<<No 53 : 1 August 1979>>

TWENTY-SIX ITEMS

[1]

Under threat of imprisonment, following a ‘chat’ at the KGB (CCE 51.19-2, ‘FIAWP’), Alexander Ivanchenko has been obliged to announce that he will cease his activity in FIAWP. (He has two dependent sons born in 1975 and 1978 and a wife, who is a Group I disabled person.) Ivanchenko has now left the FIAWP Council of Representatives.

Report by Information Bulletin No. 4 of the Free Inter-trade Association of Working People (FIAWP), which came out in May-June.

*

[2]

KIEV. The authorities are continuing to persecute Raisa Rudenko (CCE 48.3). They are trying to provoke a quarrel between her and her husband Mykola Rudenko (trial CCE 46.4), by withholding her letters to him and telling him that his wife has left him and has lovers.

For several months a man importuned Raisa Rudenko, trying to declare his love for her. In February he knocked at the door of her flat and said that he had been summoned to the KGB and had started to have trouble from them. She let him in and they went into the kitchen. Immediately there was another knock at the door and police and witnesses appeared.

The police stated that the man ‘discovered’ in her flat was living there without a permit. A statement was drawn up which said that when the police arrived this man was in bed. The neighbours in the building did not sign. But some woman calling herself a ‘witness’ put her signature to the statement.

*

[3]

KIEV. On 6 March KGB official N. F. Sheremet (CCE 51.19-2 [4]) summoned Lyubov Murzhenko and gave her a note from her husband, whom he had seen when on an official trip to Mordovia.

He said that she and her husband had no hope of emigrating as they were not Jews, and that if Alexei Murzhenko tried to apply for emigration after his release, he would end up back where he came from.

On 28 March Sheremet expressed his displeasure with Lyubov Murzhenko for having, during a telephone call to Israel, mentioned his trip to Mordovia and his meeting with her husband. Sheremet claimed to be quoting ‘the statement of an angry citizen, who had overheard the conversation by chance’.

*

[4]

Beatings in the Ukraine

KIEV. On 23 March at 12 noon Pyotr Vins (CCE 52.9-3) was grabbed by KGB officials on one of the main streets in the centre of Kiev.

Two men came up to him. twisted his arms behind his back and shoved him into a car which had driven up. pushing his mother away. Then they drove him to a forest more than 25 kilometres from Kiev. One of the men holding Vins showed him a KGB card. Pyotr was taken out of the car and ordered to stop receiving dissidents at his home and to stop seeing the American consular representative D. Swartz. If he failed to do so, they threatened, he would be ‘put away’. They left him in the forest and drove away.

Pyotr returned to Kiev, phoned the American Consulate and agreed to meet Swartz in an hour. At the meeting-place the same car was waiting for him. The same men grabbed him and drove him more than 60 kilometres from Kiev to a field.

There he was taken out of the car. thrown on to the ground, and threatened with being kicked and punched in the face. They left him in the field and drove away. He got back home in the evening.

*

On 27 March in the evening several people attacked P. Vins not far from his home, including one of the men who had driven him to the forest, Pyotr was beaten on the back of the head with a rubber truncheon. When he fell down he was kicked, beaten with truncheons and metal objects, and his leg was twice cut with a knife. Passers-by rushed over to help him. The attackers grabbed Pyotr’s bag and hat and made off in their car.

P. Vins submitted a statement to the police. The police officials who came to investigate said they were obliged to track down criminals, but that in his statement he had described the attack as the work of KGB officials and they did not intend to look for these officials. They also stated that Vins was in no position to complain as he had received a warning from the KGB. The investigator from the Criminal Investigation Department, Chunikhin, wrote in his report that Vins had been warned not to meet dissidents. The investigator did not want to include in his report the name of the man who had come to help Vins, but was extremely interested in whom Vins had been with before the attack took place.

*

KIEV. On 16 July Mark Belorusets (CCE 48.3) was assaulted by an unknown man in the entrance hall of the building where he lives.

There are grounds for thinking that this attack was an attempt by the authorities to intimidate a sympathizer with the movement to defend the rule of law and a friend of many Ukrainian dissidents. It has been noted more than once that Belorusets’s flat is watched by KGB agents. In the past, KGB officials have had ‘talks’ with Belorusets, and he has been warned ‘under the Decree’ of December 1972.

*

LVOV. The wife of Mikhail Osadchy (recently released from Mordovian Camp No. 1 and sent into exile, CCE 52.5-1) was assaulted on the street.

She was ‘accused’ during the assault of these facts: that the exile Stefania Shabatura had been to see her while in Lvov on leaver that she corresponds with prisoners; that she has a bad influence on Osadchy himself; and that she has received letters and parcels from abroad.

***

[5]

KREMENCHUG (Poltava Region). In June the former political prisoner Grigory Mokoviichuk (he spent 27 years in the Mordovian camps) was warned ‘under the Decree’. The main accusation was that in a letter to Kuzma Matviyuk (CCE 48.13) he described the trial of Ovsiyenko (CCE 52.3).

*

[6]

In the village of Luchi (Rozhnyatov district, Ivano-Frankovsk Region), on 4 March, the election day for the USSR Supreme Soviet, a leaflet appeared on the announcements board, calling on people not to vote ‘for the Bolsheviks’ and promising the village inhabitants an ‘independent Ukraine’ in the near future. Several of these leaflets were scattered in the village.

KGB officials checked the handwriting of everyone in the village, even children of school age; barns, store-rooms and houses were searched.

*

[7]

On 22 March a search was conducted in Stepan Germanyuk’s flat.

Germanyuk is a Baptist who is serving a term of exile in Khabarovsk Region (Krai) after four-and-a-half years of imprisonment. A Bible belonging to his family, bulletins of the Council of Baptist Prisoners’ Relatives, religious literature, notes, notebooks and Germanyuk’s camp letters (which had passed the camp censorship) were confiscated.

*

[8]

On 10 April Investigator Saushkin conducted a search at the Tarusa home of Nina Strokata.

On 12 April Oksana Meshko was stopped and subjected to a body-search in Serpukhov on her way back from visiting Strokata.

*

[9]

On 29 April V. G. Titov, a worker and inhabitant of Roslavl in the Smolensk Region [¹], was detained on a train from Roslavl to Fayansovoye. He was searched and put in the cells for a night.

On 6 May, as he was returning home, he was arrested on Fayansovoye Station, without any reason being given, searched, and held in the cells for four days.

Titov sent a complaint about these incidents to the Moscow Helsinki Group and the FIAWP (see ‘The Trial of Volokhonsky’, CCE 53.11).

*

[10]

In May, students of Tartu University Hubert Jakobs, Viktor Niitsoo, Doris Karev, Aado Lintrop and Madis Pesti were interrogated by KGB officials in Tartu about the samizdat Saturday Newspaper (Poolpaevapekht; CCE 52.17 [14]).

Jakobs refused to answer questions. He was expelled from the university for ‘behaviour unworthy of a Soviet student’. The others are also being threatened with expulsion and criminal proceedings.

*

[11]

On the evening of 11 June, Muscovite Igor Gritskov dropped into a café near Dzerzhinsky Square.

There he struck up a conversation with two other customers. A political argument started. Gritskov said that he was against dictatorship — left-wing or right-wing — and expressed his opinion that the Stalinist terror was merely the logical outcome of such dictatorship. In response the two men pulled out papers identifying them as KGB officials and told Gritskov that they were arresting him.

At first, they wanted to take him to the Small Lubyanka. On the way they met some policemen and told them that were escorting a citizen who had been spreading anti-Soviet propaganda in a cafe. As a result, Gritskov was taken to Police Station 46 (on B. Khmelnitsky Street). There he was informed that a charge of Anti-Soviet Agitation & Propaganda had been brought against him and that he would soon be facing trial. Police Inspector Vorobyov released Gritskov after telling him to return the next day.

On 12 July Vorobyov informed Gritskov that for now he could go free, but an investigation was being conducted and he could be summoned at any moment.

*

[12]

Olga Alexeyevna FRINDLER and her 18-year-old son were detained at the Moskovsky Railway Station in Leningrad before their departure for Moscow. They were searched and a manuscript about the camps entitled Behind the Cordon of Lies was confiscated.

Olga Alexeyevna’s husband Georgy Vilgelmovich FRINDLER, a director and playwright, was in Stalin’s camps from 1938 to 1948. He wrote the book that was confiscated. In 1963 it was accepted for publication and then rejected.

An interrogation followed. The investigator’s oral review of the confiscated manuscript: “It’s like Solzhenitsyn and all the others put together.”

***

[13]

Aslan Rustamov from Severodvinsk (Arkhangelsk Region), decided to seek out human rights activists to help him fight for his rights.

He tried a number of ways to make contact with them; for instance, he made inquiries at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and at the police station. But he was not given their addresses. Finally, in November 1978, in the fifth year of his unsuccessful attempts, he decided, after coming to Moscow, to ask everyone he met about the dissidents. The first person he approached, by the GUM department store, as soon as he had got over his shock, called the police.

At the police station a KGB official explained to Rustamov that the dissidents were good-for-nothings who sent all sorts of fabricated stories abroad in exchange for jeans and chewing-gum. As for Rustamov being taken to the police station, this was of course a mistake and there would be no repercussions. There were repercussions, however. Immediately after he returned home the conversation had to be resumed at the local police station.

The next time Rustamov came to Moscow somebody waiting in the reception room of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet informed him how to get in touch with the Helsinki Group.

*

[14]

YERMOLAYEV & POLYAKOV

Moscow. On 11 March the people’s court of the city’s Moskvoretsky district started to hear the case of Yermolayev and Polyakov, charged under Article 206 pt 2 (RSFSR Criminal Code: “malicious hooliganism”). They were arrested on the night of 13-14 January (CCE 52.4-2).

There was a notice on the door of the courtroom saying that the case was being heard in closed session. Friends and acquaintances of the arrested men sent a protest. The session lasted about one hour. The court sent both accused for psychiatric examinations as outpatients.

*

On 23 May another court hearing was held, this time in open session. Only Polyakov was brought into the courtroom. The examining team of psychiatrists had ruled him responsible. They could not reach a decision about Yermolayev. The Judge again stopped the hearing and sent Yermolayev for an in-patient psychiatric examination.

The diagnostic team at the Serbsky Institute – Yermolayev was there from 1 June to 12 July – ruled him responsible. On 12 July Yermolayev was taken back to Butyrka Prison. By 1 August the court had still not met.

*

Sergei Yermolayev (b. 1959, CCE 52.4-2 was inaccurate) was until his arrest a student in the extra-mural department of the Philosophical Faculty at Tartu University. After his arrest he was expelled for ‘lack of progress’.

Igor Polyakov (b. 1954) graduated from the Bauman Higher Technical School in Moscow and worked as a designer in the All-Union Research Institute for Metallurgical Machine Construction [VNIIMETMASH] until his arrest.

*

[15]

GAMSAKHURDIA

In May 1978 Zviad Gamsakhurdia was sentenced to three years’ deprivation of freedom and two years’ either of exile (Pravda, 21 May 1978, and CCE 50.2) or banishment (Pravda, 1 May 1979).

Gamsakhurdia did not have to spend a single day in camp.

Either the Georgian Supreme Court responded to an appeal — although Gamsakhurdia did not lodge an appeal: the Supreme Court, according to the Criminal Procedure Code, had to examine both sentences as an appeal had been lodged by Merab Kostava. Or the Presidium of the Georgian Supreme Soviet granted a pardon and altered the sentence, either changing the part of the sentence still to be served to two years’ exile, or “deeming it possible to consider the period still to be served in prison as suspended” (see //CCE 52).

On 26 July Gamsakhurdia was already in exile in Dagestan (CCE 50.2).

*

According to Pravda of 7 July, Gamsakhurdia applied to the Presidium of the Georgian Supreme Soviet for a pardon and his request was granted. Pravda published a quotation from Gamsakhurdia’s request. When the pardoned Gamsakhurdia was in Tbilisi he phoned some friends in Moscow and said that something in the Pravda article was distorted.

*

[16]

The Khavin Case (Leningrad)

On 19 April, right outside the building where Skobov’s trial was being held (CCE 53.6), Alexei Khavin was arrested. He had just given evidence as a witness.

During the pre-trial investigations in the Skobov-Tsurkov Case Khavin had admitted to being the author of several items in Perspective and gave some testimony against Skobov and Tsurkov. During Tsurkov’s trial he had withdrawn this testimony, saying he had given it under duress. He apparently did the same at Skobov’s trial.

Khavin was charged with possessing drugs. He was searched on arrest but no drugs were found. Then his clothes were taken away for a second search and in his absence packets of drugs were found sewn into them.

On 20 April a search was conducted at Reznikov’s flat, where Khavin had recently been living, but no drugs were found. On 23 April they came again to search Reznikov’s flat. This time the investigators immediately moved a cupboard and brought out from under it a packet of drugs. Reznikov is convinced that this packet was planted; he has sent a complaint to the Leningrad Procurator. During the same search, a record of the Tsurkov trial was confiscated.

In the initial days of the Khavin Case several scores of people were interrogated, including drug addicts known to the police. Nikitin, an investigator of the Leningrad Dzerzhinsky district UVD, was in charge of Khavin’s case.

On 26 April A. Reznikov and I.Fyodorova appealed to the public in an open letter:

“So now it’s drugs.

“What a great idea! A tiny packet dropped into a bag in a crowded bus, a couple of false denunciations, and three years are taken care of. If we cannot somehow take some action about this now, if everything now proceeds without any fuss, then we and our friends will all soon be in prison.

“KGB officers tell us this straight. We are tired of the constant threats. In the last six months we have had four searches at home and been detained on the streets 15 times by police and KGB officials. We have been asked to emigrate; it would, they say, be better both for you and for us. We have stayed. We were born here, our friends are here and here we shall live.

“We are obliged to ask for help from public opinion both in our own country (we hope that there is such a thing here) and abroad, from all honest people. Help us to defend ourselves from false accusations! If they want to get rid of us, let us be tried for what we have in fact done, if they dare charge us with it! Save our friends, save Alexei Khavin, imprisoned in the Crosses Prison on an unjust, trumped-up charge!“

Alexei Viktorovich KHAVIN (b. 1955) was a first-year student at a medical institute. He has suffered from epilepsy since childhood. He has to take hexamidine every day. In prison, however, this medicine has been refused him, despite medical certificates. His father, Viktor Petrovich Khavin, is a professor in the Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty of Leningrad University.

Shortly before his arrest, Alexei had applied to the Registry Office to register his marriage to Irina Vereshchaka. The ceremony was to be held on 25 May. In July Khavin was sentenced to six years in hard-regime camps. His marriage has been registered.

*

[17]

KHARKOV. Yury Dzyuba, who served a five-year sentence from 1973 to 1978 for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’ (CCE 51.9-2), has again submitted an application to renounce his Soviet citizenship.

He is also trying to be reimbursed the state tax (500 roubles) he paid into the State Bank the first time he submitted an application. An official statement from the Finance Department of the Kharkov City Soviet Executive Committee states that as more than seven years have elapsed since the tax was paid, the bank is not accountable for the sum. On 23 February Dzyuba again paid 500 roubles into the State Bank.

*

[18]

On 16 November 1978 the artist Vyacheslav Sysoyev, member of the Moscow City Committee of Graphic Designers, was subjected to two searches: one at the flat where he is registered; the other at the flat where he in fact lives.

He was ordered to hand over jewels, weapons and pornography. All Sysoyev’s completed and unfinished works were confiscated, as were drawing-materials, slides, letters and most of his personal library, including books by Tsvetayeva, Pasternak, Berdyaev and Solzhenitsyn, and albums of Gauguin and Beardsley. Despite Sysoyev’s repeated complaints to the MVD and the Procuracy, the confiscated material has still not been returned. In a reply dated 2 February 1979 from V. Karpov, head of the [Procuracy] department for supervising MVD investigations and inquests, it is stated about Sysoyev’s work that ‘according to the findings of specialist art historians they are not works of art but pornography’.

After the search, Sysoyev was taken in for questioning, where he was told that a large number of pornographic items and drawings made by Sysoyev had been confiscated from his friend, the collector Yu. P. Belov.

On 6 and 7 March Sysoyev’s 70-year-old mother and his former wife were called in for questioning by Investigator Stoyanovsky. The Investigator was interested in whether they had ever seen pornographic articles in Sysoyev’s possession.

On 26 March Sysoyev received a letter from the Kirov district Procurator’s Office in which it was stated that a criminal case against him under Article 228 (RSFSR Criminal Code: “Producing or selling pornographic items”) had been sent for investigation to the Investigations Department of Cheryomushki district UVD. Since then, Sysoyev has been sent various summonses for interrogation in connection with this case — in, however, the capacity of a witness. He did not go for questioning. On 16 April Yu. Belov was summoned for questioning by Investigator Chuyev as a witness in the Sysoyev Case. The investigator was rude, and shouted and threatened. At the end of the questioning, he showed Belov a resolution to appoint a team of experts to establish whether the drawings confiscated from him [Belov] and belonging to Sysoyev, as well as the slides confiscated from Sysoyev, were pornographic.

On 19 April a friend of Sysoyev’s, E. Bode, was brought in for questioning by Chuyev, who told her about the appointment of a team of experts. In reply to Bode’s question about why a team of experts was to be appointed when an expert decision had already been made, the Investigator said that he would produce the findings of the experts reached in February 1979 ‘later’.

Sysoyev applied for help to the officials of the City Committee of Graphic Designers and was ‘relieved’ to be told that when the trial was held the Committee would send along members to speak in his defence…

Sysoyev produces satirical drawings and cartoons. He has participated in exhibitions in Moscow at the Exhibition of Economic Achievements and in flats, and his work has been shown in Paris and London. His drawings appear in Western periodicals, and a monograph on him is being prepared for publication in France and in West Germany.

*

[19]

The Arts Festival which did not Take Place

A group of Soviet artists, together with some artists who have recently left the country, decided to organize a festival of art. The festival was planned for 28-29 April and was to be held simultaneously in Moscow, Leningrad and Paris.

On 21 February in Leningrad the collector Georgy Mikhailov was arrested. The day before his arrest there was a meeting in his flat of Leningrad artists who were to take part in the festival. Mikhailov was charged under two Articles of the RSFSR Criminal Code: 162 (“Conduct of a prohibited trade”) and 153 (“Private enterprise activity and activity as a commercial middleman”) [²].

The Leningrad artist Vladimir Ovchinnikov was taken to the KGB and questioned about the forthcoming arts festival. On 12 April the artist Valentin Mariya was questioned by KGB officials in a car on waste ground near Smolny, on the banks of the Neva.

In Moscow in the last two weeks of February and in March, members of the painting section of the City Committee of Graphic Designers — suspected participants in the festival — were summoned by officials. Pressure was put on them by means of threats and bribes.

*

On 28 March at 11 am a press conference was held at the flat of the Moscow collector Lyudmila Kuznetsova (Bolshaya Sadovaya 10, Flat 44).

Seven members of the group organizing the festival (the hostess was one) were present. At 10.45 the police arrived ‘to check papers’ but when foreign journalists arrived they left, only to appear again immediately after the press conference ended (at 12.30). Kuznetsova was ordered to come for an interview. She refused. Then she was dragged from the building by force and thrown into a police ‘jeep’. Kuznetsova was sentenced to 15 days. She served her sentence at Butyrka prison in solitary. She declared a hunger-strike.

In protest at Kuznetsova’s arrest members of the group V. Akks, I. Kiblitsky, V. Provotorov, V. DIugy, V. Savelev and V. Sysoyev barricaded themselves into her rooms. To repeated pleas and orders to leave the premises immediately, the artists replied that they would not.

On 30 March at 9.30 pm the court-yard, back entrance and corridor of Communal Flat No. 44 were filled with police officials and plainclothes men (about 50 people). The room where the artists were sitting was taken by storm and everyone was carried off to police station 83. They were then taken to detention cells in different police stations.

On 31 March the Krasnopresnensky district people’s court sentenced DIugy, Provotorov, Savelev and Sysoyev to fines of 20 roubles for resisting the police, Kiblitsky and Akks were given 15 days in jail. Kiblitsky was in prison until 3 April, when he was sent to hospital with acute hypertension for three days. He was then released.

Valery Akks served his sentence from 31 March to 14 April in the Special Detention Centre ‘Birch Trees’. He held a hunger-strike for the whole period.

On 12 April DIugy, Provotorov, Savelev and Sysoyev were summoned to the City Committee of Graphic Designers. They were threatened with dismissal from the Committee if the festival took place. The threat was also made that ‘material will be handed over to the relevant legal bodies’,

*

On 13 April four more suspected participants in the festival, Gindlin, Gidulyanov and Abramov (the Chronicle does not know the name of the fourth), were summoned. They were required to put in writing that they would not take part in the festival.

During the same period similar interviews were being held with members of the Moscow Artists’ Union who were planning to take part in the festival. On 18 April an article appeared in the newspaper Moscow Artist, entitled ‘In an Alien Voice’. It was claimed in this article that the activities of the participants and organizers of the festival had been incited from outside, and that to participate in the festival was incompatible with the calling of a Moscow artist.

In mid-April some unknown people broke the lock on V. Provotorov’s studio. An antique frame was stolen and several works were vandalized. On 25 April, with no explanation, V. Dlugy’s telephone was cut off.

Because of the unremitting pressure it was decided to postpone the festival and hold instead a small exhibition at L. Kuznetsova’s flat. It was decided to meet there at 11 am on 27 April (a day before the festival had been planned to open). On the evening of 26 April Kuznetsova went out. When she came home in the morning she saw that the doors were broken in, the windows were open and everything inside was burned. As was discovered later, at 5 am neighbours had noticed smoke pouring, through the closed door to her room and had called the fire-brigade.

In Kuznetsova’s two rooms the partitions and doors had burned, some of the furniture was charred, the ceiling and walls were covered in soot, about 30 works were completely ruined and 20 badly damaged. Several things had disappeared — a crucifix, icons, a bas-relief depicting Christ, some of the sculptures… Investigators and firemen who examined the rooms were unable to explain how the fire had started.

***

[20]

Yury Belov (CCE 48.12-2) was in Smolensk Regional Psychiatric Hospital for two weeks from 25 June for expert examination. Belov’s bosses had asked for this, as a certificate had come from a Krasnoyarsk Psychiatric Dispensary to say that ‘for reasons of health he is not capable of occupying a materially responsible post’.

The examination was carried out by doctors I. A. Ilin, V. I. Fokin, A, I. Labok and a professor from Smolensk Medical Institute, Nina Ivanovna (her surname has not been ascertained, Chronicle). Nina Ivanovna insisted that any criticism of the Soviet regime was psychopathological and refused to sign the report on the inadvisability of putting restrictions on Belov’s work. She signed when she learned that Belov was planning to emigrate [³].

The commission concluded that there was no need to restrict Belov’s working activity because of his previous hospitalization for compulsory treatment and diagnosed ‘endogenous disease’.

*

[21]

In 1979 there were 87 applicants for places in the Mechanics & Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University from the six best physics and mathematics schools in Moscow (Nos. 2, 7, 19, 57, 179, 444).

Of these 87 applicants, 47 ‘had had no Jewish relatives for two generations (quotation from an anonymous samizdat document ‘Results of entrance examinations at the Mechanical and Mathematical Faculty of Moscow University for leavers from six Moscow schools’) and 40 did not fulfil this condition. In the written examination in Mathematics (the papers are handed in without mention of the surname but with a code) one person in the first group failed, and in the second group, 23; 40 people from the first group were accepted, from the second, six.

Of the six school-leavers in the second group who were accepted, three were initially failed in the examinations. Of the other three one, a medal winner, got maximum marks in the written examination and was, in accordance with the regulations, accepted; the other two were children of professors of Mechanics and Mathematics.

The Jewish school-leavers who ‘got through’ to the oral examination in Mathematics were given extremely difficult problems to solve (see CCE 53.31 [3]) and were given only 20 minutes for each one. The names of some of the examiners who set these problems for the school-leavers are known: reader in the Department of Mathematical Analysis S. N. Olekhnik; reader in the Department of Numerical Theory Yu. V. Nesterenko; reader in the Department of Higher Geometry and Topology V. V. Fedorchuk; senior lecturer in the Department of Wave and Gas Dynamics V. F. Maksimov; assistant in the Department of Mathematical Analysis E. T. Shavgulidze; postgraduate in the Department of Wave and Gas Dynamics A. Galimov; post-graduate in the Department of Differential Equations I. Sergeyev; and research officer of the Institute of Mechanics R. A. Vasin.

The exam boards, in their report of Ilya Kogan’s oral examination, committed two forgeries: the time of completion of the examination was put back (only one hour is allowed after completion for an appeal to be lodged) and the terms of the problem he was set were altered. Ilya’s father went to see the president of the Central Exam Board, Pro-rector Ternov, on 27 May, and after this had a stroke.

On 2 August Deputy Pro-rector Nikitin told Nudelman’s father that if he had been struck by paralysis the question of his son’s acceptance would have been decided favourably. When, after this, Ilya Kogan handed in a complaint to Nikitin, quoting these words, the latter replied: “In fact I was thinking of an incident last year when both parents of a school-leaver died.”

*

[22]

In May the priest Vasily Fonchenkov started to work as a member of the Christian Committee.

Vasily Vasilevich FONCHENKOV was born in 1932 in Moscow into a family of Old Bolsheviks. In 1955 he graduated from the History Faculty of a Teachers’ Training Moscow Institute, then worked in the USSR Central Museum of the Revolution, and in the Moscow district Museum of Regional Studies (in the New Jerusalem Monastery).

Fonchenkov was christened when he was 18. From 1964 he worked as a Reader in Moscow churches. In 1969, having completed the full course of studies of the Ecclesiastical Seminary as an external student, he went to study at the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy. After graduating from the Academy in 1972 Fonchenkov was appointed a consultant in the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate and a lecturer in the Ecclesiastical Academy in the Department of USSR History. Since 1974 Fonchenkov has been a Reader.

In 1971 Fonchenkov became a deacon and in 1973 a priest. In 1976-7 Fonchenkov was dean of the Sergievsky Cathedral in Karlhorst (Berlin) and editor of the journal The Voice of Orthodoxy of the Central European Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.

At present Fonchenkov teaches Byzantine studies at the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy and the USSR Constitution at the Seminary.

In his statement on joining the Committee, Fonchenkov writes that the immediate reason for his decision was the CPSU Central Committee s Resolution ‘On the further improvement of ideological and politico-educational work’. He notes that the Resolution talks openly of the Central Committee’s intention to alter the position of religion in the country by using the all-embracing state apparatus.

Fonchenkov considers that this Resolution will have serious consequences for believers.

Commenting on the many useful activities of the Committee, Fonchenkov writes:

The juridical position of religious organizations in the USSR already provides a foundation for fruitful contact between people of different faiths. The Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights embodies in its activity the principles of genuine ecumenism.

Vasily Fonchenkov expresses the hope that his membership of the Christian Committee will not be condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities, just as the Committee’s open and public activity, and the repeated appeals of its members to the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate, have not been condemned.

*

[23]

A professor from the Institute of Oriental Studies in Rome, M. Arrantsa, discovered, when he was in the USSR, in a book by former Inspector of the Council for Religious Affairs I. Bonchkovsky, The Kingdom of this World (Moscow, ‘Young Guard’, 1976), extracts from his personal letters to Metropolitan Nikodim. Employees of the Department of External Church Relations also found extracts from their private reports in the same book.

The book was removed from sale. The Deputy Chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs, KGB Major-General V. N, Titov, was dismissed and retired.

In an open letter to the Pope, dated 2 April, Gleb Yakunin, a member of the Christian Committee, writes:

“It is a fact that relations between the Council for Religious Affairs and the Moscow Patriarchate are such that copies of all documents and correspondence (including personal correspondence) of employees of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate are sent to the Council for information — so that the Council can lay down the future foreign policy of the Moscow Patriarchate.

“In fact, the Department is less a department of the Moscow Patriarchate than a department of the Council for Religious Affairs, fulfilling as it does the wide function of translating foreign literature and of providing expert advice and counsel (the Council itself does not have the necessary staff for this).“

*

[24]

At a general assembly of the USSR Academy of Sciences held in April the statutes of the Academy were amended. Two amendments concerned the citizenship of members.

In Paragraph 1, after the existing description of who can be a member, the words ‘citizen of the USSR’ have been added;

Paragraph 35 of the new version reads:

“If full members [Academicians] and Corresponding Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences lose their USSR citizenship, they lose their membership of the Academy of Sciences.“

(The previous text then continues.)

Academician A. D. Sakharov proposed that votes on these two alterations should be separate from the others. He supported his proposal by saying that by introducing these two amendments the statutes were substantially altered, as in some cases they in fact handed over decisions on membership of the Academy of Sciences to outside bodies.

Three votes favoured Sakharov’s proposal. In the vote for the list of amendments (as a whole) Sakharov’s vote was the only one against.

*

[25]

The number of issues of the British scientific journal Nature and the American popular scientific journal Science which are placed in ‘closed stacks’ is increasing.

In the Lenin State Library (Moscow) the percentage of issues removed is as follows:

Until 1975 the journals arrived in small libraries with no ‘closed stacks’ with various pages cut out and with a note saying ‘Pages 15-20 removed’. With this note and the table of contents it was possible to establish which article had been removed.

Since 1976 issues containing articles unacceptable to the censorship have stopped being sent to many libraries altogether.

*

[26]

In May the telephones of Bella Koval (CCE 48.10-1, CCE 49.8-1) and the translator Vadim Kozovoi were cut off after Eduard Kuznetsov (CCE 53.1) had phoned them from abroad. Kozovoi was in the same camp as Kuznetsov the first time he was convicted.

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NOTES

1. Not to be confused with V.G. Titov (Kaluga Region): cf. CCE 41.7, CCE 45.14.
   ↩︎
2. In September 1979 Georgy Mikhailov was sentenced to four years in ordinary-regime camps.
   ↩︎
3. Yury Belov emigrated to West Germany in December 1979.
   ↩︎

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