In May 1976 the “Group to Assist the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreements in the USSR” was formed (CCE 40.14) by 11 individuals [1] who were already taking part in the human rights movement in the Soviet Union.
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DOCUMENTS
In the two and a half months of its existence the Helsinki Group has produced five documents.
These detail violations by the Soviet authorities of the humanitarian articles of the Helsinki Agreements and have been passed to the public and to heads of the governments which signed the Final Act of the European Conference:
- [1] Persecution of Mustafa Dzhemilev (18 May);
- [2] International postal & telephonic communications infringed (27 May);
- [3] Conditions of imprisonment of prisoners of conscience (17 June);
- [4] Separated families striving to be reunited (17 June);
- [5] Repressive acts against religious families (17 June).
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APPEALS
In addition, members of the group have issued several appeals.
These requested: the formation of International Commissions to look into Documents 1 and 3 (above), and concerned the transfer of Valentyn Moroz to the Serbsky Institute for a psychiatric examination (CCE 40.7).
Each document was signed by several members of the Group.
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APPRAISAL
Before 1 August 1976, the first anniversary of the signing of the Final Act, the group issued “An appraisal of the influence of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe with regard to human rights in the USSR” [2].
The Appraisal was signed by nine of the Group’s members:
Ludmila Alexeyeva, Alexander Ginzburg, Pyotr Grigorenko, Alexander Korchak, Malva Landa, Anatoly Marchenko, Yury Orlov, Vladimir Slepak, and Anatoly Shcharansky.
The overall conclusion of the report’s compilers is as follows.
- The Soviet Government does not intend to fulfil its international obligations on human rights;
- As before, hundreds of political prisoners are languishing in prisons and camps … The regime under which they are held has in some respects grown crueller during 1976;
- The practice of psychiatric repression has neither been condemned nor curtailed;
- There have been no changes for the better, on the freedom to emigrate, or the more private issue of reunification of families …;
- All independent sources of information are being persecuted;
- Every attempt to create associations independent of the CPSU leadership are persecuted.
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The reaction of the Soviet authorities to accusations of violating human rights, the report notes, has recently intensified. The coincidental effect of a series of internal and international factors is responsible:
(1) the Soviet government undertook the obligations concerning human rights in the Final Act “in exchange” for important political concessions by Western governments. This led to admittedly very tentative, but nonetheless unprecedented, attempts by Western governments to insist that the Soviet government should implement the obligations it had accepted;
(2) information persistently forwarded to the world public by members of the civil rights movement in the USSR has apparently “begun to penetrate the consciousness of wide circles of Western society, even to exert an influence on the tactics of Western Communist Parties”.
The compilers of the report write:
“Extrapolating from the past year’s experience:
- if the civil rights movement in the USSR can expand its work, keeping people within the country and in the West informed,
- and if the Western public, at the same time, … was to actively support the human rights movement in the USSR,
- the Soviet authorities would be forced to moderate their repressive policies.
“This, in turn, would make it easier for citizens in the USSR to implement democratic rights simply by asserting them. The likelihood of such a development is small. That should not check our efforts, however, since they will increase the chances of such advances.
“The official Soviet reaction to the European Conference has evolved.
“From an energetic condemnation before the Conference of the demand for ‘a free exchange of people and ideas’ to a total disregard immediately after the Final Act was signed for the humanitarian articles it contains.
“The cruel sentences passed on Vladimir Osipov (CCE 37.2), Sergei Kovalyov (CCE 38.3) and members of the democratic movement in Estonia (CCE 38.4); and the trials of Tverdokhlebov, Dzhemilev, Roitburd, Igrunov, Vinarov and Malkin (CCE 36.10 [13], CCE 37.3) have been a ‘demonstration of firmness’.
“This was a blow to the human rights movement. It was aimed at
- intimidating those who sympathised with the human rights movement, and
- testing the state of Western public opinion after the Conference.
“If the West had reacted sluggishly, the ‘demonstration of firmness’ would finally consolidate the Soviet interpretation of the Final Act’s humanitarian articles. It would have confirmed the unbalanced and already habitual interpretation of the principle of non-interference in internal affairs.
“The growing attention paid by Western governments and public opinion, however, to violations of human rights in the USSR has forced the Soviet authorities to make a number of demonstrative concessions. They released Leonid Plyushch and Mikhail Naritsa; they declared Valentyn Moroz to be sane; they permitted certain well-known activists in the Jewish movement to emigrate; and so on.
“At the same time repression continued but, for one reason or another, the people targeted were little known to the public.”
Moscow Helsinki Group
The report names eight people arrested or subjected to psychiatric repression since the signing of the Final Act. The Group’s information is incomplete, and these are probably only a small proportion of those who have lost their freedom during this time.
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EMIGRATION
On the issue of emigration the manoeuvring of the authorities has followed approximately the same pattern.
At first, the authorities simply ignored references to the humanitarian articles of the Final Act on the pretext that Israel had not signed it.
Then the idea was put forward that the reunification of families would be resolved in accordance with the Helsinki Agreements, but on the basis that
“the interests of the State are more important than human rights”.
Finally, in June 1976, Obidin, the head of the All-Union Visa & Registration Department (OVIR), stated that permission to leave the USSR would be given strictly in accordance with the clause on the reunion of families in the Final Act. Inasmuch as Soviet law, however, considers families to be married couples and their unmarried children, permission to emigrate would be given, said Obidin, only to those related in this way.
Refusals because of “insufficiently close relationship” have become, since then, as common as a refusal “for reasons of security” was before.
The Final Act of the Helsinki Conference has thereby aided in the restriction of emigration. Permission for a few well-known activists and long-standing “refuseniks” to emigrate is merely a cover for the growing number of refusals.
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CIRCULATION OF INFORMATION
A complex of measures by the Soviet authorities to make the circulation of information more difficult is a crude violation of the letter and spirit of the Final Act.
This has affected political prisoners, first of all: a mass offensive was waged against their right of correspondence; a variety of pretexts were used to reduce already rare meetings with relatives; searches and inspections during which all handwritten material (including copies of complaints to official bodies) were confiscated, became common occurrences.
The authors of the Appraisal report
“One source of scepticism about the future of human rights in the USSR is the lack of any movement to bring Soviet legislation into formal correspondence with international conventions on human rights.”
As examples they cite the following inconsistencies:
(1) Article 126 of the 1936 USSR Constitution requires that the guiding nucleus of all organizations of working people, both non-governmental and State organizations, should be formed by the CPSU;
(2) Article 52 of the 1968 Marriage & Family Code obliges parents to raise their children in the spirit of the moral code of the “builders of communism”; and
(3) Article 70 and Article 190-1 of the 1960 RSFSR Criminal Code [3] and the corresponding laws in the other 14 Union Republics.
In the opinion of its members, the basic difficulties of the Group’s work lie not only in gathering information on violations of the Final Act’s humanitarian articles, but also in passing the Group’s documents to the heads of the governments which signed the Final Act.
There have been no notifications of the receipt of documents sent to the ambassadors of these countries in Moscow.
(See “Helsinki Monitoring Group”, 8 October 1976, CCE 42.10;
and “MHG documents, 1976-1982“)
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NOTES
An English version of this document was published at the time in “Reports of Helsinki-Accord Monitors in the Soviet Union”, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, US Congress: Washington DC, 24 February 1977.
The original Russian was published as Sbornik dokumentov Obshchestvennoi gruppy sodeistviya vypolneniyu Khelsinkskikh soglashenii by Khronika Press: New York (vol. 1, 1977).
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- After Vitaly Rubin’s departure for Israel (CCE 41.14 [10]) Vladimir Slepak joined the Group. Rubin became the group’s representative abroad. Later he was succeeded in that role by Ludmila Alexeyeva.
↩︎ - A reference to the process, from 1973 to 1975, whereby the Helsinki Agreement was drawn up and finalised.
From October 1977 to March 1978, there was a meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in the Yugoslavian capital Belgrade. Bringing together representatives of the 35 European and North American States that in August 1975 signed the Helsinki Final Act, the conference met to consider how the Accords were being implemented.
A second CSCE meeting of this kind was held in Madrid from November 1980 to September 1983. Subsequently, the organisation evolved into the OSCE (which includes USSR successor States in Central Asia, as well).
↩︎ - Article 70 constituted a “grave crime against the State” and was investigated by the KGB. Article 190-1 was introduced in 1966 and was investigated by the procurator’s office and the police.
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