Searches, Interrogations, Arrests, 1977 (44.12-15)

<< No 44 : 16 March 1977 >>

Arrest of Vasyl Barladeanu, March 1977 (44.13)

On 2 March 1977 the art specialist Vasyl Vladimirovich BARLADEANU (b. 1942) was arrested in Odessa.

His conflict with the authorities began as long as three years ago; on 28 January 1974 he was interrogated by the Odessa KGB. At the interrogation he was accused of Ukrainian nationalism. A month later he was expelled from the Party and dismissed from Odessa University. His articles on ancient Bulgarian culture and on the history of Ukrainian art were removed from journals.

On 20 January 1975 Barladeanu was accepted for the post of academic secretary of Kiev’s Ukrainian SSR Museum of the People’s Architecture and Way of Life; a month later he was dismissed and deprived of his Kiev registration.

In May 1976 Barladeanu was accepted as a research officer at the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art.

On 16 June a search was carried out at the home of Valentina Sergeyevna Barladeanu, wife of Barladeanu (CCE 41).

On 24 June Vasyl Barladeanu rejected Soviet citizenship in a statement addressed to Soviet ‘president’ Podgorny, and requested permission to emigrate.

On 3 September 1976 Barladeanu was dismissed from the Odessa Museum.

On 15 September 1977 Barladeanu appealed to the people’s court in Odessa’s Oktyabrsky district concerning his dismissal.

In a statement by the secretary of the museum’s Party organization, N.I. Stenko, addressed to the court, it says that Barladeanu was dismissed at the demand of ‘higher organizations’. On 1 February 1977 the court (under Judge N.K. Savina) rejected a suit by Barladeanu on the grounds that the time limit of a month for presenting a suit had expired.

On 10 January 1977 a local inspector of the district internal affairs office, Ya.M. Balakshiyev, deprived Barladeanu of his Odessa registration, dating the order 10 September 1976.

Since December 1976 Barladeanu has been subjected to open (’intimidatory’) surveillance. One day in February 1977 detectives told him that if he did not stop walking quickly he would be beaten up, as they were tired of running after him.

On 2 March 1977 a series of searches took place in Odessa: at the homes of Leonid Sery (CCE 42), Anna Golumbievskaya (CCEs 34, 42), Anna Mikhailenko (CCE 42) and Yelena Danielyan. Vasyl Barladeanu was present during the search at Sery’s home. After the search he was taken away. The following day his wife was told that he had been arrested under Article 187-1 (Ukrainian SSR Criminal Code = Article 190-1, RSFSR Code).

Valentina Barladeanu, the couple Leonid and Valentina Sery, Anna Golumbievskaya, Leonid Tymchuk, Yury Gorodentsev and Pyotr Reidman made a joint declaration to the USSR Procurator-General expressing their conviction that Barladeanu was being persecuted for political motives. They demanded his release.

On 13 March a member of the Action Group, Tatyana Khodorovich sent a telegram:

“To Soviet Emigres: Ludmila Alexeyeva, Vladimir Bukovsky, Marina Voikhanskaya, Natalya Gorbanevskaya and Leonid Plyushch, and to Western public opinion:

“… Vasyl Barladeanu, arrested on 2 March 1977 … is threatened with a psychiatric hospital. Before his arrest Barladeanu warned: I consider this arrest illegal, I declare an indefinite hunger-strike, I refuse to give evidence. The case is being conducted by Vasily Vasilevich Gulenko, an investigator with the Odessa Procurator’s Office.”

Arrest of Josif Begun, March 1977 (44.14)

On 28 February 1977 two activists of the Jewish emigration movement and longstanding ’refuseniks’, Josif Begun and Veniamin Fain (CCE 43), agreed with the American consul to visit the American embassy. The consul met them near the embassy. In full view of the consul, Begun and Fain were “dragged away” and taken off to a police station, where they were held from 5 to 11 pm.

On 2 March Begun was taken to a police station where he was informed that a criminal case had been brought against him under Article 209 (RSFSR: “leading a parasitic way of life for a long period”).

On 3 March 1977 he was summoned, after being told that some papers had to be drawn up and that this would take two hours. He was arrested. Asked by his wife, “Why did you take him by deception?” they replied at the police station: “For the defence of the cause of Marxism-Leninism deception may be used.”

Josif Begun (b. 1932)

Begun is a candidate of technical sciences and an electronics specialist. He is 45. He has been ‘refused’ permission to emigrate for six years.

He has therefore been forced to engage in unskilled work. He was dismissed from one job (as a watchman) for ‘absenteeism’, the result of a 15-day jail sentence. Begun appealed to the commission for work provision, but was told that they did not concern themselves with providing work for research officers. He tried to register as a private teacher of Hebrew but received a refusal on the grounds that there is no approved programme for the teaching of Hebrew, and there is no one for him to teach.

Persecution of Ilya Levin, Aug 1976-Feb 1977 (44.15)

(Continuation. See CCE 42)

On the night of 19-20 August 1976, the Leningrad philologist Ilya Levin was on duty at his present job, at the control panel of a lift-monitoring system.

Between 1 and 2 am there was a signal from one entrance. Having gone there and assured himself that the lift was in working order, Levin went out of the entrance. Here he was set upon by three strangers who tripped him up and began silently to kick him. Levin began to call for help, and they disappeared. Levin managed to recognize one of them: he had seen the man on 9 August 1976 in the office of the technician of his area, T.I. River.

The following morning, after handing over his shift, Levin went to River and asked her who the man was who had been in her office on the morning of 9 August. River said that no one had been in her office that morning. Levin reported the attack to the police. Only in November did Dunayev, an officer of Police Station No. 4, question him about the circumstances of the attack. At work Levin was told that no one had attacked him. The page of the journal in which he made an entry about the false alarm and its outcome was torn out.

On 14 December 1976 KGB investigator Yegorov said to Levin about the beating up: “Our office does not engage in such things!”

On 15 September and 22 November 1976 KGB investigator Aksakov interrogated Levin as a witness in the “case of the inscriptions” (CCE 42). On 14 October 1976 Levin was interrogated in the case of the Jews in the USSR almanac by Senior Investigator A.I. Tikhonov of the Moscow Procurator’s Office. On 29 November the parents and sister of Levin were summoned to the KGB’s Smolny district division. There they were told that if Levin “does not stop circulating tendentious information, then he will not go West but in the opposite direction”.

On 14 December 1976 Levin was again summoned to an interrogation in the “case of the inscriptions”. This time the investigator was Yegorov. Levin was told that if he “sat quietly” he would soon be able to leave the country.

On 23 December three vigilantes [druzhinniki] came up to Levin near his building – one was commander of an operational detachment, Vladimir Nesterov – and asked him to come to headquarters. There a record was drawn up on his “insubordination to vigilantes”. The following day Levin was given 15 days in jail on the basis of the record.

On 24 February 1977 Levin filed his routine application at the Leningrad Department of Visas & Registration (OVIR), demanding permission to leave the USSR. The same day a large article was published in the paper Evening Leningrad, in which Levin was called a ‘tramp’ and a ‘renegade’, who “purveyed slanderous fabrications”.

***

OTHER INCIDENTS

CHERNOVTSY. In spring 1976 a search was carried out at the flat of engineer Josif Samuilovich ZISELS [note 1].

A photocopy of one volume of The Gulag Archipelago was confiscated. On 12 December 1976 an article, “Spiritually Destitute”, was published in the newspaper Radyonska Bukovina (Soviet Bukovina). The article unmasks a certain group which, it was said, engaged in drinking, card-playing, anti-Soviet conversations and the reading of anti-Soviet literature. The article accused Josif Zisels of collecting and circulating anti-Soviet materials and of assisting people who wish to emigrate.

LENINGRAD. In December 1976 Vladimir Yefremovich Dorfman, who served as commander of a hospital train during the war, was visited by a KGB officer who said he had come from Moscow.

The visitor questioned Dorfman about a nurse on the hospital train, his former subordinate, Yelena Georgyevna Bonner, the wife of Andrei Sakharov.

MOSCOW. On 13 March 1977 Alexander Volkov, a participant in Ogorodnikov’s religious seminar (CCE 43), was interrogated at the Moscow KGB Administration.

At the interrogation Volkov said that Ogorodnikov’s seminar had not only a religious, but also a socio-political character. He confirmed that he had received religious-philosophical literature from Ogorodnikov and duplicated it. However. Volkov did not sign the record of the interrogation. The investigator threatened Volkov with prosecution under Article 190-1 (RSFSR Criminal Code) and loss of his Moscow registration. At the beginning of the interrogation the number was given of the case under which the interrogation was being held.

On the evening of 1 February 1977, a policeman stopped A. Petrov on the street in Moscow and asked for his documents.

Petrov showed his documents, but the policeman did not content himself with this and took him to a police station. There Petrov was asked about the rucksack he was carrying. Petrov said that the rucksack belonged to Valery Abramkin (CCEs 41-43 and “Letters and Statements” in this issue), who was waiting for him not far away. None the less, all the things were shaken out of the rucksack and examined. No search warrant was presented. Petrov was held at the police station until the next morning.

On the afternoon of 2 February 1977 Abramkin went to the police station. The objects in the rucksack were returned to him, but the manuscripts and typed materials were confiscated.

***

On 3 February 1977 Senior Investigator Pantyukhin interrogated Valentin Turchin, chairman of the Soviet group of Amnesty International, at the Moscow Procurator’s Office.

The investigator told Turchin that he was going to interrogate him about a case of the “circulation of deliberately false fabrications…”, but refused to give the number of the case or the name of the accused. Turchin made a written statement that he refused under such conditions to give evidence. Witnesses were summoned, and the refusal was drawn up as a formal record.

At the end of the interrogation Turchin was invited to hand over the notes which he had been making at the interrogation. After he refused the notes were taken away in the presence of witnesses during a search of his person.

The same day Pantyukhin summoned Vladimir Rubtsov (CCE 43) to an interrogation.

This was the first official interrogation of Rubstov after the search of 30 November 1976 (see CCE 43 and “Concerning the Explosions in Moscow” in this issue, CCE 44.16). Rubtsov tried to find out from the investigator when and against whom the case had been brought, according to which he had been called as a witness, and of what specifically it consisted. The investigator declared that it was a secret of the investigators.

To repeated inquiries by Rubtsov, Pantyukhin replied with a threat “to change his position”, turning him from a witness into a suspect. Having failed to receive answers to his questions, Rubtsov refused to give evidence and Pantyukhin drew up a record of the refusal. The motive for his refusal was presented in the protocol thus: “a resolution on the institution of a criminal case was not presented”.

Pantyukhin invited Rubtsov to hand over the notes he had made during the interrogation. Under threat of a search of his person, Rubtsov agreed.

On 16 February 1977 Rubtsov was again summoned to an interrogation at the Moscow Procurator’s Office, this time to Investigator Ponomaryov.

It was written in the record of the interrogation: “The questioning will concern materials in the literature confiscated from you.” Replying to questions, Rubtsov indicated that the literature confiscated from him at the search had been left to him by a friend who had emigrated from the USSR. He refused to name the friend, as “it could cause unpleasantness for members of the family of my friend, who have remained in the USSR, and for him in the event of his return to the USSR”. Asked “Do you know citizen E.V. Yankelevich?” and about other people, Rubtsov also refused to answer, “on account of my basic human convictions”.

The same day Investigator Ponomaryov interrogated Efrem Yankelevich as a witness in the case “about materials confiscated from citizen Rubtsov which, it is believed, have a slanderous character, and about all the circumstances relating to them”.

Yankelevich refused to answer to questions: “I do not consider it possible to take part in a case directed at limiting the freedom to exchange information.” Justifying his position, he referred to the existing practice of instituting legal proceedings under Article 190-1 (RSFSR Criminal Code), and also to the fact that the Article contradicted the Soviet Constitution and the UN Covenants on Rights. Besides the things confiscated from Rubtsov, the investigator’s questions concerned a statement made by Yankelevich at a press conference on 11 June 1976 (CCE 41).

***

VLADIMIR. On 28 February Procurator Yurov of the investigations section of the Vladimir Regional Procurator’s Office interrogated Victor Nekipelov.

Yurov said that Nekipelov had been summoned as a witness on instructions from the Moscow Procurator’s Office, and put the question: “From whom did you receive the literature confiscated from you at the search on 23 September?” (CCE 42). Nekipelov demanded an explanation about the precise nature of the case in which he was being interrogated, the names of the accused, and the numbers of the Articles of the Criminal Code under which the charges had been brought. The Procurator refused to comply, at which point the interrogation terminated.

KIEV. On 9 March Vera Lisovaya, wife of political prisoner Vasily Lisovoi (CCE 30), was summoned to an interrogation at the KGB.

As the summons was not drawn up in the proper way (there was no stamp), she did not go. KGB officers came to see her at work. In a conversation they rebuked her for receiving parcels from abroad from ‘anti-Soviet’ and ‘nationalist’ organizations. They demanded that Lisovaya return the unstamped summons to them. She refused. A few days after this conversation an official from the personnel section of the institute for which she was working, sewing at home, came to see her at her flat. The official returned her work book to her and stated that from that moment she was no longer employed by them.

Lisovaya has two children and no means of subsistence. Her address: Kiev, 4 Bratislavskaya St, flat 192, telephone 53-20-16.

***

NOVOSIBIRSK. During his vacation Alexander Podrabinek, a member of the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes (see “Activities of Helsinki Groups” in this issue, CCE 44.10), visited several political exiles in Siberia.

On 21 January 1977 he was intending to fly back from Novosibirsk to Moscow. At Novosibirsk’s Tolmachevo airport, four hours before his flight, he was asked to go to the police station. There Captain Smirnov, who was on duty at the station, ordered him to turn out his pockets. Podrabinek’s demand to be shown a search warrant was met with laughter and unprintable abuse. Captain Smirnov and his assistant twisted his arms behind his back, threw him on to a bench and forcibly searched him.

The station commander Major Leontyev clearly gave Podrabinek to understand that the instructions for the search came from the KGB. Podrabinek was held at the station for six hours. Then his things were returned to him and he was asked to go quickly to the embarkation because “the flight had already been held up for two hours just because of you”.

On 26 January Podrabinek wrote a complaint against the illegal behaviour of the police to the Russian Procurator’s Office.

ELEKTROSTAL (Moscow Region). On 4 February policemen visited the flat of Alexander Podrabinek. Only his brother Kirill was at home. The policemen were looking for “escapees from Vladimir prison”.

MOSCOW. On the night of 13-14 March 1977, the flat of a friend of Podrabinek, Yelena Vladimirovna Bobrovich, was searched. Podrabinek was present at the time.

The search was conducted by Captain Yakovlev, Senior Investigator of the Moscow KGB’s investigations section and KGB officers Bychkov and Ryazanov. Authorization for the search was given by Ognev, duty Procurator of Moscow City (there was no date on the warrant). The search was carried out under Case No. 474 (the Chronicle does not yet know which case this is [note 2]).

A manuscript of Podrabinek’s work Punitive Medicine, an essay he had written “Report on a Trip to Siberia” (above), the journal Veche and an electric typewriter were confiscated. The search lasted from 00.10 until 05.30 am.

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