EIGHT ENTRIES
[1]
MOSCOW
On 20 April 1972 the arrest took place of the storekeeper of the Institute of Psychology (USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences), Pyotr Petrovich STARCHIK. Starchik (b. 1937) has two children: the elder is six, the younger 10 months old.
The investigation into his case is being carried out by the head of the KGB investigation department for Moscow City & Region, Major Bardin. Pyotr Starchik has been charged under Article 70 (RSFSR Criminal Code).
*
In April a search was carried out in connection with “Case 24” at the home of Vyacheslav Velikanov and his wife Olga (CCE 21.2).
On 6 May 1972 a series of searches was carried out:
[1.1] In connection with Case 24 — at the homes of Pyotr Yakir, Anatoly Jakobson and Grigory Podyapolsky (all members of the Action Group), and at the homes of Irina Kaplun and Olga Joffe (CCE 16.10 [3]), I. Kristi, V. Gershovich, V. Gusarov, E. Armand (grand-niece of Lenin’s companion Inessa Armand), Andrei Dubrov, V. Batshev, Vladimir Albrekht, N. P. Lisovskaya, V. M. Makatinskaya and L. E. Pinsky (a literary critic and member of the Union of Soviet Writers) [1].
[1.2] In connection with Case 370 — (probably the case of Kronid Lyubarsky, CCE 24.2) — at the home of Yury Shikhanovich [2];
[1.3] In connection with Case 374 — probably the case of Pyotr Starchik (CCE 25.2 [1]) — at the homes of K. K. Draffen and Lakhov. There is evidence that yet another series of searches has been carried out linked to Case 374.
Yury Shikhanovich, 1933-2011
*
First and foremost, samizdat material, typewriters and notebooks were seized. However, it is interesting to note that among items seized were:
- the report of N.S. Khrushchev (the “Secret Speech”) to the closed session of the 20th [3] CPSU Congress (Gospolitizdat, 1959; the booklet was not marked as classified material);
- the newspaper Pravda (7 November 1952), with a speech by Beria;
- a collection of poetry by Akhmatova, printed in Russian in Munich by a neutral publishing house;
- the cover of Berdyayev’s book The Sources and Meaning of Russian Communism (1937/1955);
- a pension card entitling Pyotr Yakir to a personal pension during his student years in recognition of his father, Iona E. Yakir, the Army commander executed in 1937.
In the search of Olga Joffe’s home, they removed only exercise-books of poetry by her father, Yu.M. Joffe, who already had an exit visa to Israel [4].
*
On 13 May Valery Chalidze sent Andropov, the KGB Chairman, a letter protesting about the confiscation of his work Reflexions on Man [5] during the searches. The letter ends with the following words:
“If the copies which have been confiscated are not returned soon, I will yet again have the impression that your institution is trying to defend the official philosophy by seizing non-Marxist (although completely legal) works. I urge you to use more academic methods of defending the official philosophy.”
*
[2]
NOVOSIBIRSK
A search was carried out on 14 January 1972, in connection with “Case 24”, at the home of Alexander Rybakov, a technician at the Institute of Physical & Chemical Bases of Mineral Processing. In the search of his home a hectograph was confiscated along with much samizdat literature.
On 20 March 1972, Rybakov was arrested.
*
[3]
LENINGRAD
In May 1972 a search was carried out in connection with the case of Yu. Melnik (CCE 24.2 [5]), at the home of Letinsky.
*
[4]
SVERDLOVSK
At the end of April 1972, Vladimir Markman was arrested.
At first he was charged under Article 206 (RSFSR Criminal Code). In the middle of May Article 206 was changed to Article 190-1. Markman is an engineer; recently he had been working as a loader [6].
*
[5]
KIEV
In the middle of March 1972 the poet Mykola Kholodny [7] was arrested.
On 18 April the writer Ivan Dzyuba was arrested (CCE 24.3). His flat had been searched three times since the middle of January (the last time on the day of his arrest). He has tuberculosis in an advanced state, and cirrhosis of the lungs.
In April Nadiya Svetlichnaya (Ukr. Svitlychna), sister of Ivan Svitlychny (CCE 24.3), was arrested. In spite of requests and protests from relatives, her two-year-old son was put into a children’s home.
On 11 May a psychiatric doctor, Semyon Gluzman (b. 1946) was arrested. Prior to his arrest he worked for a First Aid unit. Apparently he was arrested in connection with the same case as Lyubov Serednyak (CCE 24.3). A Czech student, Anna Kocurova, has also been arrested (CCE 24.3, note 20).
Oles Sergiyenko (Ukr. Serhiyenko) [8] has been arrested.
*
BERDNYK
In the middle of April a search was carried out at the home of the actor and science-fiction writer, Berdnik (Ukr. Berdnyk), member of the UkSSR Union of Writers and a former prisoner in the Stalinist camps [9].
In the search some article by I. Dzyuba and two typewriters were removed.
On 28 April Berdnyk declared a hunger-strike and sent a letter to Shelest, First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party (CPU) Central Committee, in which he said that the KGB had again broken away from the control of the Party, and that he feared another period of lawlessness would ensue. In the same letter he announced that he would not stop his hunger-strike until Shelest or somebody from the KGB received him, and until everything that had been seized was returned to him.
On 3 May 1972, one of Shelest’s deputies received him.
He was presented with all kinds of excuses, but was told that they were unable to intervene in KGB matters, in the middle of May he was summoned to the KGB and all that had been removed during the search was returned to him. His hunger-strike had lasted 16 days.
*
On 15 May [correction CCE 27.14] a search was carried out at the home of the teacher Vladimir Yevgenevich Yuvchenko, in connection with the case of his former pupil, Lyubov Serednyak (CCE 24.3).
The following were confiscated: Sigmund Freud’s The Psychology of the Masses; Sergy Bulgakov’s Christian Ethics, which had been copied by hand; a note-book, four exercise books and 14 separate sheets with various notes; two colour films and a sheaf of blank paper.
On 16 and 17 May Yuvchenko was questioned about the case of Serednyak (up until then KGB employees had held so-called “chats’’ with him, i.e. unrecorded interrogations). On 22 May he was questioned about the case of Leonid Plyushch (CCE 24.3).
*
[6]
LVOV
The artist Stefaniya Shabatura and the poet Hryhoriy Chubay have been arrested [10].
On 14 January 1972, Danylo Lavrentevich SHUMUK [11] was arrested in a village in Volynia //Region (West Ukraine). During a search his memoirs about the time he spent in a camp were confiscated. Before the war Shumuk was a member of the Communist Party of the Western Ukraine. He was first arrested by the Poles at the beginning of the 1930s and spent eight years in Polish prisons.
He took part in the Patriotic War. In 1943 he joined the nationalist movement led by Stepan Bandera. In 1945 he was arrested and served a 10-year sentence. In 1958 he was arrested again on the same grounds, and given another 10 years.
At the beginning of March Vasyl Romanyuk [12] was arrested in Ivano-Frankovsk.
*
[7]
ROVNO
I. Konchinsky has been arrested.
In mid-April in one of the Ukrainian villages, a search was carried out at the home of Natalya Karaziya, a Class II invalid with tuberculosis of the bone (CCE 7.13 [17]). Her personal correspondence with Ivan Dziuba was seized.
After the search her invalid status was withdrawn, with the result that N. Karaziya has been left without any means of subsistence. In the village in which she lives the rumour has been circulated that a bag of dollars and a portable radio were found at her home.
*
[8]
NALCHIK
(North Caucasus)
In March the arrest took place of Yury Shukhevich (Ukr. Shukhevich) [13], the son of the UPA head (Ukrainian Insurgent Army).
According to information which has not yet been fully checked, the number of arrests in the Ukraine in the period January-May is more than one hundred.
*
THE COMMITTEE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE USSR has received a letter from Ukraine, addressed also to the Supreme Soviets of the USSR and UkSSR, and to the editors of the newspapers Izvestiya and Literary Ukraine.
After providing information in this letter about the arrests, searches and interrogations in the Ukraine from January to April 1972 (CCE 24.3 and CCE 25.1 [1, 4]) the authors give the following warning:
“The decades of Stalinist tyranny which afterwards were given the modest designation of ‘Personality Cult’, are a phenomenon which is far from being understood.
“It is much more complex than the personality cult of one man, and in its after-effects comparable, for the USSR, to the disasters brought by the World War. It was a terrible social plague, giving rise to terror, suspicion and denunciations, to a whole country of concentration camps for millions of innocent people, It brought the people to the depths of moral corruption, to psychological shocks as agonizing as a severe mental illness.
“In the 1930s this illness began with the excessive growth of the role played by the agencies of State Security: they exceeded their powers, and escaped from control by the State. The NKVD became a ‘State within a State’, creating a whole industry of murder, and, in principle, it could discredit and destroy any person in the country …
“The [current] change in the climate of social life in the USSR in this direction is a very serious symptom. There has been a whole series of developments: the sending of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia, the secret veto placed on works which expose the Stalinist tyranny and even on the materials of the 20th CPSU Congress, the persecution of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the ceaseless harping on the sharpening of the ideological struggle—all this arouses a deep feeling of unease, in that it is a tendency capable of leading to another 1937 …
“The suppression of national consciousness, the numerous arrests of prominent representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the threats, blackmail, persecutions and ceaseless mass searches—all this is a threatening reminder that 1937 began in 1933, began with the repression of leading figures of the national cultures. This is our warning…”
At the end of the letter the authors write:
“We make a point of noting the considerations which have forced us to divulge our names only to the Human Rights Committee of the USSR … We answer for the authenticity of the information divulged in the present appeal, We are sick of anonymity.
“Yet the situation is such that at any manifestation of social activity the KGB agencies reply with immediate repression. At the present time we do not think it advisable to have anything to do with the faceless and irresponsible Committee of State Security, which is steadily becoming a real danger to society.
“We would have been prepared to give our names and to take part in a public examination of the essence of our letter, had there been even the slightest hope of the text being published in full.
“A Group of Soviet Citizens, Ukraine. May 1972.”
============================================
NOTES
- On all these people — except Armand, Dubrov, Batshev, Albrekht, Lisovskaya and Makatinskaya — see Reddaway, Uncensored Russia (London, 1972).
On Yakir see also CCE 24.2 (note 3). On Batshev see Pavel Litvinov, The Trial of the Four (1972). On Lisovskaya see The Trial of the Four and also CCE 15.9. Valentina Makatinskaya is a translator from French.
Gershovich signed a letter summarized in CCE 24.3. See also the letter from his 4 co-signatories, supporting his requests to emigrate, in The Times, London (13 July 1972); also a similar appeal, to Kurt Waldheim, from Academician Sakharov and 7 colleagues, summarized in Reuters and AP dispatches from Moscow dated 21 July.
↩︎ - On Shikhanovich (1933-2011) see entries in Reddaway, Uncensored Russia (London, 1972) and Name Index.
Lyubarsky was not only a prolific writer on astronomy (CCE 24.2, note 2): since at least 1965 he was also academic secretary of the Moscow Section of the All-Union Astronomy and Geodesy Society.
↩︎ - The 20th Party Congress ran from 14 to 25 February 1956.
↩︎ - Yu.M. Joffe left for Israel on 13 May 1972. See his poems in Possev-7 (1972).
↩︎ - Chalidze’s 123-page typescript was available in the West, but had not then been published. See CCE 21.11 [3].
↩︎ - On Markman and his case see The Times (13 June 1972), CCE 21.7, and NBSJ (Nos 215-217).
↩︎ - Born in 1940, Mykola Kholodny had published in the Ukrainian-language journals Zhovten and Dnipro since 1962. In 1965 he was expelled from Kiev University for heterodoxy. See Ukraine Herald (No 3), and his poems in Suchasnist 12 (1968).
↩︎ - Oles (affectionate form of Oleksandr) Sergiyenko is a young teacher. See his speech in Ukraine Herald (No 4), also M. Browne, Ferment in the Ukraine (London, 1971; p. 194).
↩︎ - See Berdnyk’s biography in Pismenniki radyanskoy Ukrainy (Kiev, 1970, “Writers of Soviet Ukraine”). Born in 1927, Oleksandr P. Berdnyk served in the war, then worked as an actor. See attacks on him for an “ideologically corrupt lecture” in Literary Ukraine (21 & 24 April 1972).
↩︎ - See Ukraine Herald (No. 4) on Shabatura and Chubay. On the latter see also Ukraine Herald (Nos. 2 & 3). He has written a cycle of poems dedicated to Valentyn Moroz.
↩︎ - See entries about Shumuk in Browne, Ferment in the Ukraine (London, 1971; pp. 101, 115, 147-148, 227) and Ukraine Herald (No. 2).
↩︎ - An Orthodox priest trained in Moscow, Father Vasyl Romanyuk serves the parish of Kosmach, where he got to know Valentyn Moroz. See CCE 17.2 and Ukraine Herald (Nos 2-4).
↩︎ - On Shukhevich, see Reddaway, Uncensored Russia (London, 1972; pp. 206, 214), and Ukraine Herald (No 3).
↩︎
============================
A Chronicle of Current Events 