<< No 40 : 20 May 1976 >>
On Wednesday, 12 May 1976 the formation of a new public association (NGO) in Moscow was announced: the “Group to Assist the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreements in the USSR”.
The declaration of its formation states:
“The Group’s aim is to promote the observance of the Final Act of the Conference on Cooperation and Security in Europe [CSCE. See “International Agreements” item 3]. We will focus on the following articles of the Final Act:
“One, the Declaration on principles guiding relations between Participating States (Principle VII).
It is headed “Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief”;
“Two, the section ‘Co-operation in Humanitarian and other fields’ (Principle IX), sub-sections 1-4:
- (1) Human Contacts (notably point (b) “Reunification of Families”),
- (2) Information,
- (3) Co-operation & Exchanges in the Field of Culture, and
- (4) Co-operation & Exchanges in the Field of Education.
“Its first goal, the Group considers, is to inform all Heads of the States which signed the Final Act (1 August 1975) and also to inform the Public, about cases of direct violation of the articles named above.
With this aim in mind, the Group:
(1) will accept written complaints directly from Soviet citizens about their personal experiences relating to violations of these articles. It will readdress them, in a concise form, to all Heads of the States which have signed the Act and also to the Public; and the Group will retain the original, signed documents;
(2) the Group will collect, with the help of the Public, any other information about violations of the above articles. It will analyse this information and give a detailed evaluation of its reliability; and it will then forward it to the Heads of State and to the Public.
“In some cases, the Group may come across specific information about particular manifestations of inhumanity, for example:
- the removal of children from religious parents who wish to educate their children according to their beliefs;
- forcible psychiatric treatment for the purposes of changing people’s thoughts, conscience, religion or beliefs;
- the most dramatic instances of divided families;
- cases which reveal special inhumanity in regard to prisoners of conscience.
“The Group intends to appeal to Heads of State and to the Public, requesting the formation of international commissions to check the information on the spot: the Group will not always be able to conduct its own direct investigation of such important and crucial information.
“The Group hopes that its information will be taken into account at all official meetings envisaged in the Final Act under the point ‘Further Steps from Helsinki’.
“In their activities Group members proceed from the conviction that humanitarian issues and matters of free information have a direct relationship to the problem of international security;
they call on the Public in other countries that took part in the Helsinki Conference [1973-1975] to form their own national assistance groups in order to facilitate a complete fulfilment of the Helsinki Agreements by the governments of all countries.
“In future, we hope, a corresponding International Committee will also be formed.
“Yury Orlov has been declared leader of the Group.
“Members of the Group include: Ludmila Alexeyeva, Mikhail Bernshtam, Yelena Bonner, Alexander Ginzburg, Alexander Korchak, Pyotr Grigorenko and Vitaly Rubin.”
The declaration also bears the signature of Anatoly Marchenko, who was exiled to eastern Siberia last year (CCE 35.2).
Later it became known that Anatoly Shcharansky was also a member of the Group.
Malva Landa joined the Group, but declared that she was not in full agreement with the declaration. It ignores the fundamental difference, in her view, between the situation of the Soviet Group and of the proposed similar groups in other countries.
♦
The authorities reacted quickly to the formation of the Group [1].
There were attempts to summon Yury Orlov to KGB headquarters.
Then on Saturday, 15 May 1976, he was detained on the street and taken to the KGB offices in the Cheryomushky district, Moscow. There he was read a “Warning” in accordance with the 25 December 1972 Decree [see CCE 30.13].
The same day the TASS news agency published abroad — the Chronicle here presents a re-translation from the English — an announcement entitled “Warning to a Provocateur” (Moscow, 15 May, 17.40 hours):
“As has become known to a TASS correspondent, State Security authorities today officially warned a certain Yury Orlov about the inadmissibility of his anti-constitutional activity.
“Orlov was once engaged in scientific work and elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. In recent years, he has fully devoted himself to anti-Soviet activities.
“Seeking to gain popularity in the eyes of the opponents of relaxation of tension [detente] and the enemies of the Soviet Union, Orlov set about knocking together a group of dissidents under the lofty-sounding and provocative name of the ‘Organization for Checking the Observance by the Soviet Union of the Provisions of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’.
“It is hard to offer any other assessment of Orlov’s actions than as an attempt to cast doubt in the eyes of the international Public on the sincerity of the Soviet Union’s efforts to implement strictly the international obligations it has assumed, and yet another provocation aimed at hampering the process of relaxation of international tension [detente].
“On 15 May 1976 Orlov was summoned to the State Security bodies. There, in accordance with the law of the land, he was given an official warning about the inadmissibility of his unlawful actions.
“Such a warning has a dual purpose: to cut short Orlov’s provocative activities, and also to prevent the perpetration by Orlov, and by persons associated with him, of actions punishable by law.”
*
In response to the TASS Statement Andrei Sakharov, 1975 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and Valentin Turchin, chair of the Soviet Amnesty International group, issued a statement.
They thoroughly approved of the formation of the Helsinki Group and considered the Group’s aims to be extremely important. They supported the call made by the Group for the formation of similar groups in other countries signatory to the Helsinki Agreement.
The TASS Statement is an indirect attempt to discredit the Group, the authors consider, as it would be embarrassing to attack such a group directly. The title of the Group, they note, is distorted in the agency’s Statement. As for the attempts to cast doubt on Orlov’s academic qualifications, the authors write:
“The TASS Statement tries to create the impression that Professor Orlov has recently abandoned his academic activity. In reality he is continuing to work actively and in the course of the year 1974-5 he published three original works of research and sent another to the publishers.
“It is true that, since the beginning of 1974, Orlov has not been on the staff of any teaching institution, but that is only because, in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he is refused employment for political considerations.
*
The first action of the Group was to study the case of Mustafa Dzhemilev (this issue CCE 40.3). The Group issued a document [2] pointing out the infringements of the Helsinki Agreements in this case.
Here is a summary:
The sentence passed on Dzhemilev contradicts
[1] Principle VII (Part A, Section 1) of the Final Act: “Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief”, and
[2] Principle VIII of Part A, which speaks of “the right of nations to determine, in full freedom, their own fate.” [3]
The circumstances in which the trial was prepared and conducted lead Group members to conclude that it was not a legal proceeding but “a deliberately predetermined reprisal”.
This fact “does not permit the application to Dzhemilev’s case of the article in the Final Act concerning non-interference in internal affairs. For this article is interpreted … in terms of respect for the laws and customs of sovereign states, not of respect for lawlessness disguised by falsification”.
The document was signed by the following members of the Helsinki Group: Yury Orlov, Mikhail Bernshtam, Yelena Bonner and Alexander Ginzburg.
(See “The Helsinki Monitoring Group”, 41.8, 3 August 1976)
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NOTES
The MOSCOW HELSINKI GROUP came into existence less than a year after the ratification of the Helsinki Accords (signed in August 1975) by 33 European and two North American countries.
The USSR was a prominent signatory. The emergence of the Helsinki Group in Moscow was followed by the creation of similar groups in four of the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics (Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Armenia). Over the next six years the Moscow Helsinki Group issued 195 statements on a variety of issues and survived the arrest, exile and emigration of many of its members.
In September 1982, those members still at liberty, Naum Meiman and Yelena Bonner (the latter spent her time between Moscow and Gorky, the place of her husband Andrei Sakharov‘s exile) decided to voluntarily disband the organisation (Vesti iz SSSR, 17-1, 15 September 1982) rather than let member and human rights lawyer Sophia Kalistratova be put on trial.
JC, February 2021
*
- A fortnight later (1 June 1976*, St 10/4) the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee requested leading members to respond to an exchange of opinions about the setting up of a body to monitor the observation of the Helsinki Accords.
↩︎ - The document was published in English in “Reports of Helsinki-Accord Monitors in the Soviet Union” by the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (US Congress: Washington DC, 24 February 1977).
For the Russian, see Sbornik dokumentov Obshchestvennoi gruppy sodeistviya vypolneniyu Khelsinkskikh soglashenii (Khronika Press: New York, Vol. 1, 1977).
↩︎ - This is a paraphrase of the various points in Principle VIII.
↩︎
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