[1]
Ilya Zakharovich SERMAN (D.Sci., Philology), a senior research officer at Pushkin House (USSR Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Russian Literature) has been dismissed.
At the end of 1975 Serman’s daughter left the USSR. Soon Serman was excluded from the collective volumes of the Institute by a decision of the director’s staff. Serman appealed on this issue in a letter to L. I. Brezhnev, and after a while an instructor of the District Party Committee explained to Serman that the actions of the directors’ office had been correct.
On 29 March 1976 (two years before the prescribed time) Serman’s reappointment was considered.
At a session of the academic council the acting director, F. Ya. Priima, stated that, in the opinion of the Party group of the academic council, Serman could not occupy his post, as his daughter had emigrated to Israel. Priima added on his own initiative: ‘Although his daughter’s emigration was legal, it is incompatible with Serman’s continuing with his ideological work’ (Serman is a historian of Russian literature of the 18th century, Chronicle). In a secret ballot Serman was not reappointed by a majority of 15 to 7.
Serman is 62 years old; in 1949 he was sentenced under Article 58 (1924 Criminal Code) to 25 years imprisonment, and in 1954 he was released and exculpated.
*
[2]
Dmitry Sergeyevich LIKHACHOV is an outstanding Soviet literary historian, and Director of the Department of Ancient Russian Literature at Pushkin House. “Certain Western circles wanted to turn him into a dissident,” a KGB official told Khvatov, Secretary of the Party Committee in Pushkin House.
*
In autumn 1975, on the landing of a staircase near his flat, a young man attacked Likhachov [Likhachyov] and beat him up viciously; he broke one of his ribs.
During the night of 1-2 May 1976 unknown people attempted to set fire to Likhachov’s flat. When the local look-out system began to operate and neighbours appeared, the unknown people vanished, leaving on the landing a canister containing a gas mixture and a hose which they had been trying to push underneath the door. Moreover, the cracks around the door had all been filled with plasticine. A detachment of police, which arrived at the summons of a neighbour, began first of all, for some reason, to scrape off the plasticine.
After a month the investigating agencies announced (as they had concerning the earlier attack) that the case was closed for lack of any evidence.
*
D. S. Likhachov is 70 years old.
At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s he spent several years in captivity on the Solovki islands and on the White Sea Canal [1].
It is known that Likhachov refused to sign the Academicians’ letter against A. D. Sakharov [2].
Likhachov has spoken out many times in defence of monuments of Russian culture which are going to ruin.
*
[3]
Yakov Solomonovich LURYE (D.Sci., Philology), a senior research officer at Pushkin House, was invited to go from his work to the KGB on 2 June.
From there Lurye was taken to his home, where a search was carried out [3]. They were looking for anti-Soviet literature, but did not find any.
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NOTES
- Likhachov’s recollections of camp terminology were later incorporated into a study of the Gulag.
In the perestroika years Likhachov was filmed describing an encounter in Leningrad with one of his former Solovki tormentors.
↩︎ - See Izvestiya, 25 October 1975 and CCE 38.1 (7). An earlier such campaign against Sakharov in the Soviet press was summarized in CCE 30.11 (December 1973).
↩︎ - A further report about the search at Lurye’s apartment was included later that year (CCE 43.15 [13]).
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A Chronicle of Current Events 