Mr. Rudenko, a Ukrainian poet and war invalid, was sentenced to seven years hard labour and five years exile. Mr. Tikhy was sentenced to ten years hard labour and five years exile. There have also been three arrests of Georgian Helsinki group members. And in Lithuania; Viktorus Petkus, head of the Lithuanian Helsinki group, was arrested this summer.
Manv dissidents have been induced to emigrate. Gen. Pyotr Grigorenko leaves next week on a six month visa for medical treatment in the U.S. Gen. Grigorenko insists that he will come back to the Soviet Union and said he regards the granting of the visa as “a humanitarian act.” Once in the U.S. he may be stripped of his citizenship and refused permission to return.
The departure of Gen. Grigorenko, Moscow’s best-known dissident after Dr. Andrei Sakharov, will follow the recent emigration of Dr. Valentin Turchin, leader of the Soviet branch of Amnesty International, who accepted an offer to leave after being unable to find work for three and a half years, and the emigration of Tatyana Khodorovich, the last remaining director of a fund to aid political prisoners, who decided to leave after being threatened with criminal charges.
Other dissidents who have emigrated in recent months include Lyudmilla Alexeeva and Yuri Mnyukh, both former members of the Moscow based Helsinki group, and Kronid Lubarsky, an astronomer who helped Mrs. Khodorovich manage the fund to aid political prisoners.
The Soviet dissident movement appeared in its present form in the late 1960s and has suffered repeated repressions since then. But never before has it lost so many of its key personalities in such a short time. Dr. Sakharov is now almost the only major dissident still active in Moscow and the absence of other well-known personalities such as Dr. Orlov, Mr. Ginzburg, and in a few days, Gen. Grigorenko, removes men whose wide contacts made them invaluable sources of information about human rights abuses throughout the Soviet Union.
The tactics being used against the dissidents are sometimes brutal. But, as a rule the KGB attempts to suppress dissent with a minimum of violence. This can be done by arresting some people, allowing many others to emigrate and making the choice between emigration and arrest almost a matter of whim. Dissidents speak of the “black box” which contains their fate. It is impossible to say with certainty, for example, why Anatoly Shcharansky was arrested and faces treason charges while Dr. Turchin, who succeeded him as the principal dissident spokesman, was allowed to emigrate to the U.S. The inability of the individual to predict the reactions of the KGB, predisposes him toward restraint.
The disorganised state of the dissident movement today comes as a particular irony since it was the 1975 Helsinki agreements with their clear pledges to respect human rights and facilitate the free flow of information which last year gave the movement new life. The Soviet Union is anxious to sign human rights commitments in keeping with its world stature but, for internal reasons, reluctant to honour them. The dissident Helsinki monitoring group, which was founded by veteran dissidents last year, for the first time managed to unite all the principal strands of Soviet dissent—the democratic movement, the Jewish emigration movement, the religious rights movement—into an organisation dedicated to taking the Soviet Union at its liberal word. From the Soviet point of view, the group probably had to be repressed to ward off independent pressure on the Soviet Government to honour its international commitments emanating from within the country.
The dissident, movement may enter a period of relative inactivity in the months ahead. The Helsinki group in Moscow it still functioning but has only four members and there is widespread apprehension about the expected trials of Dr. Orlov, Mr. Ginzburg and Mr. Shcharansky.
The forces which produce new dissidents, however, continue to operate. Sergei Polikanov, a nuclear physicist and corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences held a Press conference recently to protest the refusal of the authorities to allow his family to accompany him for a year of research at a nuclear laboratory in Geneva. By speaking out against the kind of harassment to which almost all Soviet scientists are subjected, Professor Polikanov put his career at risk and took the first step toward one day joining the ranks of those active dissidents whose numbers in Moscow are so depleted now.
Financial Times, Thursday, December 8, 1977
Soviet intellectuals are not the only ones being hounded
Trials of the Workers
“We are a vast army of Soviet unemployed, thrown out of the gates of Soviet enterprises for attempting to exercise the right to complain, the right to criticise, the right to freedom of speech.”
So begins an open letter by 72 working people from 42 cities who lost their jobs for protesting against bad working conditions and corruption. The letter and the testimony of several representatives of the group in Moscow cast doubt on the view that, although ideological criticism is barred in the Soviet Union, it is possible for the individual worker to voice objections to specific industrial practices.
“We undertook to offer publicly,” the open letter said, “critical remarks against the plundering of socialist property, bad conditions of work, low pay, high injury rates, the raising of production norms leading to waste and low quality production.”
Seven representatives of the signatories recently met with foreign correspondents in an apartment in a new district on the outskirts of Moscow where they described their personal experiences. They insisted they are not “dissidents” but rather working people concerned to correct specific injustices. They supplemented their personal stories with documentation of other cases and copies of appeals to State and party organisations, as well as a second letter, protesting recent repression against complainants, addressed to the Soviet Press.
The working people at the Moscow meeting said the 72 signatories met each other while seeking hearings for their individual complaints in the reception hall of the Soviet Procurator, the Communist Party central committee, and the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Parliament. These halls are the scenes of considerable tension because, according to the letter to the Soviet Press, “it is difficult to foresee in advance who among those waiting will be seized” and taken to the militia station, or for a “conversation” with the admitting doctor at a mental hospital.
The workers said they began to organise their efforts after discussion in the crowded halls convinced those present that their similar individual problems had more than a “private character.” The following cases, related to correspondents by workers present at the recent meeting and taken from the documents the workers’ group provided, cannot be verified under Soviet conditions. The signers, however, took a considerable risk by making them public and insist they are representative of the fate of thousands of individuals in the USSR who openly challenge industrial abuses.
Vladimir Klebanov (45), of Makeevka in the Donetsk industrial district, told correspondents that he worked in the Bazhanova coal mine for 16 years. He became concerned about excessive overtime at plan fulfilment time which frequently meant that men worked 12 hours a day instead of the standard six-hour coal miner’s shift, contributing to between 12 and 15 deaths and 700 injuries a year, which, he said, was considered “normal.”
Mr. Klebanov said that in 1968, after he became a shift foreman, he refused to require overtime of his men or to send them into the mine when safety equipment was missing or broken. He was charged with slandering the State and committed to a mental hospital.
Mr. Klebanov is the leader and principal organiser of the “worker-dissidents” and the documents he and others distributed at the meeting described industrial abuses that, in the West, would have been combated by a labour union.
These included the cases of Natalia Matyusheva, who worked as a hostess in a pension in Gorki and was sacked for “truancy” after protesting publicly
