In February 1969 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 [CCE 2.4]. One of the students suggested to the Komsomol 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 USSR was arranged at the Institute on 25 February.
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 lathe-operator, came to hear the lecture. The lecture was intended for students of the group in which Motyl was studying and for members of the Komsomol 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 out again. This can only be explained by the fact that the lecturer must in reality have been a KGB 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 Komsomol decided to expel Dmitry Motyl from their organization.
*
Meanwhile, a new trial of representatives of the Crimean Tatar movement is being prepared in Tashkent. One of the accused, Ramzan Muratov, a hero of the partisan struggle [against the invading German army], has already been sentenced by the Tashkent City Court to one year’s imprisonment. The remaining ten individuals – Rollan Kadyev, Izzet Khairov and others – will be tried before the Uzbek SSR Supreme Court. They have been charged under Article 191-4 of the Uzbek Criminal Code (corresponding to Article 190-1 of the RSFSR Code).
In Simferopol [Crimea] the trial of Gomer Baev is in preparation. He is accused, like the others of distributing the Crimean Tatar Information Bulletins, but in his case the charges have been brought under the Article [of the Ukrainian Criminal Code] concerning “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”.
A Chronicle of Current Events 