies met with a sharp rebuff from world public opinion.

This issue of the Chronicle will deal with the events in our country which in one way or another are connected with the question of Czechoslovakia.

The facts show clearly that even in conditions which practically preclude the possibility of resistance, the struggle for the realization in practice of the principles of humanism and justice has not ceased …

On July 29th a letter was handed in to the Czechoslovak embassy, signed by five Soviet Communists. It approved the new course of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and condemned Soviet pressure on Czechoslovakia.

On July 30th, Valerii Pavlinchuk died. A young physicist from Obninsk, one of the most active and public-spirited people and communists of the city, a talented scientist and teacher, he was expelled from the party and dismissed from his work for circulating samizdat. Shortly before his death he sent an open letter to Alexander Dubcek, in which he directly expressed his solidarity with the new political course in Czechoslovakia, seeing it as an example of real socialist construction, free from dogmatism and excessive police control.

Even before the invasion, Czech newspapers had disappeared from the book-stalls, and with the invasion L’Humanité, L’Unita, the Morning Star, Borba, Rinascita and other publications ceased to arrive. Regular jamming of broadcasts from foreign radio stations began. The press and the ether were monopolized by our own propaganda.

On August 24th, in Moscow’s October Square, a certain citizen shouted out a slogan against the invasion of Czechoslovakia and was roughly beaten up by some strangers in plain clothes. Two of them hustled him into a car and drove off; the third remained beside a second car. Indignant onlookers began to demand that the police should detain this participant in the assault. But the police only examined his papers.

Many incidents are known of non-attendance on principle at meetings held with the aim of achieving unanimous approval for the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia. There have also been cases where people have found the courage either to refrain from voting or to vote against giving such approval. This happened at the Institute of the International Workers’ Movement, at the Institute of the Russian Language, in one of the departments of Moscow State University, at the Institute of World Economics and International Affairs, at the Institute of Philosophy and at the Institute of Radio Technology and Electronics.

Pamphlets containing protests against the occupation of Czechoslovakia have come to circulate widely in Moscow. The text of one of these documents is printed below.

LET US THINK FOR OURSELVES

The Central Committee and the majority of members of the Communist Party of China, also of the Communist Parties of Albania, Indonesia, North Korea and the so-called ‘parallel Communist Parties’ of Japan, India and Australia declare that ‘bourgeois revisionism’ and open counter-revolution are triumphant in the USSR, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, having unmasked the cult of Stalin and his crimes and not having recognized the genius of Mao, ‘has betrayed the ideals of proletarian dictatorship’, that ‘the Soviet press slanders China’, and so on.

But supposing a few of our ardent successors of Stalin or Beria suddenly decided to call on our Chinese, Albanian and other brothers to come to their aid?

What if the tanks and parachutists of these brothers suddenly appeared during the night in the streets of our towns? And if their soldiers, in the name of rescuing and defending the ideals of communism – as they understand them – began to arrest the leaders of our party and state, to close the newspapers, shut down the radio stations, and shoot those who dared to resist, the crowd which had gathered, ones who had expressed their sympathy with us, were arrested along with us, and released only late in the evening. During the night searches were made of all those held, on the charge of ‘group activities flagrantly violating public order’. One of us, Vadim Delone, had already been conditionally sentenced under this article earlier, for his part in the demonstration of January 22nd, 1967, on Pushkin Square. After the search I was released, probably because I had two children to look after. I am continually being summoned to give evidence. I refuse to give evidence on the organization and conduct of the demonstration, since it was a peaceful demonstration which did not disturb public order. But I did give evidence about the rough and illegal actions of the people who detained us: I am ready to testify to this before world public opinion.

My comrades and I are happy that we were able to take part in this demonstration, that we were able, if only for a moment, to interrupt the torrent of barefaced lies and the cowardly silence, to show that not all the citizens of our country are in agreement with the violence which is being used in the name of the Soviet people. We hope that the people of Czechoslovakia have learned, or will learn about this. And the belief that the Czechs and the Slovaks, when thinking about the Soviet people, will think not only of the occupiers, but also of us, gives us strength and courage.

NATALIIA GORBANEVSKAIA

A team of investigators of the Moscow City Procuracy is conducting the investigation into the demonstration. They are Akimova, Gnevkovskaia, Lopushenkov, Galakhov and Soloviev. Three of them worked on the investigation into the Pushkin Square demonstration of January 22nd, 1967. General supervision of the progress of the investigation is in the hands of the Moscow Procurator’s assistant, Fedorov. The participants in the demonstration have been charged under article 190-3, which specifies a sentence of up to three years for obstructing the flow of transport and the work of state institutions. It has been learned for certain that-as part of the pre-trial investigation -material of a purely personal nature is being collected and that untrue versions of events are being concocted, which provide opportunities for false and misleading interpretations.

Meanwhile the people who committed sadistic and hooligan acts in the square, in particular the beating up of Fainberg and Litvinov, have had no measures taken against them.

Reports have come in of incidents in other towns of the country. In Leningrad and the Baltic Republics leaflets condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia have come to circulate widely.

In Tartu a student has been arrested for writing a protest on a cinema wall. The name of the student is not known.

In Leningrad on August 1st and 2nd four people were arrested: a legal adviser, Iurii Gendler; a chemist, Lev Kvachevskii; an engineer, Evgenii Shashenkov; and a jurist, Nikolai Danilov. They were searched on an absurd pretext, and literature of allegedly anti-Soviet content was confiscated.

The real reason for their arrest was an attempt to write a letter about Czechoslovakia. The majority of those arrested had previously been subjected to repression.

More detailed information about pending trials in Moscow and Leningrad will be known later.

Subsequent issues reported more detail on the Tartu student, then further immediate protests:

The Estonian student who wrote CZECHS, WE ARE YOUR BROTHERS on a cinema wall in Tartu on the night of August 21st-22nd was savagely beaten up while in detention. His kidneys were damaged and he is still in hospital. Now he has been removed from hospital by KGB men, and so far nothing is known about his fate.

LENINGRAD. On the night of August 21st-22nd, 1968, a 4 20-year-old Leningrader, Boguslavskii, wrote on the sculpture of three horses by Klodt: BREZHNEV – GET OUT OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA. He was arrested immediately on Anichkov Bridge and two weeks later was sentenced under article 70 to five years in a strict-regime labor camp. In October the Russian Supreme Court, considering his appeal, reclassified his action under article 1901 and consequently altered his sentence to three years in an ordinary-regime camp (the maximum penalty under this article).

MOSCOW. On one of the first days after the Czechoslovak invasion, Vladimir Karasev, a graduate of the Physics Faculty at Moscow University, hung a placard up in the hall of the main Moscow University building, and began collecting signatures in protest against the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia. When not long afterwards some university security men came up, he had managed to collect no more than four signatures. As Karasev refused to go with the security men of his own accord, they threw him to the ground and dragged him off by his arms and legs. One of the postmen from post office V-234, who appeared at this point, hit Karasev in the face a few times, shouting abusive political slogans at him: ‘Fascist, Bandera-ite’ and so on. At the Police headquarters they demanded that Karasev write an explanation of the motives for his action, and then sent him off to a mental hospital, where he then spent about three months. On his discharge from the hospital, Karasev fixed himself up with a job as a stoker in a factory near Moscow.

NOVOSIBIRSK. On the night of August 25th, 1968, slogans condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia appeared on several public buildings in the Akademgorodok suburb of Novosibirsk. One of them read: BARBARIANS-GET OUT OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA. Dogs were used in the search for those who had written the slogans, but no one was found. From previous experience it was known that the slogans would not wash off easily and so they were covered with newspapers.

MOSCOW Bopolov, a student of the Institute of Foreign Languages, wrote a letter to the ‘Voice of America’ condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia; he did not send the letter and lost it, but it was later found by somebody in the Institute; a meeting of his fellow students voted his expulsion from the Komsomol and recommended to the Rector that he be expelled from the Institute. Three hours later Bopolov threw himself into the Moscow river, but was saved and put into a mental hospital.

Marina Melikyan, a lecturer in the Department of Russian for Foreigners at Moscow University, voted against a resolution expressing approval of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and was dismissed ‘at her own request’.

Aronov, a member of the Institute of Organic Element Compounds, abstained at a meeting where Czechoslovakia was discussed. The Institute did not apply for an extension to his Moscow residence permit and he was dismissed from work when his permit expired.

But the colleagues of protesters were not always without a spirit of solidarity, as the next item (of 1969) – about the same institute as Aronov’s -shows:

MOSCOW. In May of this year Rokhlin, a Master of Chemical Sciences at the Institute of Organic Element Compounds, was considered along with other candidates for competitive reelection, at a meeting of the Academic Council. The Director of the Institute, Academician Nesmeianov, called upon the members of the Academic Council to vote against the re-election of Rokhlin. ‘I am a man who remembers certain sorts of things,’ said this former President of the Academy of Sciences. ‘Last year Rokhlin was one of those who spoke at a meeting in the Institute against the sending of Soviet troops to Czechoslovakia.’ In spite of expectations to the contrary, this speech did not affect the result of the voting. Rokhlin was elected Senior Research Officer, with an average ratio of votes for and against.

Thus the critical spirit did not disappear with the passage of time. Moreover, the distorted Soviet press reporting from Czechoslovakia also came in for attack.

LENINGRAD. In February 1969 V. M. Lavrov, Doctor of Geology and Head of the Coal Department at the All-Union Geological Research Institute (VSEGEI), sent an unsigned letter to the offices of the paper Pravda, addressed to the journalist Sergei Borzenko. The letter contained sharp criticism of Borzenko’s articles on the situation in Czechoslovakia, and the writer expressed the hope that ‘all honorable Leningraders would subscribe’ to his opinion. The letter was posted in a different district of the city from that of the Institute, but within three days Lavrov was faced with the charge of having written an anonymous political letter. Several closed party meetings were held in the Institute, with KGB participation. Lavrov was demoted to rank-and-file geological work, and the Coal Department was purged.

Not surprisingly, the suicide of the Czech student Ian Palach in Prague on January 16th 1969, struck a chord in the willingness for self-sacrifice of the Soviet civil rights activists, as shown in the attempt to imitate him by Il’ia Rips of Riga (see pp. 243-4) and in the next two items. The second one-an appeal by Grigorenko and Takhimovich6 was a logical follow-up to their visit to the Czechoslovak embassy on July 29th, 1968.

Moscow. On January 25th, 1969, the day of Jan Palach’s funeral, two girl students of Moscow University appeared on Maiakovskii Square with a placard on which were written two slogans: ETERNAL MEMORY TO JAN PALACH and FREEDOM FOR CZECHOSLOVAKIA. They stood in the square behind the statue of Maiakovskii for about twelve minutes. A silent crowd gradually began to gather round them. Then a group of young people, calling themselves volunteer police but without any armbands, came up to the girls. They took away the placard and tore it up, but, after a consultation, let the students go.

TO THE CITIZENS OF THE SOVIET UNION:

The series of self-immolations begun on January 16th, 1969, by the Prague student Jan Palach in protest against the interference in the internal affairs of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic continues. Yet another (for the time being, the last) human torch burst into flames in Wenceslas Square in Prague on February 21st.

This protest, taking such a terrible form, is aimed above all at US, THE SOVIET PEOPLE. It is the unasked-for and in no way justified presence Of 0 U R armies which causes such anger and despair among the Czechoslovak people. It is not for nothing that the death of Jan Palach has stirred the entire working population of Czechoslovakia.

We all carry our share of the blame for his loss, as for that of our other Czechoslovak brothers who have committed suicide. By our approval of the intervention of our armies, by our justification of it, or simply by our silence, we are helping to ensure that human torches will continue to burn in the squares of Prague and other cities.

The Czechs and Slovaks have always considered us their brothers. Can we really allow the word ‘Soviet’ to become for them a synonym for the word ‘enemy’?!

Citizens of our great country!

The greatness of a country lies not in the might of its armies brought down upon a small freedom-loving people but in its MORAL strength.

Can we really go on watching in silence as our brothers perish?!

By now it is already clear to all that the presence of our armies on the territory of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic is serving neither the defense interests of our motherland nor the interests of the countries of the socialist commonwealth.

Do we really not have the courage to admit that we have made a tragic mistake and to do everything in our power to correct it?

That is our right and our duty!

We call upon all Soviet people who do not approve of this rash and hasty act to use all legal means to achieve the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia and a renunciation of interference in that country’s internal affairs! Only in this way can the friendship between our peoples be renewed.

Long live the heroic Czechoslovak people!

Long live Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship!

February 28th, 1969 PETR GRIGORENKO, IVAN IAKHMOVICH

A year after the invasion, No. 9 produced for the occasion the following evidence, revealing that opposition and protest had far exceeded what was known to the outside world and even – so spontaneous had it been – some of the best informed people in Moscow:

Recently yet more expressions of protest against the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia have become known. There are grounds for supposing that the number of such incidents is far greater than it has been possible to discover. For instance, in October 1968 it was reported to Leningrad district party committees that there had by that time been seventeen acts of protest in Leningrad. The Chronicle has reported only one of them-the inscriptions made by the 20-year-old Boguslavskii. One more incident has become known: a car drove at high speed across Palace Square, and two packets of leaflets were thrown out of the windows. One of the packets burst, scattering leaflets in all directions; the second fell to the ground without coming open. The car managed to get away. Next day, this request was made in a Leningrad radio program of announcements: if anyone had noticed the number of a car out of which Ca parcel of valuable documents’ fell on to Palace Square, would he please inform the authorities of that number.

In the town of Roshal, in Moscow Region, the 23-year-old Valerii Lukanin displayed a poster in his window this spring protesting against the continuing presence of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia. He was dispatched to a psychiatric hospital, and, without being informed of the fact, was declared insane, with the diagnosis ‘a serious form of schizophrenia’. The fact that his case was being investigated was concealed from him: Lukanin’s actions were classified under article 70 of the Russian Criminal Code. 7 Nor was he informed that on June 23rd there had been a trial at which compulsory treatment in a special psychiatric hospital was ordered. Lukanin’s mother was threatened that if she told her son about the trial when she visited him, she would in future not be allowed visits. On July 18th Valerii Lukanin was sent to the special psychiatric hospital in Kazan.

At the beginning of July, a Doctor of Biological Sciences, Sher, was brought to trial in Rostov-on-Don. He was charged under articles 65 (espionage) and 70 of the Russian Criminal Code. In practical terms the charge related to a letter Sher had written to the Central Committee of the party, in which he protested at the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia, and at the revival of Stalinism: Sher demanded in particular that all those who had worked with Stalin-and especially A. N. Kosygin -should resign their posts. On the grounds that Sher was charged with ‘industrial espionage’, the trial was declared a closed one at the request of the Procurator. The judicial investigation failed to confirm the charges and the defense demanded a verdict of not guilty. The court reclassified Sher’s actions under article 190-1 of the Russian Criminal Code, and sentenced him to two years in an ordinary-regime camp.

In one of his articles Anatolii Kuznetsov has reported that soon after the demonstration of August 25th, 1968, he found a letter in his Tula letterbox supporting the demonstrators’ action.

One ironical comment on the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia was made by students of the Estonian Agricultural Academy at the traditional student carnival last autumn in Tartu. The students held up placards with slogans, the following of which are known: LONG LIVE THE WISE AND FLEXIBLE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE SOVIET UNION; WELCOME, TOURISTS IN YOUR TANKS; YANKEES, GET BACK BEHIND LAKE CHUDSKOE; WELCOME TO THAT UNSWERVING LENINIST, COMRADE LENTSMAN.

The Chronicle also carried these items under the heading:

THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE INVASION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

On August 20th, 1969, a group of Soviet citizens issued the following declaration:

On August 21st last year a tragic event took place: Czechoslovakia, a friendly country, was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops. The aim of this action was to put a stop to the process of democratization which had begun in that country. The whole world had been following the post-January developments in Czechoslovakia with hope. It seemed that the idea of socialism, which had been discredited during the Stalin period, would now be rehabilitated. The Warsaw Pact tanks destroyed this hope. On this sad anniversary we declare that we disagree, as before, with the decision to invade, which has endangered the future of socialism.

We declare our solidarity with the Czechoslovak people, who wanted to prove that socialism with a human face was possible.

These lines are prompted by the pain we feel for our homeland, which we wish to see truly great, free and happy.

And we are firmly convinced that a people which oppresses other peoples cannot be free or happy.

T. BAEVA, I. VISHNEVSKAIA, I. GABAT, N. GORBANEVSKAIA, Z. M. GRIGORENKO, M. DZHEMILEV, N. EMELKINA, V. KRASIN, S. KOVALEV, A. LEVITIN-KRASNOV, L. PETROVSKII, L. PLIUSHCH, G. PODIAPOLSKII, L. TERNOVSKII, I. IAKIR, P. IAKIR, A. IAKOBSON.

On August 21, leaflets appeared in the housing-blocks where Moscow writers live, near the ‘Airport’ underground station and at Ziuzino, and also in the Moscow University hostel on the Lenin Hills, protesting at the continued presence of allied troops in Czechoslovakia. One of the three texts of these leaflets is signed ‘Union of Communards’.

On the anniversary of the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia, the mathematician Aleksandr Volpin, well known for his regular writings in defense of human rights, sent the following proposals to the USSR Supreme Soviet:

1. To withdraw the Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia immediately.

2. To implement this withdrawal in such a way as to restore to the Czechoslovak people in the greatest possible degree their national rights, and to liquidate all the undesirable consequences of the presence of foreign troops on Czechoslovak territory.

3. In memory of the sacrifices made by the Czechoslovak people, the most famous of which is the life of Jan Palach, one of the Moscow streets or squares to be renamed after him, for example Istoricheskii Passage. The choice of a suitable street or square for renaming to be agreed with representatives of the Czechoslovak people.

4. Czechoslovakia to receive compensation for all material losses incurred due to the presence of Soviet troops on its territory.

Hardly expecting his proposals to be speedily accepted, Volpin nevertheless reminds the Supreme Soviet that ‘any measures it may take to implement these proposals would be in accordance with the principles of international law, which the Soviet Union has many times supported, and would help to restore its reputation as a country which faithfully follows these principles’.

A few months later, on Soviet Constitution Day, another incident took place in Moscow: the arrest of a girl who tried to distribute copies of a poem she had written. The girl concerned was later sentenced to indefinite detention in the prison psychiatric hospital in Kazan, the Procurator comparing her act to the attempt on the cosmonauts’ lives of January 1969. The Chronicle printed her poem.’ This was its first report:

On December 5th, 1969, Valeria Novodvorskaia was arrested in the Palace of Congresses, where she was scattering and handing out leaflets before the start of a performance of the opera October. Novodvorskaia made no attempt to escape, and continued to hand out leaflets until she was approached by KGB men. The leaflets were written in verse form, and the theme was our tanks in Czechoslovakia. There was probably also something in them about the constitution. After Novodvorskaia’s arrest, several copies of three manuscript booklets of her own poetry were removed from her flat.

Valeria Novodvorskaia is nineteen. She finished school in 1968 with a medal, and gained a place with honors in the French Department of the Foreign Languages Institute. At the time of her arrest she was in her second year there.

The Chronicle’s regular samizdat section has carried two categories of material on Czechoslovakia. That devoted to the county’s ‘experiment’ and the course of events there is-since it would interrupt the narrative here-presented in Chapter M. The second category is summarized in No. 5 under the heading:

OPEN LETTERS AND ARTICLES BY SOVIET AUTHORS ON THE QUESTION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, at the end of July 1968, when the Soviet press was conducting a particularly violent campaign against the democratization in Czechoslovakia and when the threat of intervention seemed more real than at any time before or after, there had already appeared two documents expressing sympathy for Czechoslovakia and indignation at the propaganda campaign: a letter to all members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the whole Czechoslovak people signed by five communists, P. Grigorenko, A. Kosterin, V. Pavlinchuk, S. Pisarev and I. Iakhmovich; and an open letter by Anatolii Marchenko.

The sending of Soviet troops to Czechoslovakia under the guise of ‘fraternal help’, unanimously approved in the pages of the Soviet press,”‘ met with various forms of protest from individual Soviet citizens. Among the samizdat reactions to these tragic events may be mentioned: the letter of Ivan Yakhimovich;12 ‘September 1969’ by Valentin Komarov;13 ‘The Logic of Tanks’, an article by an anonymous author; ‘An appeal to Communists’ signed ‘Communist’; a letter by P. Grigorenko and A. Kosterin;14 and also a letter to the Party’s Central Committee 15 from A. Kosterin, resigning from the party ‘which has become the gendarme of Europe’.

All these documents, though differing in style and form, make the same points: (a) the intervention in Czechoslovakia is the result of a revival of Stalinism; (b) the real reason for it was a wish to suppress democratization, freedom and the rule of law, and to destroy a dangerous experiment in combining socialism with democracy; (c) the invasion was a moral defeat for the occupiers; (d) our people and intelligentsia are collectively responsible for what has happened, and all honest, thinking people in our country must unite.

Source: Peter Reddaway, comp., Uncensored Russia: protest and dissent in the Soviet Union (New York: American Heritage Press, 1972), pp. 95-112.