(1)
On 28 September 1972, a search was carried out at the flat of Yu.A. Shikhanovich [see CCE 24.10 and CCE 25]. Before it had been completed Shikhanovich was presented with a warrant for his arrest. He was driven away, and the search concluded without him, in the presence of his wife.
The warrant issued by the head of the Internal Affairs Department of the KGB Administration for Moscow and Moscow region, stated that “as has been established during the examination of the criminal case relating to Shikhanovich Yu.A.” (there had previously been no mention of any such case, chronicle) “he has for a number of years systematically harboured, duplicated and disseminated anti-Soviet literature”. During the search of Shikhanovich’s flat some of his friends arrived, among them A.D. Sakharov, but they were not allowed into the flat or permitted to say goodbye to him.
Yury Shikhanovich, 1933-2011
Yury Alexandrovich SHIKHANOVICH was born in Kiev in 1933 and is a Master of Pedagogical Sciences and a mathematician by profession [note 1]. In 1968 he was dismissed from the Philological Faculty of Moscow University, where he taught mathematics, after receiving a “public censure” for having signed a protest about the unlawful hospitalization of A. S. Yesenin-Volpin [see CCE 1.3]; a special course given by Shikhanovich in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics was ended at the same time. After this he worked in a Special Construction Bureau, where as an “unreliable” person he was twice demoted (the search on 28 September was his third). This summer he was forced to leave his job.
Prior to his arrest Shikhanovich worked as a teacher of mathematics at a boarding-school and, most recently, in a trades and technical college. During the searches samizdat and personal documents were confiscated from him. Yu. A. Shikhanovich has been charged under Article 70 of the Russian Criminal Code.
On the same day, a search was made at the home of O. Baryshnikova “in connection with case No. 381”.
A search was carried out in connection with the same Case No. 381 at the home of [Boris] Vail who is serving a term of exile in Tobolsk (see CCE 16). Vail has been transferred to Tobolsk from Uvat, which is [also] in the Tyumen Region. His new address: 31 Yershova St. Nothing was removed during the search.
(2)
On 12 September 1972 Victor Krasin (see CCE 11.8 and CCE 22.8) was arrested in Moscow. At the time of his arrest a search was made, in connection with case No. 24. [Robert] Conquest’s The Great Terror, two of the special issues of Possev containing the Chronicle, a tape recorder and a transistor radio were confiscated.
Victor Krasin (b. 1929) is a former inmate of Stalin’s camps and an economist by training. Since 1972 he has been a second-category (Group 2) invalid. A member of the Action Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR. In December 1969 he was arrested, convicted of parasitism and exiled to Krasnoyarsk Region. In the autumn of 1971, the sentence was repealed following an objection by the Procurator and Krasin returned to Moscow. Now Victor Krasin has been arrested for the third time.
On 13 September, a search was made at the home of Krasin’s wife Nadezhda Yemelkina (CCE 23.2) who is serving a term of exile in the town of Yeniseisk, Krasnoyarsk Region. Floors were taken up in the house. Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and Marchenko’s My Testimony were confiscated.
(3)
On 5 September Roald Gashimovich Mukhamedyarov was arrested. Born in 1934, he is the author of several open letters and a biographical tale about camp-life which have circulated in samizdat (see CCE 14.2, and CCEs 15, 24. 25). Mukhamedyarov has two children aged three and six. During a search two issues of the Chronicle and personal notes were confiscated.
The investigation into Mukhamedyarov‘s case is being conducted by Captain Korkach [see CCEs 19-21].
(4)
Bidya Dandaron, a Buddhist scholar and research officer at the Buryat Institute of Social Sciences has been arrested in Ulan-Ude [Buryat ASSR]. Aged 58, he was convicted as an “enemy of the 1937 and legally exculpated in 1956”. Four others were also arrested: A.I. Zheleznov; Yu. Lavrov, a student (or post-graduate) at the Ulan-Ude Pedagogical Institute; V. Montlevich, an ethnographer and research officer at the Leningrad Museum of Atheism and Religion; and [Donatas] Rutkus, a graduate student from Vilnius [note 2].
Charges have been brought under Articles 142 [‘”violation of the laws on the separation of Church and State”] and 227 [“attacks on the personality and rights of citizens under the guise of performing religious rites”] of the Russian Criminal Code. The accusations include having a Buddhist philosophy of life, organizing a religious group, and, in addition, hooliganism, speculation in religious ritual objects and having connections with Zionism.
In Moscow, in connection with the arrested Buddhist scholars, a search has been carried out at the home of O.F. Volkova, an officer of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies; two copies of the Bible, in Russian and Church Slavonic, were confiscated from her, as well as a sculpted figure of Buddha, Buddhist ritual beads and xeroxed copies of Buddhist texts she needed for her work. At an interrogation, the investigator tried to extort from Volkova a confession of her participation in “bloody Buddhist sacrifices”. Also interrogated was Buddhist scholar A. Pyatigorsky. In Tartu, a search was made at the home Linnart Mall, an [Estonian] scholar of Buddhism and lecturer at Tartu University.
(5)
On 12 July by decree of the Moscow City Procuracy a search was carried out in Moscow at the home of N.L. Frolova, mother-in-law of V. A. Nekipelov. Telephone numbers, addresses, a letter and a typewriter belonging to Frolova were confiscated.
On 13 July searches were made in the town of Kameshkov, Vladimir Region, at the home and workplace (a chemist’s shop) of Nekipelov. The searches were carried out by Biryukov, an employee of the investigation department for the Vladimir Region, on the order of investigator [Yu. P. Maloyedov who is in charge of case No. 4030/59-71 in Moscow (the case of S. Myuge, see CCE 25).
(6)
On 4 July, by order of senior Procuracy investigator Maloyedov, a search was made by senior Procuracy investigator Guguchiya of the Abkhaz ASSR [in Georgia], accompanied by senior police lieutenant Tsvikariya, at the home of Margarita Vladimirovna Orekhnina, a resident of Kashtak Settlement, Gutripshi district. Confiscated were: books by Solzhenitsyn; poems by Akhmatova, Sologub, Gumilyov, [the Polish author] Broniewski, [Czech poet] Nezval and others; carbon paper, photographs of Solzhenitsyn and an “Erika” typewriter. E. [Ernst] Rudenko [see CCE 24] who was there on holiday from Moscow, was subjected to an interrogation in the offices of the local KGB.
(7)
On 27 August Yu.I. Yukhnovets underwent a search and was arrested. Born in 1933, he was expelled from the fourth-year course in the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow University in 1958 for a speech he had made in the House of Friendship entitled “What I want to free myself from” (concerning freedom of expression, of the press, etc.). Following this he worked as a lathe operator in the Pravda publishing-house and then, for the last three years, as a loader.
The warrant for his arrest was issued by the KGB investigation department for Moscow and Moscow Region. The search was carried out by Lieutenant Katalikov, Vladimir V. Vdovenko, Vladimir Vl. Martynov and senior investigator Trofimov between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. They confiscated Chronicle No. 26, songs by Galich, a copy of Possev and a photograph of Dostoyevsky [note 3].
(8)
Dzheppar Akimov was arrested at the beginning of September in Tashkent. A charge has been brought under [the Uzbek equivalent to] Article 190-1 of the Russian Criminal Code. Akimov had hung out a flag of mourning on 18 May, the anniversary of the [1944] deportation of the Crimean Tatars from the Crimea.
(9)
On 12 June, a search was made at the Riga home of poetess Vizma Belsevica, a member of the Writers’ Union, in connection with the case of Ivan Dzyuba. A representative of the Ukrainian KGB took part in it.
(10)
In July 1972 L.E. Pinsky and E.A. Grin were summoned to the KGB for questioning in connection with the case of Svitlychny.
(11)
On 17 August after a meeting with [foreign] correspondent Jim Peipert Valery Pushkin was detained and questioned for four hours at a police-station on a fabricated charge concerning “the disappearance of state valuables”.
(12)
On 10 July, a confrontation was arranged between V. Popov and [his former teacher] Kronid Lyubarsky, who was arrested in January 1972 (see CCE 24.2). On the following day V. Popov was arrested.
(13)
At the beginning of July in Vinnitsa [SW Ukraine], Itzhak Shkolnik, a worker at an automation equipment plant, was arrested. He has been charged under Article 187-1 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code, equivalent to Article 190-1 of the Russian Code [note 4]. The accusation is one of anti-Soviet conversations at his work and with friends. A search was carried out by KGB officers; a manual of Hebrew and a 5-dollar note were confiscated.
(14)
On 19 September in Moscow 31 Jews who are seeking permission to leave for Israel were arrested. Some of them were arrested at their homes or in the street, others outside the building where a session of the USSR Supreme Soviet was in progress. They had intended to hand deputies a petition protesting against the introduction of an education tax to be levied from persons leaving the USSR to lake up permanent residence in capitalist countries. Several of them were freed immediately and the rest were sentenced to penalties ranging from a fine of 20 roubles to 15 days’ detention.
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NOTES
[1] Shikhanovich was the author of the highly regarded Introduction to Modern Mathematics (Moscow, 1965), and of numerous articles, including “Examples of the Application of Mathematical logic to Algebra” (1956), and “Problems of Creating a Machine Language for Geometry” (1960).
[2] In December, Bidya Dandaron was sentenced (see CCE 28.6) to confiscation of his property and to five years in an ordinary-regime camp. He was the author of the two-volume A Description of the Tibetan Manuscripts and Woodcuts in the Buryat Multidiscipline Research Institute, Moscow, 1960 and 1965, and a co-compiler of A Short Tibeto-Russian Dictionary, Moscow, 196. The Observer, London (22 October, 10 December 1972 and 7 January 1973) and the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Zurich (14 January 1973) reported his arrest and trial.
The other four detainees were ruled insane and dispatched for indefinite to prison-hospitals [see CCE 28.6]. Butkus is an officer of the Historico-Ethnographical Museum of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius and has written an article on the Tibetan medicine practised round Lake Baikal.
Volkova is a specialist on Indian languages who has published widely. She also signed one of the protests in P. Litvinov, The Trial of the Four, London and New York, 1972.
On the recent flourishing state of Buddhist and Tibetan studies in the USSR see, e.g., the Literary Gazette, 9 December 1970, and the article “Tibetan Studies” in the Asian Museum of the Leningrad branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences’ Oriental Studies department (Moscow, 1972).
[3] Agency reports from Moscow dated 21 February 1972 said that Yukhnovets and four others were soon to be tried for allegedly having printed leaflets about exploitation of the workers (see CCE 26, p. 257).
[4] This charge was changed in late 1972 to the more serious “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” (Article 70), after Shkolnik and his friend Mikhail Mager were denounced at a public meeting and an article called “The Poisonous Fangs of Zionism” appeared in a local paper.
A Chronicle of Current Events 