9 ITEMS
[1]
Open Letter to Amnesty International and the European Commission of Human Rights (19 March 1976), from the following mothers and wives of political prisoners: Nina Bukovskaya, Oksana Meshko (Sergienko), Galina Salova (Lyubarskaya), N. Buzyreva (Fyodorova), V. Isakova (Davydova).
The authors of the letter report that the administrative authorities at Vladimir Prison have recently been taking measures to isolate the political prisoners completely. The prisoners are losing the last rights they possessed:
- the right to write to their nearest and dearest and to receive letters from them. (On the correspondence of political prisoners in Vladimir, see ‘ln the Prisons and Camps’ in this issue);
- the right to receive the rare visits provided by law.
The authors write that the method used by the censors of confiscating letters for their ‘suspicious’ contents is universal and gives full opportunities for ‘educating’ prisoners and taking revenge for complaints and protests by the latter. In addition, the prisoners are constantly being denied their prescribed visits:
Mendelevich has been denied a visit from his father for the past two years;
Yu. Fyodorov (sentenced to 14 years) has not seen his wife and infant daughter for more than a year;
Dzhemilev’s sick mother travelled to Omsk Prison from the other end of the country and begged to be allowed to visit him, but in vain.
All protests by relatives to the Procurator’s Office and other responsible organizations have been fruitless.
“Is it really necessary, before anyone finally helps us, to await the death from hunger of V. Bukovsky, M. Dzhemilev or V. Moroz?” the letter ends with these words.
The authors are supported by the Action Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR, which asks that special attention be paid to this letter and that it should be publicized as widely as possible.
*
[2]
Vera Lisovaya Four letters, to
- Georges Marchais, the secretary of the French Communist Party,
- the Communists of Canada,
- the International Committee for the Defence of Human Rights and
- the organization Amnesty International (March 1976).
The wife of political prisoner Vasily Lisovoi, former Candidate of Philosophy (CCE 30.6), asks for help in obtaining her husband’s release. When she visited him in January 1976, a visit that took place in the KGB investigation prison in Kiev, her husband told her that he was a Marxist and did not consider himself to be guilty of anything, either ideologically or legally.
Lisovoi is now in Camp 19 in the Mordovian camp-complex.
*
[3]
The priest Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regelson, in a long letter to the Secretary-General of the World Council of Churches, dated 6 March 1976 [1], point out that Soviet laws on religion prove that religious discrimination is sanctioned by the State, as they demand the ‘unlawful’ registration of religious congregations, deprive religious congregations of the right to own their places of worship and essential religious cult objects, forbid missionary and cultural-social activity on the part of religious congregations, and also forbid private religious education and upbringing in an organized form. The authors quote many examples of contradictions between internal Soviet legislation on religion and international documents binding on the USSR.
*
[4]
1,729 Soviet Germans living in the Kirgiz SSR have appealed in an Open Letter to the 25th Congress of the CPSU and to L. I. Brezhnev, Secretary-General of the CPSU Central Committee, and have also sent a declaration to the CPSU Central Committee, asking for permission to emigrate ‘to the historical homeland of our ancestors, Germany’.
*
[5]
Ivan Dvoretsky
Open Letter to American railwaymen.
The author of the letter, a diesel-locomotive engineer, tells the following story: on 1 November 1967, at 6 o’clock in the morning, train 3502 at the station of Post-Volynsky (Ukrainian SSR), which he drove, was diverted onto a sidetrack occupied by an oil-tank train. With great difficulty the engineer averted an accident in which hundreds of people might have died.
Immediately afterwards, he began to make inquiries as to those responsible for this criminal negligence and tried to bring to justice the railway chief P. F. Krivonos, ‘the originator of the Stakhanovite movement in railway transport’; this cost the plaintiff dear. A medical board declared him mentally ill; he was several times placed in a psychiatric hospital and was sacked from his job. After some attempts to hand in a statement to the highest Party authority, Dvoretsky was beaten up by the police, interrogated by the KGB and sent to a psychiatric hospital once again. The Work Fitness Medical Commission, to which Dvoretsky applied for an invalid’s pension, refused to recognize him as an invalid. He was not given his job back either. When Dvoretsky succeeded in appealing personally to V. Shcherbitsky, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP and a Member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, the latter replied that Krivonos belonged to Party history, and that ‘we shall not allow his reputation to be stained’.
When Dvoretsky asked for permission to leave and go ‘somewhere abroad’, he received a rude refusal.
Dvoretsky appeals to American railwaymen:
‘We are doing the same job, transporting people and all the necessities of life. And, although we are parted by the ocean, the same planet resounds to the sound of our wheels… I beg you, brothers, do not forget that slavery has not yet come to an end everywhere on the face of the earth … I only want one thing: that people should know truth and justice… All the people on this earth, both your people and ours. Without truth, justice and freedom, life on this earth is impossible.’
The address of Ivan Grigorevich Dvoretsky is: USSR, Kiev-87, 10 Aviatsii Street, flat 41.
*
[6]
Serafima N. Starobinets
Declaration to the USSR Minister of Internal Affairs.
Serafima Starobinets, who has been expelled from the Komsomol and from the institute she was attending (CCE 38.19 [7]), asks that ‘justice be restored and that all those responsible for a grave infringement of the law be brought to book …’
In answer to this declaration S. Starobinets received the following reply from the Ministry: ‘No infringement of the law has been found in the actions of the police.’
*
[7]
Inna Akselrod
‘To the 25th Congress of the CPSU’, 16 January 1976.
The author comments on the following statement by A. Yu. Sukharev, deputy Minister of Justice of the USSR, in the journal Novoye Vremya, No. 1, 1976 (CCE 39.10).
‘…practically all the most important international documents about rights by which human society today is guided, reflect the real rights enjoyed by citizens of the Land of Soviets …’
Inna Akselrod, a lecturer in the German language at the faculty of foreign languages of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and her husband Vitaly Rubin, who studies the history and philosophy of Ancient China, handed in applications for emigration to Israel in February 1972. In August of that year they received a refusal. The reason given was that V. Rubin was ‘a notable specialist’.
After their applications were handed in, I. Akselrod and V. Rubin lost their jobs.
*
I. Akselrod has appealed to L. I. Brezhnev twice, asking him to re-examine the case thoroughly, but has received no reply.
From 28 June to 6 July 1974, during the visit of R. Nixon to the USSR, Vitaly Rubin was interned in Mozhaisk Prison, without a warrant for his arrest and without a trial or an investigation (CCE 32.22 [19]). At that time I. Akselrod was in effect under house arrest: the policeman on duty at the block and an ‘agent in civilian dress’ allowed no one into her flat.
Akselrod attaches an appeal to the editors of the newspapers Unita and Morning Star, asking them to publish her letter, so that ‘ordinary people in the West’, whom A. Sukharev had been addressing, could compare his words with reality.
*
[8]
Concerning Public Statements by Leonid Plyushch
Two press conferences were given by Leonid Plyushch: on 3 February 1976 in London [2], and on 4 February 1976 in Paris.
The texts of public statements made by L. Plyushch in the West have become known in the USSR in re-translations into Russian and are circulating in samizdat.
On 3 February in London Plyushch spoke about himself and his stay in a Special Psychiatric Hospital.
*
The Chronicle considers it appropriate to remind readers of the past history of ‘the Plyushch case’.
In 1964 he sent a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU concerning the necessity of democratization; this was his first clash with the KGB, they asked him not to write such letters “for the next two years” for some reason.
In 1966-7 Plyushch wrote some samizdat articles. In 1968 there was his letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda about the case of Ginzburg and Galanskov, followed by his dismissal from his job.
He collected information for the Chronicle of Current Events and the Ukrainian Herald, He was a member of the Action Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR. (Plyushch was arrested; after his categorical refusal to give evidence, he was ‘diagnosed’ as schizophrenic.)
From July 1973 to 8 January 1976 Leonid Plyushch was held in the Dnepropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital (CCEs 29-39).
According to Plyushch’s estimate, there are about 60 ‘politicals’ being held in the Dnepropetrovsk hospital; of these, the majority are sane. The hospital orderlies are criminals serving the end of their sentences there; they often torment the patients, to get bribes, food, clothes, cigarettes and so on. As punishment for ‘bad behaviour’, the doctors prescribe painful injections, usually sulphazine (or ‘sera’).
‘… In a neighbouring ward a criminal prisoner told the doctors that three ‘politicals’ (one of whom was dumb) were carrying on anti-Soviet conversations … A note was found on the dumb man, “How much do oranges cost?” This was taken to be in code. They were given injections of barbamyl in unheard-of doses; at the same time, they were given sulphazine injections. The patients were brought into the ward in a state of unconsciousness.
All this took place on the doctors’ orders and on their initiative.
A characteristic dialogue:
Patient: ‘When will I be released?’
Doctor: ‘When I retire on my pension.’
The professional standard was extremely low. Plyushch asked a ‘Why do you make no use of psychotherapy?’ The doctor replied: therapy should not be used in psychiatry.’
According to the ‘old hands’, the conditions in the hospital earlier, ‘before Plyushch’, were much worse. The orderlies had been known to beat patients to the point of death. At the beginning of the 1970s, for instance, the political prisoner Grigorev died in this way.
Once the orderlies killed a patient. The matter was hushed up, the criminal ‘healers’ were packed off to a camp, and Lyubarskaya, the section head, was demoted. Now she is just an ordinary doctor.
(This is the same Lyubarskaya who appeared as a witness at the trial of S. Kovalyov, CCE 38.3. There she stated, in particular, that there were no wards in the hospital with more than 14 patients, nor was there a surveillance ward. Compare Plyushch’s statements: ‘In the ward there were more patients than beds. I was put in the third row, between two cots pushed close together,’ Or again: ‘I was transferred to the surveillance ward, where the violent prisoners are kept.’)
From the moment Plyushch entered the Dnepropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital the regime there grew somewhat less severe.
In the hospital Plyushch was kept in the strictest isolation. ‘The orderlies and hospital attendants were even forbidden to talk to me; other political prisoners were warned that, if they talked to me, it would be the worse for them.’ Most of all, obstacles were put in the way of Plyushch and Plakhotnyuk meeting.
The doctors constantly questioned Plyushch, often asking such questions as ‘Who are your contacts outside?’ Plyushch naturally refused to reply.
The ‘treatment’ did not stop for a single day. This is how Plyushch describes its effects:
‘I was horrified to see how I deteriorated intellectually, morally and emotionally from day to day. My interest in political problems quickly disappeared, then my interest in scientific problems, and then my interest in my wife and children. This was replaced by fear for my wife and children. My speech became jerky and abrupt. My memory deteriorated considerably …
‘But I also thought: “I must remember everything I have seen here, so that I can describe it later.” Alas, I don’t remember a hundredth part of what I saw…
‘In spite of my apathy I was much afraid that my deterioration was irreversible, I looked at the really serious cases who, they told me, had been quite well a few years ago in body and mind; people had been able to talk to them. Several prisoners broke down and gave up before my eyes …’
Plyushch noted that, thanks to publicity, he was treated much better than most of the others. He called on world public opinion to turn its attention to the fate of political prisoners in the USSR. ‘I consider it my duty, as a matter of conscience, to speak out publicly here, in the West, as part of the struggle for the liberation of political prisoners from the prisons, camps and psychiatric hospitals of the USSR,’ he said.
The next day, in Paris, Plyushch gave an interview to journalists from the newspaper Le Monde, in which he spoke about five prisoners, whose names he had mentioned the day before. They were N. Plakhotnyuk (CCE 28.7 [1], CCE 30.9), V. Ruban [3], B. Yevdokimov (CCE 27.6, CCE 37.5-2), A. Lupynos (CCE 22.8 [5], CCE 39.3), and V. Yatsenko.
Concerning the latter the Chronicle has the following information:
Vyacheslav Antonovich YATSENKO (b. 1948), was a student at a ship-building institute in the town of Nikolayev.
According to unconfirmed reports, he has served 4 sentences: the first (in 1968 or thereabouts) was a suspended one of 2 years; the second time, he was sentenced to 1 year for attempting to cross the Finnish border; the third time (probably in 1973) he was charged with ‘slandering the Soviet system’ and declared not responsible; on 8 May 1975 he was arrested for the fourth time and again charged with ‘slander’ (sending anti-Soviet letters; Yatsenko did not admit he was the author). He was examined in the autumn of 1975 at the Serbsky Institute. Plyushch describes Yatsenko as a ‘Ukrainian nationalist’.
Plyushch also mentioned Viktor Rafalsky, a former teacher, apparently from Leningrad [4], who has been subjected to psychiatric repression more than once; the Shatravky brothers [5], sentenced for their attempt to leave the USSR (they got as far as Finland, but were handed back by the Finnish authorities); and Vyacheslav Igrunov (this issue CCE 38.8).
In this interview Plyushch touched on the national question. He spoke of the russification of the Ukraine, of the continuing persecution of Ukrainian culture (at the beginning of the 1930s and in the early 1970s). Plyushch said that he was for a Ukraine which would be independent of Russia.
Plyushch described the situation of the Crimean Tatars and the Meskhetians, and spoke about antisemitism in the USSR.
*
In both the first and the second interview, Plyushch emphasized that he had been, and remained, a convinced communist He said that for him this meant ‘fighting for a society in which there will be no Darwinian animal-like struggle for material well-being; for a society in which the spirit will be freed from domination by the stomach and will turn to a creative existence’. Plyushch considered that the only attempt to build a truly communist society was the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. That path was ‘absolutely unacceptable for the Soviet bureaucracy … but I feel that for the population of the USSR this would be the only possibility, the only feasible way out of the political, social and spiritual dead-end in which it finds itself.’
*
[9]
Open Letter to Leonid Plyushch
from Tatyana S. Khodorovich
‘Did I know, when I began to light for your release, that you were a Marxist, that is, someone who preaches an ideology hostile to all I consider holy: God, Christianity and liberty as the highest value, inseparable from human well-being, in contrast to the Marxist ‘freedom as the recognition of necessity’?
Of course I knew it. And all the same I fought for your release. I fought for this chiefly because you had been inhumanly punished for non-violent activity, for your convictions, which you expressed in your words and in worthy actions.’
T. S. Khodorovich opposes the thesis which, in her opinion, Plyushch has expressed in his speeches, that the iniquities of Soviet society are a distortion of communist teachings.
‘I see no contradiction between the theory of class struggle, which we were taught at school, and the epidemic of arrests, the tears of friends who had lost their parents in one night, the fear which is Inseparable from our whole existence …’
Referring to the ‘Prague Spring’, so close to Plyushch’s heart, T. S. Khodorovich points out that Friedrich Engels wrote of the destruction of the Czech nation and other small nations as ‘a necessity of nature’. She devotes a great deal of space in her letter to concrete examples of the spirit of violence in Soviet reality.
‘However, a man who calls an ideology based on violence, and appealing to violence, a bright and pure ideal, takes a worse sin on his soul than the evil itself, for he is calling evil good and annihilating the gulf between the two.’
We quote the concluding section of the letter:
‘Dear Leonid Ivanovich, I am not asking you to change your worldview. I have no right to do so, nor do I have the words, or the power, or any hope of doing so. You have preserved your beliefs through suffering, and this can only arouse my deep respect for you.
‘But not for your views.
‘I call on you to take a responsible stand: for your words now have great power and persuasiveness, precisely because of your high standard of morality as a person.
‘People find it natural to identify an idea with the personality who expresses the idea. Unfortunately, they are much less sensitive to the links between ideology and reality.
‘But we, you, I, all those who live and have lived in the Soviet Union, should have an especially sensitive sense of hearing, especially sharp eyesight, an ever-wakeful conscience towards anything involving ‘bright ideals’, ‘transformation of the world’, ‘creation of a new man’, and so on.
‘Do you really believe that the West, which saved you and gave you refuge, would remain the same if it entrusted the future of its peoples to Marxism-Leninism?
‘After all, you understand quite well, Leonid Ivanovich, that even in this necessarily open letter, I am not only arguing with you, but also using one more opportunity to tell the West (the free West!) about our way of life, about the atmosphere of fear, hostility and suspicion which is thickening and growing darker all the time. Soviet propaganda is now appealing more often and more actively than before your imprisonment and emigration, respected Leonid Ivanovich, to the same ideology which you say you are loyal to, and which you now consider it your right and highest duty to proclaim.
‘All the more strongly and persistently I feel that I should like as many people as possible in the West to know and understand my real motives and reasons, so that they would consider my views as thoughtfully and attentively as they have considered yours.’
T. Khodorovich,
15 March 1976
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NOTES
- See full text of Yakunin and Regelson statement in M. Bourdeaux, H. Hebly, E. Voss, eds., Religious Liberty in the Soviet Union: The World Council of Churches and the USSR — a Post-Nairobi Documentation, Keston College, Kent, 1976 (pp. 40-53) and extended description in CCE 41.2-2.
↩︎ - The Chronicle is here slightly inaccurate. Plyushch gave one press conference at this time — in Paris on 3 February 1976. See many reports in the world press on 4 February, and the full text of his prepared statement in T. Khodorovich, ed., The Case of Leonid Plyushch, London, 1976 (pp. 143-152). Subsequently he gave numerous interviews to papers and radio-stations.
↩︎ - There is some confusion here. CCE 17.11 [5] reports on Nikolai Ruban. Vasyl Ruban, a poet and journalist born in 1942, is first mentioned in CCE 30.9, but, as here, the reference to CCE 17 confuses him with his namesake.
See later publicized details, on Vasyl Ruban in Bloch and Reddaway (1977 pbk, p. 384) and on the other inmates mentioned here; and in the Ukrainian Herald, Nos. 4, 6, 7, 8.
↩︎ - For more details on Victor Rafalsky, see Bloch and Reddaway (1977 pbk, pp. 207, 222 & 383).
↩︎ - For more details on the Shatravky brothers, see Bloch and Reddaway (1977 pbk, p. 385).
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A Chronicle of Current Events 