7 SECTIONS
(MAGADAN TO YEREVAN)
[1]
MAGADAN (Soviet Far East). At the beginning of November 1977 Gennady Bogolyubov [1] was arrested.
[2]
MOSCOW. On 22 November 1977 Vasily Nikitenkov [2] was detained in the street by KGB officers and taken to the Moscow KGB headquarters.
There they questioned him about his acquaintance, with Pyotr Starchik (at one time Nikitenkov and Starchik were together at the Kazan SPH) and with Alexander Podrabinek; why does he visit them; when and where did he make the acquaintance of Podrabinek. After one-and-a-half hours of unrecorded interrogation they drove Nikitenkov by car to Klin, where he lives, and there let him go.
*
[3]
On 20 February 1978 Vyacheslav Parkhunov, a church cantor, and Sergei Yermolayev [3], an 18-year-old metal worker and member of Ogorodnikov’s seminar (CCE 41.4, CCE 43.9), were detained at the Belorusskaya metro station in Moscow.
In a police room, without any search warrant, they were ordered to show the contents of their briefcases. When they refused, the briefcases were searched by force. The police seized five issues of the Herald of the Russian Christian Movement and Solzhenitsyn’s The Oak and the Calf.
Parkhunov and Yermolayev refused to sign the confiscation record. Two hours later they were freed.
*
[4]
DIKY’S ARREST & CONVICTION
TERNOPOL REGION (West Ukraine). At the end of 1977 Ivan Diky was arrested on a theft charge.
In December and January searches were carried out in connection with this case. In Kiev at the home of Vasily Lisovoi’s wife Vera Lisovaya; and at the homes of Vyacheslav Chornovil’s former wife Yelena Antoniv; and the artist Bogdan Soroka (son of Mykhaylo Soroka, the well-known OUN member who died in a camp, CCE 20.13). In the Lvov Region they searched the homes of Lyubomira Oksana Popadyuk, the mother of Zoryan Popadyuk, in the city of Lvov; and of Zoryan Popadyuk’s grandmother Sofia Mikhailovna Kopystinskaya in Sambor (Lvov Region).
It is known that Vera Lisovaya is not acquainted with Diky and neither, perhaps, are the others.
Newsletter No 1 of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group suggests that the real purpose of these searches was to look for money intended to assist political prisoners and their families.
*
In 1965, Ivan Diky and his wife Miroslava Tershivskaya were convicted under Article 62 (UkSSR Criminal Code; CCE 7.4 [5]). After his exile, Diky came to the settlement where his wife was living, but the police refused to register him for residence there.
For several years Diky has had neither a permanent residence permit nor a permanent job.
*
[5]
LENINGRAD. In the first days of November 1977 leaflets of an economic content were circulated in the Institute of Finance & Economics and in the Pedagogical Institute. They had been duplicated on thin photographic paper known as paper for document-copying. The text of the original was written by hand in block capitals.
Certain Leningraders were later visited at their homes by people who asked them on behalf of their friends, for example on behalf of Vladimir Borisov, if they could obtain paper for copying documents.
In mid-November students in the Philosophy Faculty at Leningrad State University (Alexander Rytin, Alexander Tishkov and Alexander Sigatoka), and Yefim Rozentsveig, who studies at a Professional Technical College, were arrested for these leaflets. All are 23 or 24 years old. They were soon released. No repressive measures followed.
*
[6]
MOSCOW. On 9 March 1978 at Domodedovo Airport Larisa Bogoraz and her five-year-old child who had accompanied her on a flight were searched under the guise of a customs examination.
Sketches for a work by Bogoraz about Alexander Ginzburg and other notes were confiscated, as well as a notification to Bogoraz that a session of the Academic Council would be held at the Institute of the Russian Language with a view to stripping her of her Cand. Sci. degree (this issue CCE 48.21).
*
[7]
KIEV. On 11 March, as he was registering a ticket to Moscow at Kiev’s Borispol airport, Josif Zisels (CCE 44.15; his surname is misspelled there) had his baggage examined. A police lieutenant took him aside to a separate room. There they searched his luggage twice and took down his passport details.
Then, threatened with a body search, Zisels handed over to a person in uniform his notebook, from which the latter copied out the Moscow and Kiev telephone numbers (at Zisels’ demand this person produced an identity card in the name of MVD Colonel Mikhail Stepanovich Shevchenko). They put Zisels on the plane five minutes before departure time.
*
[8]
YEREVAN. On 28 November 1977, the Armenian Helsinki Group reported that Akop Stepanyan, Zaven Bagdasaryan and Stepan Zatikyan were arrested at the beginning of that month.
They were suspected of attempting to cause an explosion [4] at the Kursk Station in Moscow. (Zatikyan participated in the national movement a few years ago; see also CCE 16.4 and CCE 27.12.) The arrested men are being held by the Yerevan KGB. Officials from the KGB in Moscow have arrived in Yerevan. Searches and interrogations are taking place.
At interrogations in December in connection with the case of Robert Nazaryan (this issue CCE 48.5) questions were asked, in particular, about Zatikyan.
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NOTES
- On Bogolyubov, see CCE 40.15 [6], CCE 43.7 [2], CCE 46.6 and Name Index.
↩︎ - On Nikitenkov, see CCE 19.11 [1], CCE 24.11 [2], CCE 35.10 and Name Index.
↩︎ - Sergei Yermolayev was later famously involved in an incident on the Moscow Metro (CCE 54.12 [2]).
↩︎ - See reports on January 1977 Metro explosion (CCE 44.16)
↩︎
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A Chronicle of Current Events 