On 20 November the 66-year-old artist and writer Mikhail Aleksandrovich NARITSA — author of the novel An Unsung Song, published in the West, and of certain samizdat works (CCE 16.11 [8-11]) — was arrested in the town of Jelgava, Latvian SSR.
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This is his fourth arrest.
As regards his first two sentences (in 1935, five years in camps; in 1949, eternal exile), he was fully exculpated in 1957. His third arrest (in 1961), for sending the manuscript of his novel abroad, led to his incarceration in a special psychiatric hospital. Now M. A. Naritsa [1] has been charged with “disseminating deliberately false fabrications which slander the Soviet system”. He is again threatened with imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital.
Since 1965 M. A. Naritsa has been trying to emigrate from the USSR. Uppsala University (in Sweden), where he sent his research paper ‘Perspective in Drawing’, has invited him to work there. However, the Soviet authorities will not allow him to leave the country.
In an article, ‘My Testament’, Naritsa has declared that he renounces his Soviet citizenship.
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A criminal case is also being prepared against M. A. Naritsa’s son Pyotr.
Pyotr Naritsa is charged with hooliganism and resisting the authorities: on the day his father was arrested he put up placards in the windows of his apartment in Jelgava, which read ‘Freedom and Justice’ and ‘Article 125 of the Constitution’ [2].
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NOTES
- On Mikhail Naritsa, see CCE 24.12 [10], CCE 27.10, CCE 40.15 [22], and CCE 41.1.
↩︎ - Article 125 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution (then in force) guaranteed civil liberties such as freedom of speech.
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