[1]
OPEN LETTER
On 26 July 1968, a thirty-year-old loader, Anatoly Marchenko, sent an Open Letter to the editors of the Czechoslovak newspapers Rude pravo, Literarni listi and Prace. In his letter Marchenko voiced his protest against the campaign of slander and insinuations against Czechoslovakia, and spoke of the threat of intervention in that country.
Anatoly T. Marchenko (1938-1986)
Two days later, on 28 July 1968, Anatoly Marchenko was arrested in the street and sent to Butyrka Prison in Moscow. He was charged under Article 108 (“Infringement of ‘passport’ (identity document) regulations”: RSFSR Criminal Code) [1].
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“MY TESTIMONY”
From 1960 to 1966, Anatoly Marchenko served a sentence in the Mordovian political camps on a trumped-up charge of treason (Article 64, RSFSR Criminal Code).
On completing his term of imprisonment, Marchenko wrote My Testimony, an uncompromising, factual documentation of conditions in contemporary Soviet political camps and prisons. The facts given in Marchenko’s book could not be refuted by the USSR’s punitive agencies. The author started to be the object of administrative blackmail and arbitrary measures.
After a short interval he received two warnings that he was infringing the passport regulations. The first was delivered after he had undergone a serious medical operation; the second was simply illegal.
On 21 August 1968, Moscow’s Timiryazev district people’s court presided over by Judge Romanov [2] examined the case of Marchenko, accused under Article 108 (RSFSR Criminal Code).
A seriously ill man, suffering from progressive deafness and anaemia, who has spent a great part of his life in the unbearable conditions of strict-regime camps and corrective prisons, Marchenko received the maximum sentence provided by law, one year of strict isolation from society.
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APPEAL
A group of Marchenko’s friends — Ludmila Alexeyeva, Larissa Bogoraz, Yury Gerchuk, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Petro Grigorenko, Victor Krasin, Pavel Litvinov and Anatoly Jakobson — appealed to the citizens of our country in a letter that revealed the true reason for Marchenko’s arrest.
During the night of 7-8 August Irina Belogorodskaya was arrested on charges of circulating this letter.
She was charged under Article 190-1 (RSFSR Criminal Code), which carries a sentence of up to three years imprisonment for spreading information “which defames the Soviet social system”. A search was carried out in Belogorodskaya’s flat and in the flat of three of the letter’s authors.
Irina Belogorodskaya is so far being held in Lefortovo Prison.
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[2]
LETTER TO EMBASSY
On 29 July a letter was handed in to the Czechoslovak embassy, signed by five Soviet Communists: Petro Grigorenko, Alexei Kostyorin, Valery Pavlinchuk, Sergei Pisarev and Ivan Yakhimovich.
It approved the new course of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and condemned Soviet pressure on Czechoslovakia (CCE 5.1 [1.2]).
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Valery Pavlinchuk died the next day (30 July).
A young physicist from Obninsk [3], one of the town’s most active and public-spirited people and Communists, a talented scientist and teacher, Pavlinchuk was expelled from the Party and dismissed from his job for circulating samizdat.
Shortly before his death Pavlinchuk sent an Open Letter to Czech leader Alexander Dubcek. It expressed his solidarity with the new political course in Czechoslovakia, which he saw as an example of real socialist construction, free from dogmatism and excessive police control.
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[3]
CZECH NEWSPAPERS
Even before the invasion, Czech newspapers had disappeared from Soviet book-stalls [4], and with the invasion L’Humanité, Unità, The Morning Star, Borba, Rinascita and other foreign communist publications ceased to arrive.
Regular jamming of broadcasts from foreign radio stations began. The press and the airwaves were monopolized by our own propaganda.
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[4]
OCTOBER SQUARE
On 24 August, 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 plainclothes.
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.
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[5]
NON-ATTENDANCE
Many incidents are known of principled non-attendance at meetings held to secure unanimous approval for sending troops into Czechoslovakia. There were also cases where people found the courage, either to refrain from voting or to vote against such approval.
This happened at institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences (USSR AS): the International Workers’ Movement (USSR AS), the Russian Language (CCE 2.2); in a department of Moscow State University; at the Institutes of World Economics & International Affairs (MGIMO), Philosophy (USSR AS) and Radio Technology & Electronics.
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[6]
ARRESTS
Two students of the Mechanics-Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University were arrested after gathering signatures for a petition of protest. These students are now free.
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NOTES
- A day after Marchenko’s arrest a KGB memorandum (29 July 1968, 1776-А [R]) informed the Central Committee that he had been arrested and a copy of his letter confiscated.
↩︎ - Judge Vladimir Romanov presided over other Moscow trials of dissidents and rights activists during the following years.
↩︎ - In the late 1960s, the Kaluga Region town of Obninsk had a population of 38,000 (1967).
↩︎ - “In fact, Czechoslovak newspapers remained on sale up until 21 August,” wrote the Chronicle, over two years later (CCE 18.14). “Their ‘disappearance’ can only be explained by an increased demand for the same number of copies available.”
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