RIGA
On 7 November 1969, the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution [1], E. Liepin and Misulovich were arrested on a charge of infringing Article 183-2 (Latvian SSR Criminal Code = Article 190-2, RSFSR Code): “gross disrespect towards the State flag”, in fact of burning the flag of Soviet Latvia.
Misulovich (corrected to Misudovin, see CCE 15.12) was sentenced to 18 months, and Liepin to one year’s, imprisonment in a corrective-labour colony.
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This information is given in the Soviet Latvia newspaper (8 April 1970) in “The lessons of a certain case”.
The deed was carried out, it reports, in a state of intoxication in the presence of M. Vinunas, A. Burshtein and E. Vilkov – “all at the time students of Riga colleges – and also of G. Karpus, B. Veinart and G. Grauberg.” Those present were expelled from the Latvia State University and Riga Medical Institute or have since been “discussed at their place of work”.
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Misulovich [Misudovin] was to all intents and purposes no longer a Soviet citizen: on the following day, 8 November, he was due to leave for Israel.
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LENINGRAD
On 18 January 1970, Leningradskaya Pravda published an article by A. Yenina entitled “Renegades”.
She reported that Eruand Lalayants, a translator and specialist in the Indonesian language, had written “anonymous letters to various organisations, some of them international”, signing them “Headquarters of the Russian (Российской) Socialist Party”.
Lalayants was sentenced “to several [three, ed.] years deprivation of freedom, to be served in a strict-regime corrective-labour colony.”
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The same article deals with Alexander Mozhaikin, shift foreman at the Avtovo construction combine, who “sent threatening letters to various Soviet public organisations” in the name of the Kirov Factory on the outskirts of Leningrad.
Mozhaikin “was handed over to the comrades court (общественный суд) of his collective”. The meeting condemned Mozhaikin and removed him from the post of foreman, after refusing to let him resign.
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KEMEROVO REGION (central Siberia)
On 6 June 1970, the Kuzbass newspaper (Kemerovo) reported the guilty verdict passed on Vladimir Vekshin and Polina Saburova.
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Vekshin is senior technician at the radio station in Pogranichny, a settlement near the town of Beryozovsky [2]. According to the author of the Kuzbass article “The Slanderers” (senior legal counsellor P. Pogorevnoi), Vekshin
“progressed from verbal … to written anti-Soviet propaganda. In August 1969 he deliberately left a hurriedly concocted leaflet in the smoking-room of the Yuzhnaya mine’s service centre, appealing to the reader to circulate it ‘so that at least two people get to know about it’.”
A search of Vekshin’s home resulted in the confiscation of an Encyclopaedic Dictionary and a set of the journal Tekhnika-Molodyozhi (Technology for Youth) with numerous notes in the margins.
At his trial Vekshin expressed remorse.
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Polina Saburova of Kiselyovsk city [3]
“wrote dozens of letters slandering our system, diluting the text with religious phrases. She zealously circulated her scribblings wherever she could … Doubts that she might be mentally defective proved to be unfounded.”
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NOTES
- The Tsarist Empire adhered to the Julian calendar; the Russian Orthodox Church still does so.
In 1918 the new Soviet regime switched to the Gregorian calendar, thereby catching up with Europe which had changed from one to the other in the 16th century.
↩︎ - Beryozovsky is a town in the north Kemerovo Region, population 34,800 (1970).
↩︎ - A city south of Kemerovo (pop. 127,000; 1970).
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A Chronicle of Current Events 