<<No 34 : 31 December 1974>>

3 ENTRIES

[1]

In February 1974 Ernst Orlovsky, an employee at the Leningrad Metrological Scientific Research Institute, was reduced from the rank of chief engineer (190 roubles a month) to that of engineer (110 roubles).

On 12 August Orlovsky [¹] wrote an Open Letter addressed “To the Deputies of the USSR Supreme Soviet, to everyone involved in the defence of human rights and the battle against tyranny”. In his letter he tells how his rank was reduced on the basis of a character reference, the only negative phrase in which was: “He is inclined to praise an ideology foreign to our society.”

Orlovsky was informed unofficially that his ‘guilt’ consisted of the following:

• he had refused to express approval of the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia in August 1968;
• in 1972-3 the KGB had questioned him as a witness on five occasions;
• in 1970, when called as a witness in the trial of R. Pimenov (CCE 16.2), he had shown the court some documents which made it necessary for the court to nullify one of the charges — that of distributing the manifesto ‘Two Thousand Words’;
• his typewriter had been confiscated by the KGB in January 1972 (it had, however, been returned in March that year);
• he did not deny that he liked some of Solzhenitsyn’s works which had been published in the USSR;
• he refused to condemn statements made by other people, the full and precise texts of which were unknown to him;
• he did not see how the Franco regime in Spain was better than the Chilean junta;
• he had had friendly conversations with several fellow-workers who had applied for visas to Israel;
• he had recited by heart A. K. Tolstoy’s “Dream of Popov” and Russian History from Gostomysl to the 19th Century, and Yevtushenko’s “Italian Tears”.

Orlovsky’s letter begins:

“Having exhausted the very limited opportunities for legal complaint against the violation of my rights, and assuming that my ‘case’ has not only personal but also social significance, I have decided to appeal to public opinion.”

In December 1974 Orlovsky was given the rank of senior engineer.

*

[2]

In December 1974 Anna Victorovna GOLUMBIEVSKAYA, a teacher of Russian language and literature at Secondary School 130 in Odessa, was expelled from the Party and dismissed from her job.

Golumbievskaya was born in 1937; her mother is dead, her father was killed at the front; she lives with her 13-year-old daughter; she joined the Party in 1967; she graduated from the University of Marxism-Leninism and obtained the preliminary qualifications for a postgraduate degree in philosophy.

*

It all began when, in April 1973, during a lesson about Gogol’s works, Golumbievskaya made a reference to a writer whose work had at first been nominated for the Lenin Prize but was later called “an ideological diversion in Soviet literature”. P. P. Grushevskaya, a teacher who was present during this lesson, wrote a denunciation to the headmaster. In May 1973 Golumbievskaya received a ‘warning’ from the Party bureau about the ‘apolitical’ nature of her literature lesson and was transferred to teaching the younger classes.

On 15 March 1974 the Party bureau condemned her for criticising, in staffroom conversation, the deportation of Solzhenitsyn from the USSR. In August Golumbievskaya [²] was ‘cautioned’ for having “lost her class-feeling”. At the start of the school year, she was assigned to teach only the minimum number of lessons.

On 27 November two people from the district Party committee came to the school to talk to Golumbievskaya. They suggested that she should “repent of what she had done”. Golumbievskaya refused.

On 2 December a meeting was called to discuss “the personal case of teacher Golumbievskaya”. There were two propositions: (1) that she should be expelled from the Party and dismissed from her job; (2) that the Party bureau resolution of 15 March should be approved.

The first proposition was supported only by the person who formulated it: the second was supported by 11 people, with one abstention.

On 13 December the bureau of the district Party committee expelled Golumbievskaya from the Party and recommended to the district education department that she be dismissed from her job.

Golumbievskaya has recounted this story in an Open Letter dated 25 December 1974.

*

[3]

See also “Georgian Samizdat on the Situation in the Georgian Patriarchate” about D. Koridze (this issue CCE 34.13).

==========================================

NOTES

1. On Orlovsky, see CCE 16.2, CCE 24.2 [5], CCE 41.5 [9], CCE 45.18 [21] and Name Index.
   ↩︎
2. On Golumbievskaya, see CCE 35.10 [22], CCE 37.9 [2], CCE 42.9, CCE 42.3 and Name Index.
   ↩︎

=============================