No 24 : 5 March 1972

24.1 The case of Vladimir Bukovsky

1. Recent issues of the Chronicle have been published in full in Russian only in the journal Volnoye slovo. Samizdat. Izbrannoye, which is edited in Frankfurt. No. 1 of this journal contains Chronicle 21; No. 2 contains Chronicle 22, and so on.

2. Among signatories of the 31 January 1972 letter to The Times (London) were Lord Gardiner, Arthur Koestler, Iris Murdoch. Harold Pinter and Tony Smythe. Another letter in Bukovsky’s defence, signed by 36 psychiatrists, appeared in The Times on 30 March.

3. The protest against “the persistent repression of freedom of speech in the Soviet Union” by the International Commission of Jurists was widely reported on 12 January 1972, e.g. in The Guardian.

4. See samizdat letters in defence of Bukovsky, reprinted in Possev No 4, 1972 (pp. 5-7). On Mrs. T. Khodorovich see Chronicle 19.

5. See condensed version of Sebreghts’ text in Possev No 5, 1971, p.24.

6. Chalidze treats these matters at length in his absorbing compilation of May 1971, “A Foreigner came to visit me”, Volnoye slovo No. 2, 1972, pp. 55-101.

7. On Pisarev see P. Reddaway,Uncensored Russia, London and New York, 1972, pp. 232-33.

8. On 4 May the Daily Telegraph (London) reported that 20 of Bukovsky’s friends had just appealed to Amnesty International for aid in putting an end to deliberately cruel treatment of him and his relatives, and in obtaining his release.

9. The transcript of the trial was published in Russian in Russkaya mysl, Paris, 2 March 1972 (not 9 March, as printed in note 74 to Chronicle 23), and in Volnoye slovo No. 3. An English version was published in Survey No. 83, London.