A Chronicle of Current Events
The original Russian texts of CCE 55.0 and CCE 56.0, of which this book is a translation, were published by the Khronika Press in New York (1980, CHR Russian edition), as two booklets without annotations in the Khronika tekushchikh sobytii series [1].
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Earlier issues of the Chronicle are available in English from two main sources.
Numbers 16-54 have been published by Amnesty International Publications with annotations and indexes of names: all issues except number 16 are still in print.
Numbers 1-11 appeared in full, with annotations and 76 photographs, in Peter Reddaway’s Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement in the Soviet Union, 1972 (London and New York).
Uncensored Russia (1972); CCE 22-23 (March 1972)
Future issues of the Chronicle will be published in English by Amnesty International Publications as they become available.
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“Vesti”
The most comprehensive source of current, up-to-date information on the sort of events reported with some delay by the Chronicle is the fortnightly USSR News Update (Vesti iz SSSR) edited by Dr Cronid Lubarsky.
- It is available from Cahiers du Samizdat (Brussels, Belgium). This address provides the English and Russian editions.
- A Japanese edition is available from the Soviet Coordination Group of Amnesty International in Japan (Tokyo);
- A Dutch edition can be obtained from Stichting Comité V. Boekovski (Amsterdam, Netherlands);
- a German edition may be obtained from GFM (Frankfurt/Main 1, Germany).
- A French edition is planned.
Dr Lubarsky has featured in many issues of the Chronicle since 1972, where his name is spelled Kronid Lyubarsky. He left the USSR in 1977 (CCE 47.8).
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Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR.
Many texts referred to briefly in the Chronicle have appeared in full in the quarterly A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR (CHR), Khronika Press (New York): there are separate Russian and English editions (CCE 29.1).
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Helsinki Group documents
Many of the documents of the Helsinki Groups are available in English in three publications:
The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe has published two volumes of Reports of Helsinki-Accord Monitors in the Soviet Union: Vol. 1 (24 February 1977) and Vol 2 (3 June 1977). Such reports are also available in The Right to Know, the Right to Act: Documents of Helsinki Dissent from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, May 1978. (Both the Reports and The Right to Know were published by the US Congress, Washington DC.)
The monthly Samizdat Bulletin (San Mateo, California) is also a useful source; as are, for Ukrainian Helsinki Group documents [2], several booklets published in English by Smoloskyp Publishers (Maryland, USA).
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Samizdat
The best source of samizdat texts in other languages are
- In French — the monthly Cahiers du Samizdat (Brussels, Belgium);
- in German – Samizdat: Stimmen aus dem anderen Russland (Thun, Switzerland) 12 occasional vols to date; and the bimonthly Menschenrechte-Schicksale-Dokumente, Gesellschaft fur Menschenrechte (Frankfurt-am-Main, West Germany);
- in Italian – the bimonthly Russia Cristiana (Milan, Italy);
- in Dutch – the bimonthly Rusland Bulletin (Amsterdam, Netherlands), and the Rusland Cahiers series (Stichting Comité V. Boekovski, Amsterdam, Netherlands).
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For many religious texts, see the quarterly Religion in Communist Lands @ Keston College, (Keston, England).
For Jewish texts, see the weekly Jews in the USSR (London, England) and Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union: 1727-1991.
For Lithuanian texts, see translated issues of The Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church, published as booklets (Brooklyn, New York); translations of this and other Lithuanian samizdat are also to be found in the bimonthly ELTA magazine (Washington DC).
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Other books and periodicals in which readers can find more details about many of the people mentioned in the Chronicle are listed in the annotated bibliographies in the Amnesty International editions of CCE 23.11 and CCE 27.16, and also appear in the endnotes in each volume.
PBR, August 1980
(Edited & updated, JC: 2023-2025)
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NOTES
Online Sources
- «Khronika tekushchikh sobytii» (1968-1982)
In 2008, on the 50th anniversary of the Chronicle‘s first appearance in the USSR, Memorial launched an online version of the original Russian texts of the Chronicle of Current Events in Moscow.
Until Valery Chalidze set up the Khronika Press (New York), republication in the West of each issue of the Chronicle in Russian was undertaken by the Possev Verlag (Frankfurt), the publishing wing of the emigre NTS or People’s Labour Alliance (Narodno-trudovoj soyuz).
Later the Herzen Foundation in Amsterdam also republished CCE in Russian.
↩︎ - “The dissident movement in Ukraine” (1950s-1980s)
Working with the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group in the early 2000s, former dissident Vasyl Ovsiyenko researched and wrote detailed biographical notes on 159 dissidents, in Ukraine and beyond (the list includes Andrei Sakharov, Mart Niklus, Viktoras Petkus and several other non-Ukrainian dissenters).
Like the Chronicle, Ovsiyenko’s list includes activists of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists as well as human rights defenders. Almost all of the Ukrainian texts written by him and by others were subsequently translated into English.
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A Chronicle of Current Events 