TEN ITEMS
[1]
In May and June 1968 the RFSR Supreme Court considered the appeals of Leningrad members of the All-Russian Social-Christian Union (CCE 1.6). The sentences on those convicted were confirmed.
According to their sentences, Ogurtsov (15 years) and Sado (13 years) will spend the first five years of their terms of imprisonment under a prison regime. They are currently in Vladimir Prison.
Igor Ogurtsov (1937-2023)
The other accused are now in section 11 of the Mordovian Camps [1]. Their address is Mordovian ASSR, Potma, Yavas post office, postbox ZhKh 385/11.
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[2]
On the night of 21-22 August 1968, Boguslavsky, a 20-year-old Leningrader, wrote “BREZHNEV: GET OUT OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA” on the sculpture of three horses by Klodt.
He was arrested immediately, there on the Anichkov Bridge.
Two weeks later he was sentenced under Article 70 to five years of strict-regime labour camp. In October the RSFSR Supreme Court, considering his appeal, re-classified his action under Article 190-1, and consequently altered his sentence to three years in an ordinary-regime camp (the maximum penalty under the given Article).
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[3]
The Estonian student who, on the night of 21-22 August, wrote “CZECHS, WE ARE YOUR BROTHERS”, on a cinema wall in Tartu [2], was savagely beaten in detention.
His kidneys were damaged and he is still in hospital (update CCE 9.1 [7]).
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[4]
This spring, Kaidan, a student of Moscow University’s Philological Faculty, wrote a letter to his wife in another town.
In it he described; the circumstances surrounding the trial of Ginzburg, Galanskov, et al. (with extracts from the appeal of Bogoraz and Litvinov, “To World Public Opinion”); and the anti-Semitic outbursts he had witnessed at a Moscow railway station.
This letter was “accidentally” opened and fell into the hands of the KGB, who sent it to the Rector’s office.
In the first months of the academic year Kaidan was expelled from the Komsomol, excluded from the Department of Military Training, and finally expelled from the University.
At present he is in a psychiatric hospital after attempting to commit suicide.
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[5]
Between 22 and 28 October members of the Crimean Tartar movement were tried in Tashkent on a charge (Article 190-1) of making “deliberately false statements which defamed the Soviet social and governmental system”.
The basis of the charge was the 66th issue of their Newsletter. It recounted the events in Chirchik (Uzbekistan) on 21 April 1968, and issued an appeal to figures in the cultural field.
All the accused were sentenced to terms of imprisonment. Lyuman Umerov, Idris Kasymov and Shelket Seitabletev were given a year’s imprisonment and released as they had already served this term in their period of preventative detention.
Lennar Guseinov and Yusuf Sasinov were given a year’s suspended sentence.
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[6]
At present Svetlana Ametova, Aidyr Basiev, Rollan Kadiyev and others are being held in preventive detention in Tashkent on a similar charge, in connection with other issues of the Newletter.
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[7]
Arrested in Leningrad in August (CCE 3.4), Yury Gendler, Nikolai Danilov, Lev Kvachevsky, Anatoly Studenkov and Yevgeny Shashenkov have been charged under Article 70 for distributing “anti-Soviet literature.”
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[8]
The administrative surveillance of former political prisoner Leonid Rendel (CCE 1.5) ended in August.
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[9]
In recent months the following people have been freed from the Mordovian political camps [1]:
- Vladimir Osipov: sentenced to seven years under Article 70 in the first Phoenix case;
- Yaroslav Gevsich: sentenced to three years for Anti-Soviet Agitation & Propaganda in one of the so-called “nationalist” cases of 1965;
- Yury Shukhevich: who has served two terms. First he was sentenced at the age of 14 to ten years because his father had been leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) underground movement. The day he completed his term in Vladimir Prison he was re-arrested on a false charge of “Anti-Soviet Agitation” and sentenced to another ten years;
- Vladimir Yershov from Latvia, sentenced twice, who served more than 17 years under Article 53, paras. 9, 10, 11 and 12 (1926 RSFSR Criminal Code);
- Anatoly Gurov: sentenced to ten years under Article 64 [correction CCE 9.11] for fleeing to West Berlin.
Eduard Kuznetsov: same term and charge as Osipov, has been released from Vladimir Prison [3].
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[10]
According to information from a reliable source the book On the Events in Czechoslovakia was compiled by Felix Borovinsky and Boris Kozlov, who work in the socialist countries section of the Novosti Press Agency (APN).
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NOTES
- See CCE 33.4 for an account of these camps, and a map of the complex.
↩︎ - Estonia’s second largest city (pop. 90,459, 1970) after Tallinn. //(Named Yuryev between 1030 and 1919.)
↩︎ - Sentenced to death in 1970 at the “hijackers” trial (CCE 17.6-1); later commuted to 15 years’ imprisonment.
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A Chronicle of Current Events 