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As the Memorial Society (December 2021) faces the threat of dissolution it is informative to see what prominent dissidents were demanding early in 1974.

How many of their demands have since been met, in Russia (or other parts of the former Soviet Union)?

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The “Moscow Appeal” appeared the day after SOLZHENITSYN’s arrest.

Its authors [¹] made four demands:

• That The Gulag Archipelago be published in the USSR and made available to every compatriot [²];
• That archival and other materials be published [³] which would give a full picture of the activities of the Cheka, NKVD and MGB [Previous incarnations of the KGB];
• That an international public tribunal [⁴] be set up to investigate the crimes they had perpetrated;
• That Solzhenitsyn be protected from persecution and allowed to work in his homeland [⁵].

The authors of the “Moscow Appeal” [⁶] called for national committees to be set up in various countries to collect signatures in support of the appeal.

Text of the Moscow Appeal (CCE 32.1 [12]), 17 July 1974

(revised December 2023)

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NOTES

1. Of the ten 1974 signatories — Andrei Sakharov, Yelena Bonner, Vladimir Maximov, Mikhail Agursky, Boris Shragin, Pavel Litvinov, Yury Orlov, Father Sergy Zheludkov, Anatoly Marchenko and Larisa Bogoraz — only Pavel Litvinov is alive today.
   
   Later the following 11 people associated themselves with the “Moscow Appeal”: E. S. Andronova, L. Aptekar, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, N.Ya. Joffe, Olga Joffe, Irina Kaplun, Alexander Lavut, Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov, Grigory Podyapolsky, Sergei Khodorovich, and Leonid Tymchuk (Odessa).
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2. The Gulag Archipelago was first published in the USSR in successive issues of the Novy mir monthly, starting in July 1989. The first Soviet publication of the work in its entirety took place in 1990.
   
   In 2009, a one-volume edition of The Gulag Archipelago, abridged by Solzhenitsyn’s widow Natalia, was added to the secondary school curriculum.
   ↩︎
3. In June 1992, President Yeltsin issued an edict that all archive materials relating to “mass crimes” should be declassified within three months. Over thirty years later that goal has still not been achieved (see Prudovsky & Krivenko, April 2021).
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4. The late Vladimir BUKOVSKY devoted an entire book, Judgement in Moscow (2016), to the necessity for a Moscow equivalent of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
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5. Alexander SOLZHENITSYN was deported from the Soviet Union in February 1974. He returned to live in Russia late in May 1994 and died there in 2008.
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6. The group photo shows Sakharov and veteran dissenters in October 1977. He and Sergy Zheludkov signed the 1974 Appeal; three others (Meiman, Kalistratova and P. Grigorenko) were then members of the Helsinki Group.
   
   Top row (left to right): Naum Meiman, Sophia Kalistratova, Petro and Zinaida Grigorenko, Natalya Velikanova (mother of Tatyana Velikanova and her six brothers and sisters), Father Sergy (Sergei Zheludkov) and Andrei Sakharov;
   Bottom row: Genrikh Altunyan (Kharkov) and a 25-year-old Alexander Podrabinek.
   ↩︎

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