Back to the Future (I)
- 3.1 The Stalinist void
- 3.2 Our “Thaw”
“TOO FEW”?
- 3.3 Rebellious Youth
- 3.4 Law and expediency
- 3.5 Glasnost
- NOTES & SOURCES
- click on superscript number [23] to see note and source
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JUDGEMENT IN MOSCOW
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For a long while I did not think such a turn of events was possible. Until Gorbachov appeared with “his” glasnost I had assumed the Communist system would collapse towards the end of the 20th century. Then, however, the change would be far more radical than what occurred. The inevitability of collapse was beyond doubt – but when would it happen, and how?
In the 1970s the question appeared largely theoretical. I recall the discussions prompted by Andrei Amalrik’s essay, “Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984?” [1] Logically and, as we were to see, quite rightly, he described a scenario in which the USSR disintegrated into separate countries. He predicted that a war against China would set this collapse in motion, but that was not significant. Far more important was his main argument: the regime was increasingly sclerotic, the opposition (which included various nations and ethnic groups) was growing and, consequently, the Soviet Union would not survive a major crisis. Many of the books published around that time — Solzhenitsyn’s The Oak and the Calf and my memoirs, To Build a Castle — were essentially about the same subject.
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That this idea was far more contentious to others, I only realised after I arrived in the West.
What to us in the Soviet Union was obvious, thanks to our own experiences, was considered by most Westerners to be not merely debatable but the absurd and quite possibly dangerous ravings of émigrés. It was comparable, in their eyes, to the hubris of Cuban anti-Communists in the spring of 1961, confident that they would easily triumph over Castro at the Bay of Pigs. The West did not want to treat us seriously. At best, we were regarded as a curiosity. In Amalrik’s apt comparison, it was as though an ichthyologist suddenly heard a fish speak: it was curious, but the specialist remained sure he knew far more about the fish than the creature itself could tell him.
Western policy towards the Soviet bloc turned on this issue, however. If our description of the regime’s growing decrepitude was right, and we were correct in asserting that it could not withstand a serious challenge, the West should deliberately pile on the pressure, forcing the regime to squander its remaining resources. That, in part, was what happened in the early 1980s. The tougher policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, coinciding with the crises in Afghanistan and Poland, forced the Soviet regime to over-reach itself, something it could not sustain. Ten to fifteen crucial years had meanwhile been lost. If in the early 1970s the West had followed our advice and ratcheted up the pressure rather than relaxing it under “détente” and, most important of all, if the West had mastered the tactics of ideological struggle, the Soviet Union would have collapsed in the early 1980s. The result would have been quite different. Then, at least, there would have been no doubt as to who the victor was and who, the vanquished. The healing process in Russia might have been as successful as in the Czech Republic.
In the 1970s one could only dream of such an outcome.
We were afraid that the very opposite might occur – the West’s total capitulation to the Soviet monster. On this issue, Russian émigrés were more or less united and we did all we could to bolster the fainthearted West. How the Soviet regime would collapse, on the other hand, was a subject of debate among us. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” was published in Paris early in March 1974 (he sent it to the Soviet leadership in September 1973, but received no reply [2]) it provoked a storm of protest. Influenced to some degree by Amalrik’s book, his “Letter” first raised the problem of the transition from totalitarianism to democracy. Looking back, it is amusing to recall how Solzhenitsyn was attacked merely for suggesting that such a period of transition was unavoidable: after a total lack of liberty for so many decades it was unrealistic, in his view, to hope for the immediate triumph of democracy. In Western and certain émigré circles he was denounced as a demagogue – a supporter of monarchy, theocracy, and (almost) of a coup d’état. Immersed in his study of the 1917 February and October Revolutions, Solzhenitsyn wanted simply to warn against a repetition of a similar scenario in post-Soviet Russia. Today we can see he was much nearer the truth than his opponents.
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My participation in this debate was largely accidental and involuntary. By 1976, when I was released from prison and expelled from the USSR, the discussion had degenerated to the point where Solzhenitsyn was being openly persecuted.
I did not like speculating about the future. Such an occupation, in my view, was not only pointless: it was also harmful since it would further divide our very modest forces. What was the point in arguing about who might replace the Communists? They had no intention of stepping down and continued to starve our friends in their camps and prisons while the rest of the world, to borrow a phrase from biology, adopted “a submissive posture” in its dealings with the Soviet Union.
Having embarked on such a debate, the participants had reached the point where they began impugning each other’s motives. Each speaker swathed himself in the mantle of nobility, crushing his opponent with the moral superiority of his own goals. Let the intelligentsia talk about the future and it would inexorably conclude, with the lofty wisdom of all chatterboxes in history, that “nothing should be done now, because it might make things worse in the future”. That was the outcome on this occasion, although anything worse than the Communist dictatorship could hardly be imagined. Having argued ad nauseam and accused Solzhenitsyn, in passing, of all mortal sins, our intellectuals reached agreement that nothing should be done – God forbid: Communism might otherwise turn into a yet more terrifying beast, the National Bolshevism towards which the wily Solzhenitsyn was leading us. Professor of logic Alexander Zinoviev declared, with the incontrovertible manner of his discipline: “If I had to choose tomorrow between the Soviet regime and being ruled by Solzhenitsyn I would prefer the former.” Such a conclusion, it hardly needs saying, was very welcome to the Western establishment, which constantly stoked the fires of this quarrel. As a result, the Soviet regime appeared not so very bad after all: it was unnecessary to fight it – indeed it would be harmful to do so! Best of all, the dissidents had fallen out among themselves. They themselves didn’t know what they wanted, so it was not worth paying attention to what they said.
I tried to avoid getting involved but purely practical considerations demanded that I intervene, if only to end a squabble that had done us so much harm. It was like withdrawing troops from the front at the height of a war in order crush a rebellion at home. Leafing through my 1979 article, “Why are Russians quarrelling?” [3] I was curious to remind myself what I thought then about the transitional period.
“Undoubtedly, predictions of an imminent revolution in the USSR are absurd, and it is as criminal to promote such a revolution as it is to promote terror. Only sentimental writers claim that revolutions happen because people are impoverished and have no rights, and take place now when the common people have been driven too far. No one fully knows why revolutions take place, but when a person is hungry and destitute he is more inclined to steal, riot, commit acts of insubordination or display a dull-witted subservience. When someone has no rights, he does not know what his rights might be and he is too humiliated to demand them. A competent government can always bribe the most gifted and energetic among this mass of atomised and embittered people. This leads to stagnation and degeneration, as we can see in the USSR today. In these conditions, were some magical external force to remove the existing administrative structures the result would be a catastrophe, leading to anarchy and mutual destruction.
“Revolutions most often happen when true poverty and lack of rights lie far behind but the accumulated popular hatred and mistrust of the regime make any reform detestable and inadequate. In such circumstances an indecisive or incompetent government is a guarantee that revolution will occur.
“It is extraordinarily naïve to expect that revolution will bring justice and liberty. Any social upheaval mobilises the dregs of society and then, in the words of the Internationale, they “who were nothing, shall be all!” Revolution promotes the most cruel, deceitful and bloodthirsty individuals, those with strong despotic characters who lead gangs of thugs. After a determined struggle the most cruel and crafty person among them will concentrate absolute power in his own hands. A revolution, in other words, always ends in tyranny, it does not lead to liberty and justice.
“Could the same happen in the USSR? Regrettably, it could, but it is unlikely to occur soon. For the time being the regime is still strong enough to reject any reforms: the emasculated Kosygin reforms were not implemented as originally intended – and with good reason. The authorities realise that the present clumsy bureaucracy could not cope with the forces unleashed by any significant reforms. There are no more fearless young men waving Mausers who know how to combat chaos. The Communist regime in the Soviet Union is, probably, the most conservative regime on earth today. It found Khrushchov too revolutionary. Thus far, no significant social forces independent of the regime and capable of forcing it to reform have emerged in the USSR.
“It may take any length of time for such forces to appear. It depends on the behaviour of the Soviet authorities, the international situation and yet other factors. Sad as it may seem, we should not expect rapid improvement, let alone radical change. In the present circumstances, economic difficulties will not force the regime to carry out significant reforms. All we can count on is the slow growth of independent forces in society against a background of stagnation and degeneration. So far, the contours of these growing forces have only been outlined: the national and religious movements, the civil rights movement (for the most part based on the intelligentsia) and the beginnings of a workers’ movement.”
As I then conceived it, this “transitional” or preparatory period was represented by the struggle of social forces within the country “for autonomy”, a struggle that would result in “less and less totalitarianism and more and more democracy until a point has been reached when revolution is no longer needed. That transitional period, in my view, has already begun.” Consequently, our task was to widen and strengthen this movement and its non-violent traditions, and to secure its recognition and support by the West. When the final crisis of the Communist system arose, there would be a force capable of ensuring a transition that was the least painful and shed the least blood. All our efforts within the USSR and in emigration were directed to this end. Naturally, no one could then foresee all the alternatives, every twist and turn, but knowing the subsequent course of events I cannot find any serious flaw in my argument. Apart from a peaceful revolution there was no other civilised way to resolve this problem: it would allow us to avoid, on the one hand, appalling bloodshed and, on the other, the slow degradation and death of the country together with the Communist system. Yet for such a scenario to succeed homo sovieticus had to cease, at least for a moment, to be homo sovieticus. He had to reject the temptations of servile acquiescence and overcome his fear of punishment: he had to make an effort, to reach his own choices and simply become a human being.
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Probably that is what would have happened, despite all the repressive measures, had not Gorbachov’s “perestroika” intervened. And we must suppose that the Central Committee, in its wisdom, invented this alternative as a way of avoiding such a denouement.
Hoping that the system could be saved by such overdue and half-hearted reforms, the Central Committee then found itself faced by the prospect of just such a loss of control. The Communist regime ended as dishonourably as it had begun, caught up in conspiracies and plunged into putsches, dooming the country to collapse and disorder. For the Gorbachov “reforms” were aimed at preventing, at all costs, the emergence of the independent social forces that could have secured stability during the transitional period.
The regime was doomed. Before gasping its final breath, however, it did people one last bad turn when it dangled before them the illusion that the country could be cured without effort or sacrifice. Ordinary people, it should be said, put very little faith in Gorbachov’s trickery. The Communists, confident as always, believed it would take only a little manipulation to get the economy working, to fool the people, to rewrite history and enter paradise before anyone realised what was going on. When I saw, however, how easily and willingly the intelligentsia believed in the possibility of salvation “from above” I was stunned. The success of this deception, especially amongst the intelligentsia, was far more depressing than all the perestroika posturing of the Soviet leaders. Was there anyone who failed to see that renewal could not have emerged from the depths of a Party that, for the past fifty years, had energetically recruited all the country’s careerists and scoundrels? Surely it was clear that a country they had driven to catastrophe must be saved, in the first instance, from them – not with them!
Of course, it was clear. It had been discussed and agreed, sitting around Moscow’s kitchen tables as far back as the 1960s. The intelligentsia was, however, the most corrupted and compromised of all social groups in the USSR. Like Professor Zinoviev it “preferred” the Soviet regime, while complaining about it in every way. Now (what joy!) the Master had finally allowed freedom of expression in the press. How could they resist? How could they fail to praise the Master? The Soviet leaders deserve credit for adroitly conjuring up, on the very brink of disaster, the latest version of the “bloc of communists and non-Party members”, and they did so, moreover, on the basis of anti-communist sentiment. At the same time, contrary to Chekhov’s behest, it was evident that the intelligentsia had not spent the intervening decades, squeezing out the serf within them, by drops or trickles. The intelligentsia proved as easy to trap and entangle with Gorbachov’s carefully dosed “glasnost” as the country’s ignorant masses in 1917, which followed Lenin after he incited them to “seize what was theirs” (to expropriate the expropriators). In both cases, the phoney threat that the “former masters” might return made the masses, and the intelligentsia, an obedient weapon in the hands of the Communist manipulators. The Original Sin of Gorbachov’s “liberties”, after all, was that they were a gift. And that which is given, not won, has this in common with stolen goods, that it may always be taken back: what’s more, you may be punished for its temporary possession. What alternatives were there in such circumstances? Only to pray that the Master would not return and send you to the stables for a whipping.
Gorbachov’s “glasnost” corrupted and subverted the intelligentsia far more than Brezhnev’s censorship. However foul things may have been before 1986, certain criteria of decency and rules of moral hygiene had survived. Consequently, there were morally healthy people, while those who had become infected understood their condition and it was noticeable to others. The coming of perestroika and glasnost introduced a particularly loathsome era when there was no way of distinguishing the sick from the healthy, and any criteria were sacrificed to “save perestroika” from imaginary “conservatives”. The intelligentsia all began to sound and behave like the ageing “rebel” Yevgeny Yevtushenko; the entire country began to think and write like court dissident Roy Medvedev. Suddenly they were all politicians while decent people were nowhere to be seen; going against one’s conscience was grandly termed “political compromise”. They marched together. Yesterday’s oppressor was moved by his new-found liberalism, while yesterday’s liberal discovered he was not averse to a little repression.
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This was greatly helped, of course, by the West’s unconditional support for Gorbachov. The situation within the Soviet Union, by no means easy, became hopelessly complicated as a result.
At that moment of crisis “Western opinion”, in reality the views of the Western establishment, was just as infallible for vast numbers of people in the Communist world (unaccustomed to thinking for themselves) as Holy Writ was for practising Christians. If the “West” had proclaimed Gorbachov a hero and his “perestroika” democracy, then who in Russia would dare dispute it?
There were plenty in the West who wanted to believe Gorbachov’s nursery tales or, at least, thought it was reasonable to support the hard work of those implementing perestroika. They indeed appeared to be making an effort. The Berlin Wall came down; Soviet troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan; Article 6 of the 1977 Constitution, which gave a leading role to the Communist Party, was repealed; Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was published; and nobody was imprisoned for political offences. What more could one want? “You suffered too much at their hands,” people told me. “That’s why you’re incapable of being objective. There must be some point beyond which the Soviet regime ceases to be Soviet and the Communists cease to be Communists, and then our hostility should be replaced with friendship.”
What could I say? How could I explain to people who had never lived under Communism that it was not so much a political system or a criminal regime as a mass contamination comparable to an epidemic, like bubonic plague? You cannot take personal offence at what plague does to people, nor can you argue or reach agreement with it. Either you fall ill or you do not. Consequently, there is no way in which this plague can undergo “perestroika” or reform. You must tackle the disease with all your determination. The person who has ceased to fight the plague and becomes apathetic, as a rule, does not survive.
The unthinking euphoria in the West undermined the last opportunity to defeat Communism and, in so doing, removed the remotest chance of Russia’s recovery. It was as if at the end of World War Two the allies had demanded not the “unconditional surrender” of Nazi Germany but made do with the country’s “perestroika”, a certain liberalisation of the regime. Where would Europe be today if that had happened? There would certainly be no democracy but, to use an elegant phrase about former Communist countries, Europe would find itself in a “post-totalitarian period”. Marshal Petain would be the hero who saved France, unlike the irresponsible opportunists of the Resistance whose extremism obstructed the reasonable “reformers” in Vichy.
The results in the USSR were disastrous. Among other consequences, it made possible an emerging split within our movement, pushing one part headed by Sakharov into a suicidal union with the leaders of perestroika. Former political prisoner Father Gleb Yakunin called on people to vote for former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, who had organised the murder of dissidents. How could one know a true democrat from one of Gorbachov’s fakes? I shall never forget how Gorbachov opened the Congress of People’s Deputies, his imitation of a parliament, in the spring of 1989, by inviting Sakharov, with a broad gesture, to address the assembly. He thereby gained a screen for all his own deceit and for the manipulation and falsification of the dying regime. “Andrei Dmitrievich, please take the stand …”
That scene rises before my eyes today. It reduced almost thirty years of stubborn work to build up independent forces within society to nothing. To be fair, Sakharov understood his mistake. Not long before his death in December 1989, he tried to create an opposition party and called for a campaign of civil disobedience against the Gorbachov regime. By then, however, it was too late.
xxx
History has pronounced its verdict. The Communist regime collapsed despite the entire world’s efforts to save it, thereby confirming what the fish had tried to tell the ichthyologist. It was decrepit and could not be reformed; it should and it could have been dismantled. The threat of nuclear war would disappear only with the disappearance of the Soviet Union. The Communist reformers, so beloved of the West, left the scene without creating a “socialist model of the market”. What was left in the 1990s was a ruined country without a future or any hope of salvation, where gangsters ran the show and millions of impoverished inhabitants wandered, apathetic and downcast, past the ruins of their homes.
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3.1 The Stalinist void
I copied hardly any archival documents about the repressive measures of the Stalin period; just a few that particularly astonished me by their cynicism. It was a conveyer belt of arrests and executions that, like all Soviet industry, had to meet its plan targets and never stopped working. We already knew most of these stories from books and what others had told us. The everyday inhumanity of certain documents, however, made an impression even on me.
Knowledge is one thing: seeing a scrap of paper with Stalin’s pencilled note condemning several thousand people to death at a stroke of his pencil, is quite a different matter (31 December 1938*) [4]: “Permit Krasnoyarsk Region 6,600 additional ‘1st category’ arrests. Stalin, I.V.”
The scale of the country’s transformation was so great that the Soviet leaders took no interest in individuals. People were also counted in thousands and tens of thousands, and divided into “categories”. When the Republics and Regions of the USSR met their target for “Enemies of the People” they reported back to Moscow, just as they did about grain harvests or milk production [5]. Then, as was the custom under Socialism, they asked permission to demonstrate their ardour by “over-fulfilling” the plan (4 February 1938*, No 95/III) [6]:
“The troika has completed its work within the targets set for the Region and convicted 9,600 kulak, SR, rebel and other anti-Soviet elements. In addition, kulak-White Guard elements who were carrying out subversive work have been uncovered, giving a total of up to 9,000 kulak-anti-Soviet elements throughout the Region.
The Regional Party Committee requests that an additional ‘first category’ target of 3,000 be established and a ‘second-category’ target of 2,000, with an extended deadline of 20 March.
Regional Committee Secretary, Yu. Kaganovich.“
After consultations, the Soviet leadership in Moscow agreed that the executions (‘first category’) and arrests (‘second category’) should continue and, we may imagine, went out to enjoy an evening at the Bolshoi Theatre. Or consider this Politburo decision (17 February 1938*, Pb 58/57) [7]: “Permit the Ukraine NKVD to arrest additional kulak and such like anti-Soviet elements and examine their cases before the troika, raising the target for the Ukraine … to 30,000.” The special troika in any Region usually consisted of the first secretary of its Party Committee, the head of the local NKVD and the chief procurator. Naturally, there was no way they could cope with such a volume of work. During 1938 alone the targets were raised several times, deadlines were extended, and the entire murderous process threatened to run out of control. Finally, in the autumn of that year Stalin, ordered the troikas to be wound up and any new cases transferred to the courts (15 November 1938, P64/22) [8].
It is hard to believe that anyone who lived through that period, as either executioner or victim, remained normal. Could the one be distinguished from the other? A year before, for instance, an NKVD officer informed Yezhov, then head of the secret police, that the machine was not running smoothly in the Kuibyshev Region (31 October 1937*) [9]:
“Several days ago, the workers at one of the collective farms of the Kuznetsk district complained to a visiting official of the Party’s Regional Committee that a mass murder had been committed during the night not far away. On investigation, it proved that eight Enemies of the People had been shot dead in the woodland during the night on orders of the special troika. The head of the NKVD in the district was expelled from the Party the night before for having been linked to the unmasked Enemies of the People. He committed a provocative, hostile act by not taking measures to ensure that those shot were buried.
“He was arrested. The executed Enemies of the People were buried.
“Because of poor security at the investigation offices of the Kuibyshev Region NKVD there were two cases when Enemies of the People who were being interrogated jumped out of the window. One jumped onto the street and was killed.”
How many did they murder? I did not come across a figure for those who were shot. From a February 1939 report to Stalin by NKVD chief Beria and Procurator-General Vyshinsky it follows that, from 1927 onwards, the troikas and special boards of the NKVD (and its predecessor, the OGPU) sentenced two million, one hundred thousand people to terms of imprisonment and internal exile (5 February 1939, 530/B). This does not take into account the regular courts and tribunals that were tirelessly at work, nor does it include the mass expulsion of “kulaks” during the collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1930s.
Of course, the years 1937 and 1938 became particularly notorious because the Communist leadership was itself affected. For ordinary people, other times were little better. The beginning of war in June 1941 did not ease their burden. Entire nations were deported and millions of prisoners of war were transferred from German to Soviet concentration camps. It is less well known that the warlike spirit of the troops was also sustained through repression. “From the beginning of the war to 10 October 1941 657,364 soldiers who left their units and deserted from the front have been arrested by NKVD Special Sections entrusted with protecting the rear of the army,” the deputy head of the Special Sections, Commissar Milstein, informed his boss Lavrenty Beria (31 October 1941*) [10]:
“Among those arrested by the Special Sections are:
| Spies | 1,505 |
| Saboteurs | 308 |
| Cowards and scare-mongers | 2,643 |
| Deserters | 8,772 |
| Those spreading provocative rumours | 3,987 |
| Self-mutilators | 1,671 |
| Total: | 25,878 |
“In accordance with decrees issued by the Special Sections and the verdicts of the military tribunals 10,321 individuals were shot, 3,321 of them before their fellow soldiers.”
That was only at the front during the first three months of the war. For the NKVD, the front extended across the entire territory of the Soviet Union. The cruel ingenuity of their methods was taken to absurd extremes. Many of their so-called operations were made public only in 1956 during the “Thaw”, when the Party Oversight Committee re-examined the cases of Party members imprisoned or executed without having committed any crime. One case may serve as an illustration (4 October 1956*, St 1061) [11]:
“… it has been established that in 1941, with the permission of the NKVD in Moscow, the Khabarovsk Region NKVD set up near the border with Manchuria, a fake Soviet border crossing, a “Manchurian border police post”, and “a local Japanese military mission”, all in the area of the Kazakevichi village. NKVD officers referred to this in correspondence as “the Mill”. It was their idea to use the simulated Soviet border crossing, Japanese border and intelligence-gathering organisations to test Soviet citizens they suspected of being engaged in hostile activities.
“… The ordeal at the so-called Mill began with a suggestion to the person suspected of espionage or other anti-Soviet activities that he carry out a mission for the NKVD across the border. After obtaining the agreement of the “suspect” there was a staged transfer of the individual onto Manchurian territory from the phoney Soviet border crossing followed by his capture by Japanese border authorities. The “arrested” person was then transferred to the premises of the Japanese military mission where he was interrogated by NKVD officers posing as officials of Japanese intelligence and Russian White Guard émigrés. The task of the interrogation was to make the “person being tested” confess to the “Japanese authorities” that he had links with Soviet intelligence. To this end exceptionally tough conditions were created, aimed at breaking the individual psychologically, using various threats and forms of physical pressure.
“… At the end of the interrogations, which sometimes continued for days or weeks, the “arrested” person was recruited by representatives of “Japanese intelligence” and sent into Soviet territory to carry out a mission. This provocative game concluded with the arrest by the NKVD of the “person being tested”. He was then sentenced by the NKVD special board to a lengthy term of imprisonment or execution.”
From 1941 to 1949 (inclusive) 150 people were processed by this “Mill”. They were subsequently rehabilitated, for the most part posthumously. This entire undertaking was condemned during the Khrushchov period as an “anti-State” operation, but none of the officers involved suffered serious punishment. Most were pensioned off and General Fedotov, the man who invented this hellish “Mill” and oversaw its operation, merely faced “Party discipline”. There is nothing surprising in this. Almost the entire leadership of the Soviet Union was implicated, one way or another, in the so-called Stalin repressions – starting with General Serov, who now headed the KGB and had been directly involved with the Khabarovsk “Mill” (12 September 1956 [12]), and ending with Khrushchov himself.
Brezhnev’s career began comparatively late, but he also managed to participate in this nationwide annihilation during the last years of Stalin’s rule. On becoming first secretary of the Moldavian Communist Party in 1950, he asked if he might be given additional targets for the expulsion of hostile elements (6 October 1952, No 10931) [13]. By then the “class struggle” had become much less heated. A few pitiful remnants, by some miracle, had survived the previous purges: 735 “kulak” families (2,382 individuals); 735 individual “kulak” farmers; and members of various sects (Jehovah’s Witnesses, 850 families; and 400 families of Innokentievites, Archangelists, Subbotniki [14], Pentecostalists and Seventh-Day Adventists): in all, some six thousand individuals. Not a very good catch, but vigilance must be maintained.
These were Stalinist officials and one could not expect them to be particularly strict in their condemnation of “individual violations of socialist legality during the Cult of Personality”. Especially since they did not intend to end political repression as such. Contrary to common opinion, the “Thaw” did not go very deep. The style and scale changed, but not the essence. It is curious, much later, to note how KGB head Yury Andropov excused himself before the Central Committee in 1975. Frustrated by our campaign to defend human rights in the Soviet Union, Andropov said that many more had been imprisoned under the “liberal” Khrushchov than he himself had managed to send to prison or the camps since 1967 (29 December 1975*, 3213-A) [15]:
“As concerns criminal charges against the so-called “dissidents”, by which the West usually means persons prosecuted under Articles 70 (Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda)[16] and 190-1 (Circulation of knowingly false fabrications, denigrating the Soviet system)[17] of the RSFSR Criminal Code, the figures are as follows. For the period from 1967 (Article 190-1 was introduced in September 1966) up to and including 1975, 1,583 persons were convicted under these Articles. During the previous nine-year period (1958-1966) 3,448 persons were convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Incidentally, in 1958, i.e. during a time, as it happens, that the West frequently refers to as the “period of liberalisation”, and when N.S. Khrushchov made his statement (27 January 1959) about the lack of “prosecutions for political crimes”, 1,416 people were convicted under Article 70, i.e. almost as many as in the past nine years [1967-1975].”
The West always preferred to think in stereotypes and make a liberal of each new Soviet leader. No one escaped this praise: neither Stalin, nor Khrushchov, nor Brezhnev, nor Andropov – not to mention Gorbachov. This, one must suppose, was an expression of the constant Western dream that the Communist threat would somehow vanish of its own accord, without struggle or risk.
And the people who nursed this dream were not the worst. The worst proposed to choke the Soviet python “with kindness”, surrendering to it body and soul. I remember how the British intelligentsia turned on me in 1978, after the appearance of my book To Build a Castle, because I was insufficiently respectful towards Khrushchov and his “Thaw “. There was no limit to their indignation, especially in The Guardian, which has always known, better than us, about life in the Soviet Union. If Khrushchov did differ in some way from all the other Soviet leaders since Lenin it was in his rather naïve belief in the rapid triumph of Communism. While the West was getting ready to award him the laurels of a liberal, he was energetically preparing for that victory. A Top Secret (Special File) document (3 September 1953* [18]) contained a Central Committee Resolution for setting up a “special section” within the Second (Intelligence) Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. Its tasks were
“… sabotage at the major military-strategic and communication installations on the territories of the main aggressive States, the USA and Britain, and on the territories of other capitalist countries being used against the USSR by the main aggressors.
“… carrying out
acts of terror[crossed out by hand and replaced by “active measures”] against the most active and ill-intentioned enemies of the Soviet Union among individuals in capitalist countries, especially dangerous foreign intelligence agents, the heads of anti-Soviet émigré organisations and traitors to the Motherland.”
All measures of this new special section were to receive “preliminary examination by and sanction from the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee”, and the Resolution was authorised by “N. Khrushchov, Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee”. A fine liberal, wasn’t he? For those of us imprisoned during his “Thaw”, this document is no revelation. The murder and abduction of émigré leaders was a well-known practice at that time, as was the Khrushchov innovation of incarcerating people in psychiatric hospitals.
The course of partial de-Stalinisation after the Leader’s death was inevitable and, as we can now see from the documents[19], the first person to propose it was not Khrushchov but Beria. Naturally, it was not his kindly nature or a striving towards the purity of Leninist ideas that led him in this direction: it was a fierce power struggle. At Stalin’s death Beria headed both the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of State Security. He had access to the archives of both organisations and used them against his opponents. Beria began the process of rehabilitation for those convicted in cases where his rivals, but not himself, had been involved. In so doing, he set the terms for the entire post-Stalin struggle for power. Khrushchov and his supporters could do nothing but eliminate Beria and adopt his methods. The genie had escaped from the bottle and it was now impossible to put it back.
It is curious to note that Beria, who is remembered in history only as Stalin’s secret police chief and a pathological murderer, was, it seems, an imaginative politician. His struggle for power was not limited to a campaign of selective rehabilitation. He also foresaw a new course of destalinisation for the Party. He proposed that agreement be reached with the West to reunify Germany as a neutral State in return for 10 billion dollars, something the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Gorbachov achieved far less successfully 35 years later. It is easy to imagine how the West would have idolised Beria if he had won the struggle for power in the USSR. The post-Stalin period would have been called the “Beria Thaw” and no one today would remember Khrushchov.
The campaign of rehabilitation under Khrushchov was far less honest than most people then imagined. Almost until the end of Khrushchov’s time as Party leader, for example, the families of those executed on the orders of the troikas were told lies about the fate of their loved ones. A note provided to the Central Committee by KGB head Semichastny (25 December 1962*, 3265-S [20]) showed that an instruction had been issued in 1955 that citizens interested in the fate of persons executed by the decision of extra-judicial bodies were to be told that their relatives had been “sentenced to 10 years in a corrective labour camp and died in a place of detention”. The reason for establishing this practice, he explained,
“… was that many individuals were unjustly convicted during the period of mass repression, and information about their real fate, therefore, might have a negative effect on the position of their families. Furthermore, it was considered that informing the members of the families of those who had been shot of the true fate of their relatives might be used by certain hostile elements to the detriment of the interests of the Soviet State.
“The existing practice of giving out fictitious information for the most part concerns those Soviet citizens who were innocent and shot on the decision of extra-judicial bodies during the period of mass repression.
“As a result of the re-examination of criminal cases from 1954 to 1961 about half of the total numbers shot by extra-judicial decisions have been rehabilitated. Relatives of most them have been told details of their deaths, which supposedly occurred where they were detained, and these details do not correspond to reality.”
Semichastny did not suggest that the Central Committee now admit it had been lying and tell people the whole truth. He merely recommended that those now requesting information “be told in person the real circumstances of death”. In any case their number, he wrote, was decreasing year by year. From now on “the registry office record of their death would indicate the date of execution without specifying the cause of death, as the Military Board of the USSR Supreme Court and military tribunals do when recording deaths of persons executed after a verdict in court”.
In other words, we did not then know the whole truth about that horrific period. We possessed fragments, incidents and stories about those “secretive, almost legendary times”, as Vysotsky so aptly put it. Soon people began digging up the once concealed mass burials. You could not reconstruct the truth from those scattered bones, but did we really want to know the truth? I am afraid that insane era will always remain a black, frightening void in the popular consciousness, no matter how many new documents we may find.
*
3.2 Our “Thaw”
Probably that is why I put more trust in the legends and songs, the pictures and sounds of my childhood. They provide, in my view, a more accurate reflection of that time. While the pictures in my memory are invariably a dirty grey with coarse-grained images, like old photographs or the cinema newsreel of those years, the sound of my childhood is a steady, tense hum of engines, disquieting and alarming, somewhere beyond the horizon. It was as if my childish ear could detect what adults constantly engrossed in their own concerns did not hear: the hellish machine of the State in operation.
It was a period of anguish, almost hysteria. There were the pompous Stalinist parades, with salvoes of fireworks and May Day demonstrations in which half Moscow took part. Meanwhile, we lived a wretched beggarly existence in barracks and communal flats, with endless fights and drunken abuse, the cripples always round the beer stalls and young hooligans who gathered down the side passage into the courtyard. The less appealing life became, the greater the heroic spirit projected through the loudspeakers, out on the street and inside each flat. Everyone was supposed to be a hero, that’s what the famous song said:
“When the country orders us to be heroes /
each one of us a hero will become”.
The liberated man of socialist society must become a Superman, conquering nature, turning back the rivers and transforming deserts into blooming orchards. There was an implacable logic at work. To create heaven on earth, after all, we had to achieve miracles every day. They were “made-to-order” heroes. Always half-starved, always in workmen’s padded jackets or military uniform (I can remember no other clothes from my childhood), while Soviet pilots stormed the heavens and our explorers conquered the North Pole. With little but their bare hands these “heroes” dug canals, erected dams and built the largest industrial complexes in the world. The triumphant proletariat strode from victory to victory, demonstrating the unshakable power of collective labour.
*
MAYAKOVSKY
This State romanticism, naturally, did not tally with the realities of our existence. Mayakovsky was a gifted writer and, no matter how much he wanted to glorify the feat of those who built a “garden city” in the impenetrable forests, he could not help conveying the crazy nature of the situation: “The workers sit in the mud / chewing their rain-soaked bread “. You can just imagine that picture. His emotional, not to say hysterical, conclusion carries no conviction:
I know the city will rise
I know the orchards will bloom
when such people are to be found
in the Land of the Soviets!
Of course, “such people” will not build any “garden city” if they cannot build themselves a clean canteen and protect their bread from the rain, but prefer to sit submissively in the mud. These are not heroic warriors and conquerors of chaos, they were zeks in all but name.
Heroism is a cruel concept for it is based on the idea of self-sacrifice. When raised to the level of a State ideology it also becomes absurd. Nature does not provide us with many heroes, and in any epoch no nation possesses many. What then is meant by “mass heroism”, something so stubbornly exalted by the system, if it is not a mass and by no means voluntary form of self-sacrifice? Put simply, it means mass murder, just as the “conquest of nature” means its barbarous destruction. It was only much later that the people of that time, looking back, saw that the superhuman and the inhuman were identical. A few were inflamed with enthusiasm. The rest trembled with fear while the most cynical demagogues rose to positions of power and died in the successive purges. It was a generation that burned itself out, exhausted by work beyond its strength, perishing in the camps, sacrificing itself in “class struggle”, and all for no good reason. The sacrifice proved pointless. The magnificent canals and dams transformed the rivers into putrid bogs while the gigantic industrial complexes turned once flourishing regions into desert. It was as if nature, that eternal “Enemy of the People”, had decided to wreck the Party’s grandiose plans.
A further absurdity is that, like any emotional outburst, a heroic impulse may be easily stirred but quite impossible to regulate, let alone direct for the exclusive benefit of the State. The system tried to create “Soviet Man” but this was as impossible as an obedient rebel, a conformist revolutionary or a cowardly hero. This explains, on the one hand, the intoxicated anguish, the fights and the crime waves and, on the other hand, the endless and fantastic lies. The country cannot order you to be a hero only at certain hours of the day and in certain circumstances. If you have been brought up since childhood on the example of someone who used his own body to block the enemy’s machine gun, or of a girl who was tortured to death by the SS rather than give away her comrades, it is hardly possible to reconcile yourself to the atmosphere of lies and secret denunciations in which you are forced to live.
In any case, this romantic propaganda must have greatly complicated the work of State Security. It is astonishing to learn, for instance, that there were individuals processed by the NKVD “Mill” near Khabarovsk who did not give in either to the “Japanese” or to the “Soviet” side. After many weeks of torture the State Security officers had to shoot them without trial to conceal what they were up to. One astonishing act at that hellish “Mill” sends shivers up and down the spine (4 October 1956*, St 1061 [21]): “On 21 November 1947 a Soviet citizen, Yan Lin Pu, who worked as a cook at the phoney border post (the official name of the fictional “Japanese military mission”), was incensed by the treatment handed out there. He broke the plates and destroyed all items of Japanese manufacture. Fearing that Yan Lin Pu might flee across the border, section head Popov and underground agent Chu Tsin Lin shot him”.
The unfortunate individual who jumped out of the NKVD investigations office window in Kuibyshev and died from the fall onto the street below also performed a feat of courage, exposing at the cost of his own life the lawless behaviour of State Security. How many were they, those who did not give in, who were not broken and who died, scratching and biting, without a hope that later generations would remember them with thanks? History has not preserved their names. Only the legends have survived, but they ensured that evil did not swamp the entire world and become a generally-accepted norm.
*
POST-WAR
Strange as it may sound, the war introduced a certain normality after the paranoid ravings of the 1930s. A quite real enemy appeared, as did a genuine threat to the lives of one’s family and, therefore, a quite understandable need to risk one’s life to save them. For the same reason, however, Stalinist patriotic propaganda so successfully infected the wartime and post-war generations with the virus of heroism. We grew up without knowing anything other than war, destruction and death, and from an early age thought how we could most dearly sell our lives: “While in the basements small boys longed to hurl themselves at tanks” [22]. Evidently, it was not just a matter of propaganda. Sometimes I think we were simply born with some mysterious goal implanted in our genes. In its last desperate effort to survive, it seems, the nation gave the earth a generation of kamikazes who, if Hitler had ever reached Siberia, would still have torn his hordes to shreds. Europe was very lucky that the war ended before we grew up. Still, the war came to an end and the tearful Soviet kamikazes were deeply disappointed (“there wasn’t a bullet for me”), and already proved incapable of doing anything but fight.
The consequences for the Soviet regime were alarming. The country was swept by a wave of criminal romanticism and, no matter how the regime fought against it, it would remain the dominant “ideology” among the young and, in the end, outlived the Communist ideology. When allowance has been made for post-war disruption, a fatherless generation and so on, the opposition to the State behind this impulse is obvious. These romantics emerged from the unlit courtyard side-passage (“from the gutter”). They were not drawn from among the Komsomol volunteers on the construction sites of Communism who, if they found themselves in the camps, suffered the most ferocious retribution. By 1956 “juvenile” offenders formed almost 40% of the camp population and the 22 commissions, sent out across the country by the frightened Central Committee to investigate this phenomenon, testified that they could not be tamed (22 August 1956, St 21/4 [23]).
Wartime heroism also stirred a spirit of resistance in the nation. There were uprisings in the camps, and outside the camps, which shook the very foundations of the system. Change had become unavoidable, even if Stalin had lived longer. His death was a turning-point, of course. The wave of uprisings in Eastern Europe, and especially the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, were undoubtedly linked to his demise, and they electrified the atmosphere in the Soviet Union itself. We did not have to throw ourselves at tanks. That fell to our contemporaries in Budapest and earned them our admiration. I suspect that most the 1,416 arrested in 1958 for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda [24], were imprisoned “for Hungary”, as the phrase then was. Leaflets, arson attacks or simply the refusal to take part in Soviet elections were common occurrences (5 March 1957, 465‑S [25]).
*
LEV LANDAU
The intelligentsia also revived, especially those surrounding the country’s major physicists for whom the microbe of free thought had never been fully exterminated, even under Stalin. “Landau has gathered around him a group of theoretical physicists from among anti-Soviet and nationalistic scientists of Jewish ethnicity,” KGB head Serov reported to the Central Committee (19 December 1957* [26]). It was curious to read that report in 1992. Seventeen pages long, it was composed for the most part of remarks, very typical for the intelligentsia at that time, uttered by Lev Landau [27] and overheard by State Security:
Identifying the rebels with the Hungarian nation and working class, he characterised the events in Hungary as ‘the Hungarian Revolution’, a ‘very good, joyful event’ in which ‘the warrior-nation was fighting for its freedom.
“… The Hungarian Revolution means that almost the entire Hungarian nation has risen against its enslavers, i.e. against a small Hungarian clique and mainly against our clique.
“… They are the true descendants of the great revolutionaries of all times… What they have now demonstrated is worthy of emulation. I am ready to get down on my knees before Hungary.”
Talking of the policy of the Soviet government on this issue, he declared:
‘… They have decided to bespatter themselves with blood.
… The people running our country are criminals.’
On 12 November 1956 Landau was asked, during a conversation at his apartment, about our actions in Hungary, whether ‘if Lenin came back, his hair would stand on end’. He replied:
‘… Lenin also got his hands dirty. Remember the Kronstadt Rebellion. That was a filthy business. The working class in Petrograd and the sailors at Kronstadt rebelled. They put forward the most democratic demands and were answered with bullets… It’s a fascist system.
‘The first thing they did as early as October 1917, in the space of a few months, was to seize power and transfer it wholly into the hands of the party apparatus. Without delay they established the Party principle of expropriating the expropriators. They did all that for sound reasons.
‘… It was no mistake, it was what they believed. That was how they carried out the revolution.’
When asked, ‘So, the whole idea is flawed?’ Landau replied, ‘Of course.’
‘I consider that as long as this system exists there will never be any hope of it leading to something decent. The very idea is comical. I’m not counting on it.
‘… Now the possibility, which I had never entertained, of a revolution in this country has arisen. Only a year ago it would have seemed laughable to think of a revolution here but it isn’t laughable. It will happen, it’s not inconceivable’.”
That is exactly how we thought and felt then, from a teenager to a member of the Academy of Sciences. It was that belief, and certainly not faith in the ‘liberalism’ of the Soviet leaders, that accounted for the ‘Thaw’. It gave rise to our movement and our struggle against the sudden return of winter. Those who have not lived in perpetual anguish, who haven’t heard with their own ears the hum of the hellish machine of State, those who have not prepared from childhood to hurl themselves at a tank, will not be able to grasp the meaning of our struggle.
x
RULERS
As for the country’s rulers, from Khrushchov to Gorbachov, they tried to extinguish this spark of hope, rightly seeing it as a threat to their own power. For them the Stalin period forever remained a ‘golden age’, about which they wished to remember nothing apart from the official legends.
Thirty years later, as the following Politburo exchanges show, their only regret on the eve of ‘perestroika’ (12 July 1984*, Pb [28]) was that Khrushchov had rocked the boat too hard during the struggle for the succession. How they wanted to rewrite history and cross out all the zigzags of the ‘Thaw’. How they missed the clear vision of the Leader and Teacher, with his steady hand and his eagle eye, fixed on the future! How they sympathised today with Stalin’s elderly comrades-in-arms …
*
12 JULY 1984 (POLITBURO)
CHERNENKO. In addition to today’s agenda I would like to inform you about certain letters I have received.
As you know, we have taken a decision in response to one of these letters. It was a request from Molotov [29] to be re-admitted to the Party. I saw Molotov and talked to him. He received our decision with great joy and almost shed a tear. Molotov said this decision marked his second birth. He is now 93 but looks quite sturdy and speaks firmly. He declared that the Politburo has preserved and continued with determination the work which the Party had conducted. It’s just bad, he said, that you work until late at night as we did. Molotov says he takes an interest in the newspapers and reads the periodicals. You are managing things properly, he declared, and that is why the people support you.
USTINOV. That’s an important assessment on his part.
CHERNENKO. Molotov said he does not understand people who would be in opposition because of their grudges. He realises his mistakes, he declared, and has drawn the necessary conclusions. After our conversation, Victor Grishin at the Moscow Party Committee gave V.M. Molotov his Party card.
TIKHONOV. All in all, we have behaved correctly in restoring him to the Party.
CHERNENKO. However, after this the CPSU Central Committee received letters from Malenkov and [L.M.] Kaganovich. There was also a letter from Shelepin in which he declared that he was ‘a consistent opponent of Khrushchov’ and he sets out certain requests. Let me read out the letter from Kaganovich. (Reads letter.) A letter of similar content, with an acknowledgement of his mistakes, was sent by Malenkov.
TIKHONOV. Perhaps we won’t do anything about these letters?
CHERNENKO. For the meanwhile we may do nothing about these letters and agree to return to their consideration after the 27th Congress of our Party [due to be held in 1986, tr.].
USTINOV. In my view, Malenkov and Kaganovich should be allowed back into the Party. They were important figures, leaders. Let me speak plainly. If it had not been for Khrushchov the decision to expel these people from the Party would not have been taken. There would not have been the scandalous outrages that Khrushchov permitted in relation to Stalin. Whatever you may say, Stalin is our history. No enemy did as much harm to us as Khrushchov, with his policy towards the past of our Party and State, and towards Stalin.
GROMYKO. In my view, this pair ought to be allowed back into the Party. They were among those who ran the Party and State and for many years were in change of particular areas of work. I doubt that they were unworthy people. For Khrushchov, the main task should have been to select people for particular jobs and not to expose the mistakes made by certain individuals.
TIKHONOV. Perhaps we could return to this issue at the end of this year, or the beginning of next?
CHEBRIKOV. I would like to inform you that Western radio stations have already been reporting for some time that Molotov has been allowed back into the Party. Moreover, they claim that the toiling masses of our country and our Party know nothing about it. Perhaps we should put an announcement in the Information Bulletin of the Central Committee that Molotov has been re-admitted to the Party?
As for the re-admission to the Party of Malenkov and Kaganovich I would ask that we be given a little time to draft a report about the resolutions they wrote on lists of the repressed. If they are allowed back into the Party we may expect quite a few letters from those who were rehabilitated in the 1950s and, of course, will be opposed to their readmission to the Party, especially Kaganovich. We must be ready for this. I think the Politburo should have such a note to hand when it takes a final decision.
TIKHONOV. If it hadn’t been for Khrushchov they would not have been expelled from the Party. He discredited and disgraced us and our policies in the eyes of the whole world.
CHEBRIKOV. Furthermore, a number of people were unlawfully rehabilitated in Khrushchov’s time. They had been punished quite correctly. Take, for example, Solzhenitsyn.
GORBACHOV. I think we could manage without publishing an announcement that Molotov has been re-admitted to the Party in the Central Committee Information Bulletin. The section for organisational and party work could inform the Party regional committees about this in its regular briefing.
As concerns Malenkov and Kaganovich, I am also in favour of re-admitting them to the Party. The time of their readmission, moreover, does not need, evidently, to be linked to the forthcoming Party Congress.
ROMANOV. Yes. They are already elderly and could die.
USTINOV. In my assessment of Khrushchov’s activities, I am ready, as they say, to fight to the death. He did us a great deal of harm. Just think what he did to our history and to Stalin.
GROMYKO. He did irreparable damage to the positive image of the Soviet Union in the eyes of the outside world.
USTINOV. It’s no secret that the Westerners never loved us. But Khrushchov gave them arguments and materials that discredited us for many years.
GROMYKO. It was thanks to this, in fact, that so-called ‘Eurocommunism’ came into being.
TIKHONOV. And what he did to our economy! […]
GORBACHOV. And to the Party, dividing it into industrial and agricultural organisations!
USTINOV. […] In connection with the 40th anniversary of the Victory over fascism I would suggest another issue for discussion. Should we not change the name of Volgograd back to Stalingrad? That would be well received by millions of people. But that, as they say, is an idea to be pondered over.
GORBACHOV. There are both positive and negative aspects of this proposal.
TIKHONOV. Recently a very good documentary film, Marshal Zhukov, was released, which provides quite a full and fair depiction of Stalin.
CHERNENKO. I’ve seen it. It’s a good film.
USTINOV. I must make sure to see it.
CHERNENKO. As concerns the letter from Shelepin, he requests that his material provision finally be raised to the level of former Politburo members.
USTINOV. In my view, what he has received since he retired is quite sufficient. There’s no point in him bringing up such matters.
CHERNENKO. I think that we shall limit ourselves, for the time being, to an exchange of opinions on these issues. But as you yourselves understand we shall have to return to them.
TIKHONOV. We wish you a good rest during your vacation, Konstantin Ustinovich.
CHERNENKO. Thank you.
*
“TOO FEW”
“There are too few of you,” people always told us: “what can you do?” We would always agree, “Yes, we are few.” Asked how many took part in the democratic movement or the number of political prisoners in the USSR we always preferred to underestimate. Sorry, we explained, that was the kind of society and country we lived in, where no more willing participants could be found. When people in Russia, especially those of my age, posed the same question in the early 1990s, I would add: “If you had joined us, there would have been at least one or two more.” They always found weighty and convincing arguments why they could not possibly have done so.
At the time, we also said it was not a question of numbers, or of practical results. What mattered was the principle of inner freedom and the individual’s moral responsibility, something that should be a normal human need, like the need to breathe, eat or move [30]. No one wanted to hear a word about that, however. There was already a great deal of philosophy in our life while the practical results were few. Why should people give up a normal life, and their careers, and go to prison – for their own good? What good did that do? With so few hopes for the future, and so many past decades of terror that (one might think) had uprooted any normal human impulses, there were more of us than we could have believed. Our influence on the regime, meanwhile, was of greater significance than we ourselves suspected. A superficial acquaintance with Central Committee documents was enough to convince me of this. The sheer quantity of material was astonishing.
The KGB reported literally everything, describing every trivial aspect of our movement to the Central Committee. Each time the Central Committee, and sometimes the Politburo, had to take a decision: the fifteen busy men who ruled the Soviet Union were informed not just about the searches, arrests, trials and terms of exile we endured. As this report by KGB head Andropov (31 July 1967*, 1931-A) to his Central Committee colleagues shows, they were briefed on the minutest detail:
“… according to information received, Zhores Medvedev, a Biology PhD who lives in the town of Obninsk (Kaluga Region), and his close acquaintance Valery Pavlinchuk, have begun making copies on typewriters of A. Solzhenitsyn’s unpublished novel ‘The First Circle’, with the intention of circulating the book among the scientific staff of Obninsk. Pyotr Yakir, a research associate at the USSR Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History, who is known as a participant in several anti-social actions and has made politically harmful statements, is planning to visit Obninsk for the same purpose. Bearing in mind that Solzhenitsyn’s novel ‘The First Circle’ is a politically harmful work, it would seem necessary if Yakir goes to Obninsk and obtains copies of the novel to arrest him and confiscate those manuscripts and, as concerns Zh. Medvedev, to instruct the Obninsk Party committee to take measures to halt his anti-social activities. I request authorisation.”
They gave it their thought. Then, in the margins, below the word “Agreed”, there followed the signatures of Suslov, Ponomarev, Kirilenko… An amazing sight. Andropov forwarded our samizdat, our underground literature, to them, for example, the first issue (11 June 1968*, 1372-A) of what became the Chronicle of Current Events [31]: “Our sources have established that Litvinov, Gorbanevskaya, Yakir and certain of their like-minded acquaintances have prepared and are distributing a document entitled “Human Rights Year in the Soviet Union” (copy attached). This gives a defamatory account of the trials in Moscow and Leningrad with a summary of letters and appeals that discredit Soviet executive and administrative bodies. For your information.”
Just try to get a member of the Politburo to read your complaint. It was hopeless. Everything became caught up in the bureaucracy and returned to those you were complaining about. Yet they were not only reading our texts but reached decisions after reading them. It was miraculous, and a most effective way of making the authorities think twice. This refers to samizdat and the reports of their undercover informers. When it came to our arrests, trials and convictions they sometimes disagreed: they deferred a decision until the matter had been further examined, and returned to their discussion several times. They gave it some thought and took decisions. They did not just add their signatures. I was touched to see that the entire Politburo, apparently, met to decide whether to publish a small item about my 1967 trial in the Moscow evening newspaper. Andropov informed them (4 September 1967*, Pb 1393):
“Bukovsky, […] the main organiser of an anti-social demonstration, tried during his speech in court to give the trial a political aspect. He declared that the authorities and the courts were acting in an unconstitutional way. His behaviour in court showed a clear wish to be reported in the foreign press not as an anti-social criminal but as a person accused of a political crime. […] Since reports, distorting the nature of this trial, have appeared in the West it would seem expedient to publish a short note (attached) in the ‘Vechernyaya Moskva’ newspaper.”
The draft, a fourteen-line note headed “In the Moscow City Court”, was enclosed. Its only purpose was to report that, supposedly, I had admitted my guilt and so all rumours about my speech in court were entirely fabricated by bourgeois propaganda. That was all; just the latest little lie in the cause of socialism. Yet gather they did, to discuss and vote, and the results of the vote were recorded: “Brezhnev, for; Voronov, for; Kirilenko, for; Kosygin, on holiday; Mazurov, no comment; Pelshe, agreed; Podgorny, on vacation; Polyansky, for; Suslov, on vacation; Shelepin, for; Shelest, on vacation”.
Sometimes there were also uncomfortable differences of opinion. Take the documents concerning the trial of those who demonstrated on Red Square in August 1968 against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Nothing could be clearer, it would seem. As in our case a year before this was an “anti-social crime”. Send them off to the camps, and have done with it. Yet in this case too it was not that simple. Ivy Litvinov, the widow of the former Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, was evidently an old friend of Mikoyan and appealed to him (4 September 1968*) not to let her grandson Pavel be imprisoned. Mikoyan forwarded the letter directly to Brezhnev, adding by hand: “Leonid Ilyich! Please give this your attention. To put Litvinov’s grandson and others on trial at the present moment will give our enemies fresh ammunition. They have already spent time in prison. It would be more reasonable to let them off with a warning now. A. Mikoyan, 13 September.” Below in Brezhnev’s handwriting are the words, “Show to Politburo”, and the signatures of its members. That’s quite something. There was a trial but Litvinov and two more of the five convicted were banished to other parts of the Soviet Union rather than being sent to a corrective-labour camp, although banishment was not an option, under either Article 190-1 or Article 190‑3.
There are many thousands of such documents, representing a great many hours of work. If we achieved nothing else at least we diverted some of the State’s energy away from World Revolution. The exceptional interest the authorities took in our activities was not paranoia. In a totalitarian system one dissident is dangerous, especially if that system has proclaimed itself to be perfect: there can be no dissatisfied people in the socialist paradise. It was not in their interests to become more repressive but it was dangerous to let political opponents operate unpunished when popular dissatisfaction was quite widespread. This accounts for their tactic of reducing the number of political prisoners while increasing pressure on dissenters, something they gave the elaborate title: “prophylactic work to forestall crime”.
The number of political prisoners, therefore, did not in itself represent the mood within the country, it was merely a measure of human determination: those whom they broke were, as a rule, not imprisoned. Bearing this in mind, we were not so very few. From Andropov’s report to the Central Committee (29 December 1975*, 3213-A) it follows that the numbers convicted solely for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” were: 3,448 from 1958 to 1967 (inclusive); and from 1967 to 1975, 1,583. Later KGB reports to the Central Committee show that despite all their efforts and “prophylactic measures” they could not do much to reduce this level: 905 individuals were convicted between 1977 and 1987 [32] (I was not able to find a total for 1976). These were individuals that the regime had to openly admit as its political opponents. The total does not include those confined to psychiatric hospitals or expelled from the country. The figures do not include individuals convicted of treason or illegal attempts to cross the border; or those found guilty of “religious” crimes or convicted of ordinary crimes in fabricated cases – we simply know nothing about them. During the entire post-Stalin period, therefore, the regime was unable to break the resistance of at least six thousand individuals.
Yet it was not, I repeat, a question of numbers. It was of immense moral significance for the country that there were people who would openly challenge the slavery of totalitarianism and continue to resist, despite the full fury of the State. In the same way, evidently, it is important for a Christian wallowing in the filth of this world to know that somewhere in a monastery there are simple mortals who are living “a righteous life”. At times, it is this knowledge alone that saves him from temptation. In any case, we experienced something of that attitude in prison, both from our jailers and the criminal inmates. I shall never forget the words of the man whom the ordinary criminal offenders in the camp recognised as their boss before he was moved somewhere else: giving his final orders he prodded me, the solitary political prisoner in the camp, and said severely: “And take good care of this fellow. We’re here for what each of us did; he’s doing time for all of us.”
Decades of Communism, astonishingly, had not been able to uproot such attitudes. The jailers, for their part, regarded us with almost superstitious reverence. There was always one among them, at the notorious prison in Vladimir as well, who would agree to post a letter illegally or pass a note to another cell. Given the volume and detail of reports about us in foreign broadcasts one can only guess what effect our presence had on the town’s inhabitants, especially when we went on strike or refused to eat. That was probably why no Party Committee would agree to our being imprisoned in their region. They always thought up a reason to get rid of us and the Central Committee did not know where else we could be sent. The correspondence went on for decades. In 1978, the KGB and the Ministry for Internal Affairs sent a joint memorandum to the Central Committee, supporting the proposal that “especially dangerous State criminals” be transferred from the prison in Vladimir to another corrective labour facility of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (17 March 1978*, 492-Ch). In their view, it was “expedient”
“… to transfer the said criminals (they number between 40 and 60) to prison No 4 of the Tatarstan SSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. Among the considerations was that there are no defence or especially important installations at Chistopol, the town where prison No 4 is located. The town is 144 kilometres from Kazan, at a distance from the country’s major industrial and cultural centres, and is not linked by developed transport connections with other districts. Prison No 4 was built in the 18th century and has no association with the past imprisonment of revolutionaries and progressive figures …”
In numerical terms, naturally, this represented only the tip of the iceberg. Some idea of the true scale of the problem faced by the regime in the early 1970s can be obtained from figures about the KGB’s “prophylactic” efforts in a Top Secret (Special File) memorandum (16 November 1972*, Pb 67/XVIII):
“In accordance with the instructions of the Central Committee the agencies of the Committee for State Security have been carrying out extensive prophylactic work: to forestall crime; to suppress attempts at organised subversive activity by nationalist, revisionist and other anti-Soviet elements; and to localise groups of a politically harmful character that have arisen in several places. Over the past five years 3,096 such groups have been uncovered and 13,602 individuals belonging to such groups have undergone prophylactic treatment: 2,196 participants of 502 groups in 1967; 2,870 participants of 625 groups in 1968; 3,130 participants of 733 groups in 1969; 3,102 participants of 709 groups in 1970; and 2,304 participants of 527 groups in 1971.
“Such groups were uncovered in Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Tula, Vladimir, Omsk, Kazan, Tyumen, and in Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belorussia, Moldavia, Kazakhstan and other places.”
The number of yearly arrests “for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” had declined as result of these measures, wrote Andropov and Procurator-General Rudenko. There were still those, however, who did not heed such warnings.
“The majority who underwent prophylactic treatment have drawn the correct conclusions. They have actively joined in public life and are working conscientiously in those areas of production and services with which they have been entrusted. Some, however, continue to commit acts that could under certain circumstances become criminal and do substantial harm to the interests of our State.
“To strengthen the preventative effect on individuals who are about to follow the path of serious crime, and to ensure the more robust suppression of undesirable behaviour on the part of anti-social elements, we consider it would be sensible to permit the KGB, when necessary, to issue an official written warning on behalf of the authorities with a demand that these individuals cease their politically harmful activities and to provide an explanation of the consequences that could follow its continuation.
“In our view this would substantially raise the moral responsibility of those subjected to prophylactic measures and if they then committed criminal acts and were prosecuted this would be of significance for assessing the personality of the criminal by bodies conducting the preliminary investigation and by the courts.”
The proposal was approved, of course, and an edict was issued by the USSR Supreme Soviet. Despite all the efforts of the KGB, however, resistance continued to grow within the country. Three years later Andropov reported (29 December 1975*, 3213-A): “Between 1971 and 1974 63,108 individuals underwent prophylactic measures. During the same period 1,839 anti-Soviet groups were suppressed in their formative stages merely through prophylactic treatment.”
The average number of groups uncovered each year, in other words, had not declined while the individuals subject to prophylactic measures had increased roughly fivefold. This was still not the whole story. As Andropov went on to explain in the same report, not all the active enemies of the KGB were treated in this way:
“Alongside the prophylactic measures, we have continued to use investigative and other measures that do not involve criminal prosecution. We have been able to break up several dangerous groups of nationalist, revisionist and other anti-Soviet tendencies when they were just beginning.
“By compromising authoritative figures who had inspired anti-social behaviour we were able to avert undesirable consequences in several regions. Such measures as depriving certain individuals of their Soviet citizenship and expelling them from the country have also proved their worth (Solzhenitsyn, Chalidze, Maximov, Krasin, Litvinov, Yesenin-Volpin and others). Permitting many extremists to leave the Soviet Union for Israel has also facilitated an improvement in our operational situation within the country.”
So, were we few or many? Andropov believed that among the adult population which had come through the war “such people are numbered in hundreds of thousands” [33]. I think he seriously underestimated their numbers. In his reports, for instance, he hardly makes any reference to the nations “punished” (i.e. deported) under Stalin, such as the Crimean Tatars or the Volga Germans, nor does he refer to religious movements, especially among the prohibited denominations and confessions. Yet they numbered millions for whom the Soviet Union was a prison, and our contacts with them began to develop as early as the 1960s. In 1968 Andropov submitted this brief memorandum to the Central Committee (10 June 1968*, 1342-A):
“The Committee for State Security has received information from its sources that Grigorenko, in conversation with one of his acquaintances, declared that the Crimean ‘autonomists’ intended to prepare an appeal to the United Nations. They would gather the signatures of 250,000 Tatars, appealing for support of their demands. Expressing approval for this action, Grigorenko said that it would have a ‘colossal impact’. The Committee for State Security is taking measures to prevent possible hostile acts by nationalist-minded individuals from among the Crimean Tatars and other anti-social elements.”
Here is another example of what was going on at that time. Andropov reported, at greater length, about the protests and petitions of “German extremists living in Kazakhstan and Moldavia” (12 June 1975, 1482-A) who intended
“… to incite Soviet citizens of German nationality to refuse collectively to take part in elections on the 15 June 1976 to the Supreme Soviet of the two republics and to the local Soviets of workers’ deputies. … To coincide with the elections an ‘activist’ of the ‘movement for German emigration to the FRG’, Leis (Moldavia) has organised a collective visit (70 persons) by Germans to the republic’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and its KGB committee, demanding that their request to emigrate from the USSR be granted.
“Extremists from Kazakhstan have prepared several defamatory appeals, signed by many, to international organisations and tried to send their representative to Moscow to present these appeals to foreign correspondents or for transmission abroad through A. Sakharov. Measures were taken on 7 June 1975 at Djambul [in Kazakhstan] to confiscate ‘appeals’ addressed to the UN, the Geneva Conference [CSCE, tr.], the Chancellor of the FRG and to other addresses from a certain Termer on behalf of 900 German families (more than 6,000 individuals). These appeals contained tendentious information about the situation of Germans in the USSR and requests for assistance in their emigration to the FRG.”
In other words, life in the Soviet Union seemed quiet and unperturbed only to Western politicians. The Soviet leaders knew very well what a volcano they were sitting on. The empire was splitting at the seams long before Gorbachov. In the North Caucasus, it was already a matter of murder and mass disturbances (30 December 1980*, St 243/8):
“Among a certain part of the native population of the Karachaevo-Cherkessk Autonomous Region negative processes, characterised by nationalistic and anti-Russian feelings have been noted. These provide the basis for anti-social activities and criminal offences. Measures are being taken to anticipate and forestall such acts.”
Crimean Tatars and Soviet Germans, Jews and the nations of the Baltic States, Ukrainians and Moldavians, all were struggling, individually and together, by every means available for their right to national self-identity. The threads that linked together all the far-flung parts of that vast country met in Moscow where our channels of communication, our opportunities for contact with the outside world, and our glasnost were all in operation. For such groups we were both an inspiring example and an aid in organisation. Andropov had good reason to be concerned, and the Politburo kept track of our latest activities and publications.
The most “passive” forms of resistance were the most widespread: the banned religious congregations; the various anonymous protests; and the distributors of samizdat. We cannot now estimate how many millions were involved in such activities. The KGB itself could not put any final figure to this category. It is possible to quantify religious persecution, for example: on average two to three hundred individuals, it seems, were imprisoned each year while tens of thousands were subjected to prophylactic “chats” and warnings [34]. It is not possible, however, to establish an exact figure for religious believers. Equally it is impossible to say how many people read samizdat, retyping articles and magazines (entire books!) and passing them on to others. The figure certainly ran into the millions. The Politburo was also therefore obliged to read these materials. Its members had to know what millions in the USSR were reading, a country where not a comma on a price tag could be printed without first being approved by the censors.
The Politburo took these matters seriously, moreover. In 1971, for example, the Central Committee discussed samizdat three times, in January, in April and again in June. Thereafter the Central Committee would return to the subject almost every year. Discussion began with a memorandum from Andropov about the evolution of samizdat (15 January 1971*, St 119/11). “Analysis of the so-called samizdat literature being distributed among the intelligentsia and the student population shows that “samizdat” has undergone qualitative changes over the past years,” the head of the KGB reported to the Central Committee.
“Five years ago, it was, for the most part, the circulation of ideologically flawed works of fiction; today, increasingly, documents of a programmatic and political character are distributed. In the period since 1965 more than four hundred different studies and articles have appeared about the [Soviet] economy, and on political and philosophical issues, in which the historical experience of socialist construction in the Soviet Union is criticised from various aspects, examining the domestic and foreign policy of the CPSU, and putting forward various programmes of opposition activity.
“… A definite consolidation of like-minded individuals is taking placing around the preparation and distribution of ‘samizdat’ literature, and attempts to create the semblance of an opposition can clearly be traced.
“In late 1968, early 1969, approximately, a political nucleus calling itself the ‘democratic movement’ took shape among opposition-minded elements. In their own assessment, this movement possesses three features of opposition: ‘it has leaders and activists and depends on a considerable number of sympathisers; it does not adopt precisely defined forms of organisation but sets itself certain goals and chooses definite tactics; it strives to achieve legality.’
“… The distribution centres for these uncensored materials remain Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Gorky, Novosibirsk and Kharkov. In these and other cities roughly 300 people have been identified, calling themselves ‘anti-Stalinists’, ‘fighters for democratic rights’, ‘participants in the democratic movement’, who produce both individual documents and collections of texts, The ‘Chronicle of Current Events’, the ‘Ukraine Herald’, ‘Social Issues’, and so on. In 1970, a group of Zionist-minded elements in Moscow, Leningrad and Riga began to issue a magazine called ‘Exodus’.
“… The Committee for State Security is taking the necessary measures to forestall attempts by certain individuals to use ‘samizdat’ to spread libel against the Soviet State and social system. They are charged with criminal offences under the existing legislation and prophylactic measures are taken with respect to individuals who have come under their influence.
“At the same time, noting the ideological transformation of ‘samizdat’ into a form of expression for oppositionist attitudes and views, and the striving of imperialist reaction to use ‘samizdat’ literature for goals hostile to the Soviet Union, it would seem expedient to instruct the ideological apparatus to study the problem and devise the necessary ideological and political measures to neutralise and expose the anti-social tendencies represented in ‘samizdat’ literature, and also to make suggestions as to the factors that facilitate the appearance and distribution of ‘samizdat materials’.”
The regime was already recognising us as a political opposition. Despite its outward imperturbability, it was prepared to adjust but proved incapable of political flexibility. It was six months before the Central Committee adopted a Resolution “On measures to counter the illegal distribution of anti-Soviet and other politically harmful materials” and it was an exceptionally pointless document. Everything was reduced to a combination of repressive, educational and propagandist measures with the one and only concession in its final, ninth paragraph (28 June 1971, St 8/37) [35]:
“The Central Committee’s Culture Department, the Press Department at the USSR Council of Ministers, and the USSR Union of Writers are to study the issue and make proposals to the Central Committee about the expediency of publishing certain works by writers in whom some cultural workers and students have shown an interest and whose works that have not been republished in the USSR since the 1920s.”
As a result, I seem to recall, they published the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, and in a small print-run. This had no effect on the growth of samizdat. It continued to develop, offering an alternative to the official press and giving Andropov a constant headache. Such unofficial publications began to take new forms: films and tapes were also copied and circulated.
An alternative culture came into being, weakening the grip of the Party on the artistic intelligentsia and, especially, on the young. Once again Andropov sounded the alarm (19 May 1975 (1241-A) [36]:
“While implementing measures to forestall the hostile activities of the Adversary we have uncovered instances of a striving among the artistically gifted young, or those who are trying to make their mark in this way, to form unofficial groups engaged in literary readings, exhibitions of paintings and drawings, and theatrical performances staged in private apartments and in premises used just for the occasion. A tendency has been noted towards the issuing and distribution of typescript magazines, made up of unpublished works.
“Study of the circumstances of such groups in Moscow shows that when the young put on their own shows a part of the artistic youth does not find a socially useful application for its abilities and at times becomes involved in undesirable behaviour that, as a rule, is instigated either by persons engaged in anti-social activities or by foreigners.
“… Thus, a danger arises at present that unsupervised associations of artistic young people will be created in parallel with the official creative unions.”
These years, indeed, saw such extraordinary events as the exhibition of non-conformist artists in Moscow in the park at Izmailovo [37], the attempt to create a branch of the International PEN Club in Moscow [38], and the trial of Andrei Tverdokhlebov [39], who had set up a Moscow section of Amnesty International two years earlier.
Soon followed the organisation of the Helsinki Groups (CCE 40.14) in Moscow, Ukraine and Lithuania, and those in Armenia and Georgia, with all their commissions, committees and working groups, to monitor observation of the Helsinki Accords. The first independent trade union for manual workers appeared towards the end of 1977 (6 April 1978, 655-A). The opposition had begun to acquire form and structure and this coincided, evidently, with a loss of control over the young by the authorities, which was especially dangerous for the Soviet regime.
*
3.3 Rebellious youth
As far as I can recall, control or supervision of young people was never effective in the USSR. It existed, for the most part, on paper, in official reports by Komsomol and Party committees boasting about the scale on which they could mobilise the young and attract them to their propagandist events.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s young people in the Soviet Union were becoming notably more political. Most frequently this found expression in anonymous protests: leaflets, slogans written on walls, pre-Soviet national flags in the republics, or anonymous letters sent to the authorities. Any official event – a jubilee, a holiday or elections – usually provoked such “delinquent misbehaviour” by the young.
In April 1970, for instance, Andropov informed the Central Committee (27 April 1970*, 1118-A) that the birth centenary of the “founder of the Soviet State”, V.I. Lenin, had been celebrated
“… in an organised fashion throughout the country, in circumstances of great activity, and enthusiastic commitment by Soviet people to work and to our policies. It demonstrated, once again, their indissoluble unity and consolidation around the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. At the same time, 155 politically harmful, delinquent acts, connected to the jubilee were reported in certain districts across the USSR during the preparation and the celebration of this event. 55 of these events took place in 1969; 100, in 1970.
“Such types of action were noted in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Belorussia, Estonia, Latvia, Moldavia and Turkmenistan; and, [within the RSFSR], in the Primorsky and Khabarovsk Regions, the Moscow, Leningrad, Kuibyshev, Rostov and other Regions. Several statues, busts and bas-reliefs of the Leader were destroyed or damaged, as were a significant number of paintings, stands and banners, and portraits, placards, reproductions, wall newspapers and other celebratory decorations…. 70 people have been charged with criminal offences for such politically harmful and delinquent acts; 65 more have undergone prophylactic treatment and 7 are now under observation. In 18 cases the act was particularly brazen and intended to cast a shadow over the celebration of the centenary of Lenin’s birth by Soviet people.”
Or consider this wholly typical information from the mid-1970s about the May Day celebrations (4 May 1975, 1103-A) which were the occasion for “great political enthusiasm” although
“… isolated negative incidents were reported in certain parts of the country. In Moscow, Odessa, Kishinev and the Rostov Region leaflets of a hostile content were distributed.
“In the administrative centre of the Pustomyty district, Lvov Region [West Ukraine], 13 flags of the Union republics were burned on their masts before the obelisk commemorating the soldier-liberators. Flags were also destroyed in Moscow and Kharkov. In Grodno [Belorussia] it was discovered that a portrait of the Founder of the Soviet State had been defaced. The necessary measures have been taken in response to all the noted incidents. Most those taking part in this hostile behaviour have been identified.”
Usually, the authorities did not identify all those responsible. They caught or found half of the culprits, subjecting some to “prophylactic” treatment while the others were convicted, as a rule, of purely criminal offences (delinquent behaviour). When added to the anonymous letters the Soviet authorities received each year these “anti-social” acts reached an annual total of between ten and twenty thousand [40]. Most often the offenders turned out to be young people, teenagers and schoolchildren. Sometimes they had set up an illegal organisation.
At the time we had no idea, of course, of the scale and extent of this phenomenon. We never heard about most of these incidents but any picture of the USSR and its prevailing mood at the time would be incomplete without them. The anxiety of the Soviet authorities cannot be fully understood without this background. Imagine how they felt when they received several of the following reports. The KGB in the Krasnodar Region, bordering the Black Sea, uncovered an illegal “Club to Fight for Democracy” in the town of Tuapse (19 March 1970*, 699-A):
“It is made up of 14 persons, for the most part school-children in the 8th and 9th classes of School No 3 [15-16-year-olds]. Seven of them are members of the Komsomol…. The participants have drawn up a programme and a constitution for the club, published hand-written magazines under the title ‘Democrat’ and ‘Russian Contemporary’ containing verse and articles written by members of the Club based on reports by foreign radio stations. Each member has sworn an oath, has a pseudonym, a membership card, and has paid a subscription.
“The Club’s programme envisaged the creation of a party of ‘democrats’ and seizure of power when the members of that party grow up. Its immediate aim was the preparation and distribution of anti-Soviet documents and attraction of new participants to the organisation. Implementing this programme,… in December 1969 the members wrote anti-Soviet texts in chalk on the asphalt and the fences in various parts of Tuapse to mark the 90th anniversary of Stalin’s birth. In February 1970, they prepared more than 40 leaflets, in the name of the ‘All-Russian Union of Democrats’, which called for the overthrow of the Soviet regime and the creation of illegal political organisations, and they distributed these texts in Tuapse. “All the participants of the ‘Club to Fight for Democracy’ are juveniles. It was decided, therefore, not to charge them with criminal offences but limit the response to measures of a prophylactic nature.”
In a part of the Soviet Union closed to foreigners and far from any border, the KGB for the Sverdlovsk Region “uncovered an illegal youth group” (12 June 1970*, 1610-A):
“calling itself the ‘Party of Free Russia’ or the ‘Revolutionary Workers’ Party’ …. Using a typewriter, the members of this group produced in two sessions about 700 leaflets, titled ‘A note to the Soviet government from the Working Youth of the USSR’ and ‘Minus a Future, Plus the Past = Contemporary Socialism’. On 7 November 1969 [anniversary of the October Revolution] a considerable proportion of these leaflets were thrown from the viaduct over Cosmonauts Avenue in Sverdlovsk on the column of workers from the Electric Train Repair Factory and a group of demonstrators from the polytechnic and law institutes.
Meanwhile, in Central Russia (26 August 1970, 2353-A),
“… seven handwritten leaflets, signed the ‘Black Angels’, were distributed in February in the town of Ryazan. The authors slandered the Soviet government and called for the organisation of strikes and demonstrations. Measures were taken and established that the leaflets had been prepared and distributed by students of the 9th class in School No 42… They all repented of these acts and, in the presence of their parents, assured KGB agencies that they would not engage in any anti-social activities in the future.”
xxx
Such a mood among the young, combined with the growth of an organised opposition, created a highly dangerous situation for the Soviet regime. The authors of an extended report by the KGB “On the Nature and Cause of Negative Behaviour among Schoolchildren and Students” tried to attribute everything, as usual, to the influence of bourgeois propaganda and “subversive centres” in the West (28 December 1976, St 37/14).
At the same time, they mention some particularly interesting findings [41]. They analysed over three thousand “anti-social” acts committed by young people in the Soviet Union over a period of three years (see Table One). While more than half of those involved were students in higher education, a little under one in four were still at school. Almost three quarters committed solitary acts of “anti-social” behaviour (3,174); the rest (1,232) were members of 384 groups.
A third of these acts arose from ideological stances hostile to socialism (see Table Two) and were committed by 1,269 individuals (29% of the total). This describes those who could offer a precise formulation of their ideological platform, or who would take the risk of doing so. Those who were “un-ideological” were no better. Groups of “hippy imitators” were found in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Vilnius, Tallinn and Rostov-on-Don. In the words of the study, they favoured a re-examination of the moral and ethical norms of socialist society; casting doubt on the revolutionary traditions of the past and the spiritual legacy of “conservative” fathers, they called for a surmounting of “inertia” and a “struggle for freedom and the democratisation of society based on hippy ideas.”
Table One: Anti-social behaviour among the young, 1972-1975 [42]
| TYPE OF BEHAVIOUR Slander and other politically harmful comments | INCIDENTS 1509 | % 45.4 | INDIVIDUALS 1598 | % 36.3 |
| Participation as a group in public disturbances | 99 | 3.0 | 495 | 11.2 |
| Participation as a group in imitation of “hippies” | 152 | 5.5 | 382 | 8.7 |
| Preparation and distribution of defamatory and ideologically harmful documents (excluding leaflets) | 252 | 7.6 | 323 | 7.3 |
| Preparation and distribution of leaflets, banners and placards | 167 | 5.5 | 277 | 6.3 |
| Desecration of the State crest, flag, monuments or portraits | 90 | 2.7 | 115 | 2.6 |
| Verbal and written threats towards Soviet and Party activists | 50 | 1.6 | 53 | 1.2 |
| Transmission (attempt to transmit) abroad defamatory and ideologically harmful documents | 26 | 0.8 | 33 | 0.8 |
| Preparation and distribution of anonymous letters of a defamatory and ideologically harmful content | 33 | 1.0 | 32 | 0.7 |
| Attempt to establish contact with foreign anti-Soviet centres | 16 | 0.4 | 17 | 0.4 |
| Preparation and display of nationalist flags | 6 | 0.2 | 15 | 0.3 |
| Other types of behaviour | 894 | 26.8 | 1066 | 24.2 |
| TOTAL | 3294 | 4406 |
Of all those who had prophylactic chats with the KGB or received warnings about their behaviour between 1970 and 1974 well over a third were young people below the age of 25 [43]. Much the same was true of criminality as a whole: for example, more than half of those convicted in 1971-1973 for the preparation and sale of narcotics were under 29. There were 2,533,443 young people, aged 29 and under, among those who were fined or spent brief periods behind bars in 1973 for drinking hard liquor and appearing drunk in public. In 1974 that total rose to 2,616,708 [44]. On average juveniles, i.e. those under 18 years of age, were responsible for around 100,000 crimes, of which almost half were committed as part of a group.
Table Two. Ideologically motivated anti-social behaviour, 1972-1975 [45]
| Variety of hostile ideology | Act | % | Individuals | % |
| Bourgeois nationalism (excluding Zionism) | 364 | 33.7 | 674 | 43.0 |
| Zionism and pro-Israeli attitudes | 188 | 17.5 | 242 | 15.0 |
| Revisionism and reformism | 377 | 35.0 | 445 | 28.0 |
| Religious ideology | 88 | 8.2 | 128 | 8.0 |
| Fascism and neo-Nazism | 60 | 5.6 | 80 | 6.0 |
Curious data from other studies are cited in the December 1976 report.
The Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Sociological Research, for example, examined the audience of “Western radio stations in Moscow”. They found that “80% of students and about 90% of pupils from the older classes in secondary school, vocational and technical colleges listen with greater or lesser regularity. For most these individuals listening to foreign radio broadcasts has become a habit: 32.0% of students and 59.2% of 16-18-year-olds listen at least once or twice a week” [46]. This was our audience, who followed our activities thanks to broadcasts from London, Munich and Washington. Fifteen years later, as a generation of thirty and forty-year-olds, they would join the demonstrations of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“Many of the students who underwent prophylactic treatment”, the researchers wrote [47]
“indicated in their confessions that they recorded ideologically hostile works broadcast over the radio on tape recorders or copied the texts on typewriters. This channel provided them with an idea of several of Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Soviet statements and lampoons, Sakharov’s ‘Thoughts about Peace, Progress and Intellectual Freedom’, and various ‘studies’, ‘appeals’ and other documents containing defamatory fabrications that denigrated Soviet reality… The most influential materials are those prepared within the USSR.”
At the same time, notes the report, there was declining interest in Marxist-Leninist theory at institutions of higher education and “passive participation by a sizable number of students in the socio-political life of their collectives.” There is every ground, in other words, for asserting that by the 1970s the regime had effectively “lost” the country’s young people, while our influence over them was growing all the time.
What could the decrepit and bureaucratised Party do to counter this alarming phenomenon? It had nothing to offer, apart from repressive measures, prophylactic chats and warnings (i.e. threatening to apply the same repressive measures), and a further “intensification” of its propaganda, of which all were thoroughly sick and tired by then. Yet in a Top-Secret report only a few years before the collapse of the Communist regime (26 December 1986, 2521-Ch [48]), KGB chairman Chebrikov, Procurator-General Rekunkov, Minister of Justice Kravtsov and Supreme Court Chairman Terebilov proudly informed the Central Committee (the underlined figures in italics were added, as usual, by hand):
“To expose the subversive activities of imperialist special services and hostile elements among Soviet citizens linked to those services we have carried out major work through the media. Over the past 10 years 150 films for cinema and television (mainly short documentaries and newsreel items) have been made with the participation, and using the materials, of the state security agencies. During the past four years 262 books and brochures have been published, 178 magazine and 250 newspaper articles. Staff from the KGB, the Procuracy, the Supreme Court and the Ministry of Justice constantly give propaganda lectures on these issues. Re-education of offenders in penal institutions is being carried out, with the systematic involvement of the public, and this has yielded positive results.”
It was, for them, an object of particular pride that between 1982 and 1986 they had been able to break the resistance of more than one hundred people. Not grudging its precious time, the Central Committee also oversaw this process. When to avoid inevitable disaster, they had to introduce a measure of “glasnost” they began by breaking the spirit of the country’s remaining political prisoners, thereby destroying the core of the opposition. Gorbachov would take personal charge of this process.
*
3.4 Law and expediency
This is a strange day for me,” I told the Constitutional Court in 1992. “For the first time in all my years in Moscow I find myself appearing in court as a witness, not as the accused.” The comical aspect was enhanced as I raised the very same issues as in 1967: lack of respect for the law and the unconstitutional status of the CPSU and the political repression in which it engaged. The continuity was so great that I could have repeated my earlier speech, word for word: no one in court that day would have noticed.
I could not help but recall how I prepared in 1967 for my “last words” in court – previously I had twice been pronounced insane and sentenced in my absence. By threatening a hunger strike, I forced the KGB at Lefortovo to provide me with the Criminal Code and the Criminal-Procedural Code. I also made them go out and buy a copy of the Soviet Constitution: there was not one to be had anywhere in the prison. Then followed the official tedium of the court hearing, and an anxious wait for the end of the proceedings when I was entitled to my last words, the only form of uncensored speech in the country. Who knew what would happen. Sometimes the judge interrupted and did not allow a person to finish. Finally, as the culmination of the entire drama, I managed to speak for almost 90 minutes, waving the KGB’s copy of the Constitution and waiting any moment for the judge to call a halt.
I truly was an expert on the “unconstitutional status of the CPSU”. Then such views were regarded as “slander against the Soviet system”. By 1992 they had become the highest form of wisdom, backed by the authority of the Russian President himself. Should I rejoice or be sad? Be glad that I had been 25 years ahead of my contemporaries, or perplexed that such an obvious truth had not occurred to them during the past quarter century?
xxx
The Communist regime’s violation of its own laws was well known, but the idea of demanding that these laws be respected was too complicated for some. “Why demand that everyone keep those laws?” they asked us. “What good would that do?”
“What is it you want?” Soviet people commented sarcastically, usually those who thought us too few to be worth joining: “to make the Soviet regime better?”
“When is your movement going to stop referring to Soviet laws,” demanded Westerners who had never lived under such a regime, “and finally turn to open resistance?”
Our movement’s emphasis on human rights led to countless misunderstandings and criticism. There was no way of explaining to certain people that this was neither camouflage nor a tactical ruse: it was a principled position, like our rejection of violence. The problem with this position did not lie in its complexity. What was so hard to grasp when we had the example of the 1917 October Revolution and its consequences before our eyes every day? Anyone in the Soviet Union of the 1960s surely understood that violence would not result in a State governed by the rule of law, and that underground organisations could not lead to a free society. From a practical point of view, there were clearly not enough people capable of demanding what was theirs by right. Where then would we find enough fearless men and women to take up arms against the KGB, the Party apparatus and a large part of the Soviet army? And supposing, one fine day, so many were to be found, there would be no need for violence.
No, these objections were all excuses and self-justification. Homo sovieticus could not force himself to demand anything from a nuclear super-power. Steal, yes; demand, no. A simple refusal to cooperate with the regime was beyond most people. Yet someone had to do it – in full view, demonstratively – to disperse the mystic, irrational terror Soviet Man felt when faced by the regime’s aura of omnipotence. In that sense, nothing could be more destructive of its power than a demonstration that it was both ineffective and unlawful.
What else could be done? Scattering leaflets or creating an underground “party” of a few friends was for schoolchildren and they had already understood it would change nothing. There had to be forms of legal opposition that would allow independent social forces in the country to unite and grow. “Legal”, however, meant that they observed the law and operated within its framework.
xxx
The Soviet regime, meanwhile, had its own problems with the law. It had been unable to solve these problems ever since the revolution. In fact, it never did resolve them because ideology as a whole, and Marxism-Leninism in particular, was incompatible with the concept of law. An ideology is a myth or a legend and therefore inevitably contradictory; the entire meaning of law lies in its internal consistency.
Communist behaviour was a compromise between ideology and reality, and a source of yet more contradictions. What was acceptable at any moment was something known to those at the very top. In practice, law in the Soviet Union existed only on paper while the country was administered through endless orders or decisions issued by ministries, the State and the Party, which often contradicted one another and were, for the most part, secret. To make this all function as a coherent whole was beyond the powers of the Party. “Telephone law” flourished, and a call from the Party boss was the latest legislative act. It was necessary to know how to interpret secret instructions.
The most important reason why law and ideology were incompatible in a totalitarian society, however, was that ideology had to come first. And since ideology could not rule through the law then it must be above the law, ruling somehow from behind its back. In the same way the Party, the bearer of that ideology, ruled from behind the back of all other State structures and was a supra-State formation. Given the global aims of that ideology and the Communist Party the law was simply transformed into a fiction and a branch of propaganda that was intended to create the attractive image of the “world’s most democratic” Socialist State. The 1936 Stalin Constitution, then still in force, made this particularly clear. It had been written exclusively for reasons of propaganda and was, therefore, very well suited to our purposes.
To begin with the law became our weapon of choice simply because the State used this weapon against us. We became so skilled in its use that if any of us was put on trial the proceedings would be a defeat for the authorities. This was so obvious that, unlike the Stalin show-trials, our trials were held in camera and concealed from the public as far as possible. If they were reported in the Soviet press it was only as a response to the “slanders of bourgeois propaganda”. Such an achievement, of course, did not come easy. It required great restraint on our part and behaviour calculated to ensure we were imprisoned “on our own terms”, causing maximum damage to the regime, i.e. forcing them to commit the most extensive violation of their own laws.
In 1967, for example, I did not just organise a demonstration and receive a three-year sentence: I also proved that Article 190-3 of the Criminal Code [49] was unconstitutional. The demonstration and our arguments during interrogation and in court were planned in such a way that the authorities, abandoning any appearance of legality, could only convict us despite the law. In this case, they were violating Article 125 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution, which guaranteed the right to freedom of assembly. I made a very good job of it. The director of Lefortovo himself admitted that we had been imprisoned “unlawfully”; the Procuracy found a plausible excuse not to conduct the case; and my KGB investigator shook his head and gave a sorrowful sigh. There was good reason, therefore, for the Politburo to meet and decide whether to print a mendacious report about the case in the newspapers. It was the equivalent, for me, of a Gold Medal or a doctoral degree.
Younger generations will probably find it hard to understand what purpose this served. Like the Chinese man smashing the Japanese plates at the Khabarovsk “Mill”, we had no practical goals in the narrow utilitarian sense. None of us expected that our trials, our samizdat and our tiny, purely symbolic demonstrations would lead to the collapse of the Soviet regime. Certainly, no one was expecting that regime to become any “better”. The paradox was that although our movement had a considerable political effect it was itself not political but moral. We were driven principally by a desire not to change the system but to reject complicity in its crimes. Everything else was a logical consequence of that position. This stance of “non-participation” was society’s reaction to the horrors of Stalin’s rule or, to be more exact, their partial exposure under Khrushchov. “How could such monstrous crimes have occurred? Who is to blame?” Society, its best part at least, was tormented by these questions. The unavoidable answer was that everyone shared a portion of the blame since, willingly or unwillingly, actively or passively, almost all had been the regime’s accomplices. Not only the executioners and torturers, but also those who at rallies raised their hands in “unanimous approval” of reprisals against others; not just those who gave the orders, but those who preserved an obedient silence as well.
As in post-war Germany, this had a particularly strong influence on the younger generation who were, seemingly, not involved in their parents’ crimes. (Life is so organised that the children always pay for the sins of their fathers.) The Soviet leaders did not sit in the dock at Nuremburg but, in a wider sense, the verdicts of that tribunal applied to us in equal measure. Like our German contemporaries, we were duty-bound to remember that the opinions of the majority, the orders of our superiors, or a threat to our own lives, did not relieve us of responsibility for our choice. For us this meant confronting our still undefeated Reich (and our own SS), a system with which the Western world was striving for “peaceful coexistence “.
We could dream of no practical goals. No one attempted to define what could be qualified as victory. Our task was to set the written law constantly against its unwritten ideological interpretation, forcing the regime to expose its own unlawful nature. It was better not to dwell on what might happen to you as a consequence. You would end up with nothing apart from the longest possible term of imprisonment. Irrespective of the practical results, it was important to do all you could to serve your sentence with a clear conscience. In time, we came to see victory as the right to tell our descendants, “I did what I could.”
*
3.5 Glasnost
Looking through the Central Committee documents about our cases I was amazed: almost any of them could have been used as evidence in 1992. It was as if we had been preparing for years for the trial at the Constitutional Court. Our movement began, in formal terms at least, with our first demonstration on Pushkin Square in December 1965. Our slogan then was “Respect your Constitution!” and we were demanding glasnost, the public hearing of a forthcoming trial. You could not have made it up! [50]
The occasion was the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel, two writers who had secretly published their books in the West. Their arrest had caused a great stir. The oddness of the situation was that the country, as under Stalin, was expected to “unanimously condemn the renegades and turncoats” without ever having seen what they had written. It was then that the word “glasnost” made its appearance in the Soviet Union. Our chief legal specialist, the mathematician Alexander Volpin, must have come across it when reading the section about trials (Article 18) in the 1958 Criminal-Procedural Code:
“Judicial hearings in all courts are to be open, except for cases when this contradicts the interests of preserving State Secrets…. In all cases the verdict of the court is announced publicly.”
The call for public court hearings, for glasnost, did not strike the most well-intentioned Soviet citizens as a threat. You have not allowed us to read their books, but at least give them an open trial so that we can find out everything for ourselves. The regime was caught off balance. Soviet Man had never demanded anything before. They had to invent their own “glasnost”. Six weeks before the trial, KGB chief Semichastny and Procurator-General Rudenko made the following proposals (23 December 1965, 2843‑S) [51]:
“… the KGB, the Central Committee Culture Department and the USSR Union of Writers are jointly preparing reports for the press which will uncover the true character of Sinyavsky and Daniel’s literary activities. To provide the public with more detailed information, and avert similar activities on the part of certain individuals with hostile intentions, it would seem expedient to examine the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel in an open court hearing at the RSFSR Supreme Court and condemn the criminals to imprisonment under Article 70, part 1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, for preparing and distributing literary works that contain defamatory fabrications against the Soviet State and system.
“It is proposed that the trial be held in early February 1966. The chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Court Comrade L.N. Smirnov will preside, Comrade O.P. Temushkin, aide to the USSR Procurator-General, is to serve as State prosecutor, and the case will be heard in a courtroom of the RSFSR Supreme Court. The room holds one hundred people and we propose inviting Soviet-Party activists and writers to attend the trial…. After the trial is finished the appropriate reports will be issued in the press and on the radio. We request your authorisation.”
The Central Committee agreed, but these were general proposals. The elaboration of the Soviet concept of “glasnost” was entrusted to quite a different person, the man who, twenty years later, would become the main architect of “glasnost” under Gorbachov: Alexander Yakovlev. He was then deputy head of the Department for Propaganda at the Central Committee. Now he is an entirely historic figure and without knowing his past the origins of Gorbachov’s glasnost and perestroika are incomprehensible. This was how Yakovlev then defined “an open trial” [52]:
“… the judicial hearing will proceed in the presence of workers, Party and Soviet activists, and writers and journalists from Moscow. The procedure for their invitation will be established by the Moscow city committee of the CPSU.
“Regarding the forthcoming trial, we consider it necessary to make these suggestions about its coverage in the press and on radio:
“1. The newspapers “Izvestiya” and “Literaturnaya gazeta” will publish daily accounts of the course of the trial by their own correspondents, and special reports by TASS. The editors of the newspapers “Pravda”, “KomsomolskayaPravda”, “Sovetskaya Kultura” and “Sovetskaya Rossiya” can publish items from the courtroom by their correspondents, at their own discretion. All other newspapers are to publish only the official TASS announcements about the trial. Radio will broadcast reports from TASS and individual items from the newspapers.
“Novosti, together with the KGB, are instructed to prepare the appropriate articles about the trial for publication abroad.
“Correspondents of the aforementioned newspapers and of TASS and Novosti will be admitted to the courtroom (without cameras) on presentation of permits issued by the KGB.
“Foreign correspondents are not to be allowed into the trial.”
Yakovlev also suggested that a press group composed of comrades from various Central Committee departments (Culture, Agitation & Propaganda and Administration) and the KGB be set up to prepare official announcements and examine reports about the course of the trial. He had thought of everything, or so it seemed. The carefully chosen public “would greet the court’s verdict with applause”. The press, Party organisers and the KGB also played their part.
Afterwards the KGB proudly reported (16 February 1966, 346-Z [53]): “The conviction of Sinyavsky and Daniel was approvingly received by the Soviet public. During the trial, many letters and telegrams were sent to the court and to newspaper editors by Soviet citizens, demanding that the slanderers be severely punished.” Yet, despite their efforts, the “last words” of the accused were already spreading across the country on thousands of pages of cigarette paper and everyone knew they had not admitted their guilt. Protests grew, and the world was indignant and outraged by this vengeful act. Our glasnost was at work. Yakovlev could do nothing but roar louder, issuing a stream of instructions [54] “to clarify the essence of the judicial proceedings against Sinyavsky and Daniel, and expose the defamatory fabrications of the bourgeois press”.
These involved talks
… at cultural organisations, newspaper and magazine offices, and publishing houses… at the humanities faculties of higher education institutions, in arts colleges, and in research establishments in the humanities, inviting authoritative literary, artistic, scholarly and scientific figures to speak and deliver lectures ….
Publication of the trial materials
to acquaint the Party and cultural activists, and correspondents from newspapers in the socialist countries and the Communist parties in capitalist countries ….
For the audience at home there would be letters, comments and theoretical articles:
“– publish a letter in “Literaturnaya gazeta” and “Izvestiya” on behalf of the USSR Union of Writers, which will contain a response to the statements of foreign writers and cultural figures about the trial;
“– the editors of “Izvestiya”, “Komsomolskaya“Pravda”, “Literaturnaya gazeta” and “Sovetskaya Kultura” are to publish comments by readers and by leading representative of literature, art, scholarship and science, approving the verdict of the court and condemning the anti-Soviet activities of Sinyavsky and Daniel…;
“– the editors of “Pravda”, “Izvestiya”, “Literaturnaya gazeta”, “Komsomolskayapravda”, and the “Kommunist” periodical are to publish theoretical articles about the Marxist understanding of the issue of freedom and the responsibility of the individual in the conditions of socialist society.
For their audience abroad, meanwhile, the Committee for Radio and Television Broadcasting was to prepare and broadcast to foreign countries:
“– statements by representatives of the Soviet public in support of the court’s verdict in the Sinyavsky and Daniel case;
“– an interview with a leading Soviet legal specialist, justifying the verdict from the viewpoint of Soviet legislation …
“– materials exposing the defamatory nature of Sinyavsky and Daniel’s writings, their calls for terror, malicious anti-Semitic statements, and the wide use of their works for the purposes of waging the Cold War… materials showing the moral turpitude and political double-dealing of Sinyavsky and Daniel;
“– commentaries and talks about the freedom of creativity in the USSR and the persecution of progressive cultural figures in the West.”
As under Stalin, meetings were held in all factories and it was demanded that workers “unanimously condemn” the writers without having read their books. Hundreds of thousands of people in the USSR were forced to choose between their conscience and their material well-being. Some refused, the majority agreed – after all those who refused were “too few”. What was the point? To improve the Soviet regime?
That became the prototype for all our subsequent trials. It was the benchmark of Party “glasnost”: open trials held behind closed doors, with a specially chosen public, while a handful of foreign correspondents and friends of the accused waited outside. The deafening roar of Yakovlev’s propaganda followed each trial. Yet it could not drown out our glasnost and, instead, undermined confidence in the official press yet further. Is it surprising that the young preferred to listen to Western radio stations? If our glasnost had some practical aim, it was to deprive society of its future peace of mind. None of us believed we had the right to force our decisions on others or to draw them into our activities: that was left to the conscience of each individual. Unlike the Stalin years, however, no one in the West or the East could now claim ignorance as their justification.
Despite the intrinsically philosophical and ethical nature of our stance it had a considerable political impact to begin with. The trials that followed that of Sinyavsky and Daniel, especially the trial of Alexander Ginzburg and Yury Galanskov [55], provoked a storm of protest within the Soviet Union, a “chain reaction”. Direct repressive measures were not only useless: they were harmful to the regime. The greater the number of trials, the more people joined in the protests. The atmosphere also changed in the camps: those sent there no longer vanished from our lives but, on the contrary, joined the protests. Reports about hunger-strikes, strikes, and petitions – even the literary works of zeks – began to find their way out of the camps, as if mocking the idea of the prisoners’ isolation from society. Imprisonment in the camps, moreover, provided a link between different groups in a movement that was emerging all over the country. It was there we got to know one another and, through us, our relatives and friends also became acquainted. Judicial reprisals lost their significance. They aided a growth in the consolidation of a spontaneous and, at first, extremely varied movement, transforming it into a serious political force.
The Soviet authorities never forgot this lesson. The subsequent history of our relations was the story of their search for other ways to fight us and our response to their innovations. Arrests and trials became an extreme measure that was forced on them and very often represented a victory of sorts for us. The regime preferred other means, from incarceration in psychiatric hospital s, to campaigns of slander (“compromising measures”, the KGB called them) and expulsion from the country. In 1977, the authorities tried to “codify” the ideology in a new Constitution, which, for the first time in Soviet history, openly declared in Article 6:
“The leading and governing force of Soviet society, the core of its political system and its State and non-governmental organisations, is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The CPSU exists for the people and to serve the people.
“Armed with the teaching of Marxism-Leninism, the Communist Party determines the general trend of society’s development, the course of the USSR’s domestic and foreign policy. It directs the great constructive activities of the Soviet people, giving a planned and scientifically-based character to its struggle for the triumph of communism …”
They thereby accepted, in part, the rules of play we had suggested. As if to say, “You won’t be able to quote the Constitution to us now! It’s all legal.” Yet this was no help to them either. We had already begun referring to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the United Nations’ Pact on Civil and Political Rights (1968); now we appealed to the 1975 Helsinki Accords. With time, curious to relate, the defence of human rights became extremely popular in Soviet society. It was apparently the most difficult aspect of our philosophy for people to assimilate but looking at samizdat documents from the late 1970s I was astonished at the skill with which manual workers referred in their petitions to all the nuances of the law. It had suddenly become very fashionable to “assert one’s rights”.
xxx
When the Soviet regime was on the brink of collapse it also tried to exploit this fashion. Somehow the “Party elite” must be saved. It was then, in 1986, that the “liberal” Yakovlev, the architect of perestroika, appeared. Suddenly our demands and definitions of twenty years before (a State governed by the rule of law, the era of stagnation and, of course, glasnost) were everywhere in Soviet newspapers.
Entire sections of our samizdat works were reprinted in the official press and included in the Party’s own decisions – though without inverted commas or any indication of their authors. What curious fellows those “reformers” were. Who did they think they were fooling? History? Logic? Themselves? Without our names glasnost could not be kept under control and the law remained incompatible with ideology. All it required was a few years without repression, a few years of comparatively free exchange of views, for the Soviet regime to collapse.
By early 1990, like an avalanche in the mountains, a growing wave of strikes and mass demonstrations swept across the Soviet Union from one end to the other. People were not demanding bread or money, although neither was easily available. No, the demand was for the abolition of Article 6 of the Constitution, which confirmed the CPSU’s domination of every public structure in the country. It was something I had talked about in court in 1967, waving the KGB’s copy of the previous (1936) Constitution. Watching the striking miners, covered in coal like devils, those half-starved people, entire families with the old and the young, demanding not vengeance but a change in the Constitution, I must confess I was ready to weep. Images from three decades passed before my eyes as if in a film, running inside my head: camp barracks, the cells of Vladimir Prison, the corridors of psychiatric hospital s smelling of carbolic, and the Moscow alleys where I grew up, feeling that I had been abandoned since childhood behind enemy lines. Suddenly this all acquired meaning and found its place in an ordered symphony of image, sound and scent … It would now take one or two years at most. The collapse of the regime, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, was just the logical conclusion. As if it had been waiting for this moment, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation sent me two certificates confirming that my convictions in 1967 and in 1972 had both been revoked for lack of a corpus delicti. The two papers bore the same date, Constitution Day (5 December 1991*, No 90-680 [56]) – the day we had organised our first demonstration 26 years before.
Alexander Yakovlev retired from politics and became head of the Presidential Commission for the Victims of Political Repression. As if in 1945 Goebbels had been put in charge of rehabilitating the victims of the Nazis …
xxx
Most of the Central Committee documents concerning our trials held no surprises. We knew a certain amount at the time. We guessed about other aspects, and some things became known later. Nevertheless, they made a strong impression. Guessing was all very well. It was quite another matter to see the document, with all its signatures and stamps, and examine the subject of your past speculation expressed in their unspeakable officialese. All these matters were decided by the Party, that was clear. It would have been immodest until then, however, to suppose that the Central Committee, let alone the Politburo, were involved.
Remembering the evasive euphemisms that the Nazi leadership adopted in their documents, I never expected such frank and cynical disregard for legal norms. Long before a trial, sometimes several weeks’ earlier, the Soviet leaders themselves decided who should be imprisoned and who should be pardoned: they were unperturbed by the principle, inscribed in the Constitution, of the independence of the judiciary. Search warrants were obtained from the Central Committee, not from the Procuracy. The Party and its leaders were above the law: they did not let legal concerns get in their way and daily adjusted legislation at their own discretion. All other institutions merely rubber-stamped their decisions. Soon after the Ginzburg-Galanskov trial, for instance, the Politburo decided to take reprisals against those of our friends who had been too active in defending the accused (15 April 1968, Pb 79/XI) [57]:
“Acting as the accomplices of the most reactionary part of the bourgeois press and radio, they systematically supply them with defamatory materials; they try to hold private press conferences for foreigners; they incite anti-social elements to engage in politically harmful activities; they inspire the preparation and distribution of letters, declarations and “protests” that are hostile in content; and they act in a provocative way towards the authorities.”
What was the problem? Why not put them on trial? They had already committed more offences than Ginzburg and Galanskov by petitioning on their behalf. The document itself notes: “The behaviour of this group of individuals is increasingly reckless and the lack of punishment for their actions prompts disbelief among many citizens.” However, the Central Committee was not ready to put them on trial and imprison them at that moment because “this measure might prompt a new wave of demagogic demands from anti-social elements inside the country, and provocative acts by bourgeois propaganda.”
This explains the comprehensive response that, in the Russian saying, left the sheep whole and the wolves fed. Pyotr Grigorenko would be sent for psychiatric assessment. Alexander Volpin would receive permission to attend a mathematics symposium in the USA (it was not the first time he had been unsuccessfully invited there) and then, if “he compromised himself with unworthy behaviour” abroad, he would be deprived of his Soviet citizenship and “refused entry to the USSR”. Yakir, Litvinov and Bogoraz-Bruchman were to be summoned to the Procuracy. A “categorical demand” would be made that they immediately stop their “anti-social activities” [58] or else they would be “deprived of their residence permit and removed from Moscow”. To implement this threat, it was necessary
“– to make an addition to the 15 August 1966 decree (No 658-211) of the USSR Council of Ministers’ ‘Concerning a strengthening of the passport regime in the cities of Moscow and Leningrad and the Moscow Region’ (draft attached);
“– To instruct the Moscow Soviet (if the warning does not have the [necessary] effect) to take a decision, based on the addition to the said decree, to deprive Yakir and Litvinov of their Moscow residence permit for a period of two years;
“– to instruct the Ministry for the Maintenance Public Order to remove Yakir and Litvinov from Moscow, having established a place of residence for Yakir in the Tyumen Region and for Litvinov in the Guryev Region of the Kazakh SSR;
“– to consider the removal of Bogoraz-Bruchman’s residence permit and her removal from Moscow, depending on her behaviour after the application of the said sanctions to Yakir and Litvinov;
“– to prepare an announcement about this matter and publish it in the “Sovetskaya Rossiya” newspaper on the day that the sanctions are implemented against Grigorenko, Yesenin-Volpin, Yakir, Litvinov and Bogoraz-Bruchman.”
The addition was immediately made to the law on residence permits. Now city soviets had the right “without issuing preliminary administrative reprimands, to cancel the residence permits of individuals who are engaged in anti-social activities, manufacturing defamatory fabrications, provoking anti-social elements to engage in politically harmful activities, and behaving in a provocative fashion towards the authorities … The expulsion of the individuals indicated in the present decree is to be effected within 24 hours after a decision is taken to cancel the residence permit.”
Not one of these measures was legal at the time, but what did they care? Without pretending to consult anyone else, the Politburo ordered that all should be made ready within ten days [59]. The Leningrad and Moscow City Soviets had no idea as yet of the new and unlimited power they had gained over the millions residing in their cities; the leadership of “sovereign” Kazakhstan did not know that Litvinov would be exiled to their republic; the editors of Sovetskaya Rossiya had no inkling about the announcement to be made in their pages; and the USSR Council of Ministers, supposedly the lawful government of the Soviet Union, would obediently sign the draft of its “decree”. A new era was about to begin when anyone, without warning, investigation or a court order, could be expelled from his home within 24 hours – and all because it was inconvenient at that moment for the regime to put three people on trial.
I have quoted this example not because it was the most outrageous or cruel. On the contrary, it was among the “gentler” acts of its kind. Furthermore, these measures were not implemented. Within a month, the fuss in the West died down. The Politburo could now imprison the citizens who had so infuriated it and a decision was taken, again without informing the interested parties, to withdraw the Resolution (16 May 1968, Pb 81/XVI) [60]. Duly signed and stamped, these “laws” never saw the light of day. Six months later Litvinov and Bogoraz were indeed exiled from Moscow but for a quite different reason and after a “lawful” trial. In 1972 Volpin was allowed to travel to the USA and speak at a symposium. Five years later Yakir was exiled from Moscow, again for a different reason. This example is astounding in its absurdity and the appalling indifference of the highest Soviet authorities to the most elementary legal standards. This was what they called “socialist legality”.
The same day, curiously, the Politburo took a decision about two other people, Anatoly Marchenko and Ilya Gabai (15 April 1968*, Pb 79/XII)61. It proposed that they be deprived of their Soviet citizenship and expelled from the country (the formulation of the edict and the accusations against them were virtually identical). The decision was taken and the edicts of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet were signed. After a month, the Politburo had second thoughts. Soon an excuse was found to arrest them and send them to the camps. Formally and legally speaking, they had already been deprived of their Soviet citizenship but no one remembered that. Later the two men died in tragic circumstances. Gabai committed suicide in 1973 and the imprisoned Marchenko died on hunger strike in December 1986, when “perestroika” had already begun. Fate played its hand. If they had been deported from the USSR they would probably still be alive.
xxx
Of course, this was just the beginning. In time the regime learned to be more careful in its use of the law and to prepare its “measures” more thoroughly. This memorandum from Andropov and Rudenko (20 January 1977*, 123-A) [62], for instance, shows how the Central Committee prepared its reprisals against the Helsinki Groups, set up in Moscow, Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Armenia. It would be best, they suggested, to halt the “criminal activities” of the most active Helsinki Group members “by a variety of means”
“With regard to Yu. F. Orlov an investigation should be conducted into the criminal case opened earlier by the Moscow Procuracy so as to charge him under Article 190 of the RSFSR Criminal Code… During the investigation Orlov is not to be arrested unless his actions force us to do so.
“A.I. Ginzburg should be arrested and charged under Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. The investigation is to be carried out in the Kaluga Region, in accordance with his place of residence.
“N.D. Rudenko, who lives in Kiev, is to be arrested and charged under Article 62 of the UkSSR Criminal Code (corresponding to Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code). The investigation is to be carried out not in Kiev but in Donetsk, for which there are procedural grounds.
“Since T.A. Venclova (b. 1937), a former research associate of the Lithuanian SSR Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History, has petitioned for a temporary trip on a private invitation to the USA, permission for such a trip is to be granted. The future fate of Venclova will be decided in accordance with his behaviour abroad.”
Preparations for putting them on trial were yet more carefully considered and with even less regard for the law. For purely propaganda reasons, for instance, all the political trials in 1977 were postponed for almost a year (1 April 1978*, 785-A) 63.
“The completed investigations into these criminal cases should have been sent to court. Bearing in mind the very important political events then taking place within the country (discussion and adoption of a new Soviet Constitution, celebration of the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution), however, and the situation surrounding the Belgrade Conference, it was recognised to be inexpedient to hold these trials in 1977.”
Approval was sought in this way from the Central Committee not by the scribblers of Pravdaor the agitprop head Alexander Yakovlev, but the three main legal authorities in the USSR: Procurator-General Rudenko, Chairman of the Supreme Court Smirnov, and head of the KGB Andropov. What could we expect of the Politburo or the Central Committee if those who bore the responsibility for upholding the law understood it to be merely an appendage of ideology? For them the term “lawful” did not exist, but there was the concept of expediency, meaning what suited the goals of ideology.
Of course, they knew the law. It was not a question of ignorance. For instance, there arose a legal complication in the case of Anatoly Shcharansky. The KGB had tried a little too hard in accusing him of espionage [64] and wanted to square this by legislating an exception:
“In accordance with Article 9 of the Statute concerning Military Tribunals this case should be examined by a military tribunal. However, this circumstance could lead to an intensification of the anti-Soviet campaign that reactionary circles in the West are now conducting in connection with Shcharansky’s case. In view of this, we consider it would be expedient to make an exception and change the jurisdiction of the case, examining it before the Judicial Board for Criminal Cases of the RSFSR Supreme Court. A draft decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet is attached.”
Any legal specialist would regard the proposed decree of the highest legislative body in the country as absurd: “By way of exception, permit the Judicial Board of Criminal Cases of the RSFSR Supreme Court to examine, as the court of first instance, the criminal case of Anatoly Shcharansky, who is accused of treason in the form of espionage.” Yet the lawmakers acted as requested by the executive, in accordance with “socialist legality”, and without objection since they all knew that the accusation of espionage was framed in terms of “expediency”. The real “guilt” of Shcharansky was (25 December 1977) 65 that he had
“… systematically provided the West with defamatory information about the Soviet Union that has been actively used by US special services under the guise of the ‘defence of human rights’ in the USSR. These data were also used by pro-Zionist congressmen when adopting the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the ‘1974 Law on Trade’, which discriminates against the USSR.”
Chapter 4: “DEPORTATION OR THE MADHOUSE” …
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NOTES & SOURCES
Chapter Three: “TOO FEW”?
An asterisk (*) and bold type indicate that a file from the Bukovsky Archive has been fully or partially translated into English.
The archival description of the various sources mentioned in the text and in these notes has been added, indicating their size and contents, and providing access to the original Russian text. (The three Russian texts mentioned in two of these notes, 49 & 53, are not available online^.)
Click arrow below note to return to text.
JC, December 2024
*
- See summary of Amalrik’s ‘booklet’ and a first response in the Chronicle (CCE 12.10 [8, 9], February 1970). Others followed, e.g., CCE 13.10 [21], April 1970.
↩︎ - See range of opinions expressed in A Chronicle of Current Events: CCE 34.20-1 (December 1974).
↩︎ - Kontinent, quarterly (Paris), No 23, 1980.
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3.1: THE STALINIST VOID
↩︎ - 31 December 1938* – STALIN’s written permission for the Krasnoyarsk Region (central Siberia) to carry out several thousand additional “1st category arrests” (executions). The instruction was written in pencil on a small, plain slip of paper [R 31 December 1938].
↩︎ - See outline of the Great Terror, drawn by Nicolas Werth in 2009.
↩︎ - 4 February 1938*, No 95/III – Encrypted telegram from YULY KAGANOVICH to STALIN and NKVD chief YEZHOV. Request to increase executions and arrests in the Gorky Region. [R 4 February 1938, No 95-III]
↩︎ - 17 February 1938*, Pb 58/57 – Politburo. NKVD request to increase Ukraine NKVD’s quota for arrests by 30,000 is granted. [R 17 February 1938, Pb 58-57].
↩︎ - 15 September 1938, Pb 64/22 – Politburo. Reduce the role of “special troikas”, signed by STALIN; after 1 August charges of Counter-Revolutionary activities (Article 58) to be examined by courts. [R 15 September 1938, Pb 64-22] total 2 pp.
↩︎ - 31 October 1937* – NKVD correspondence. Letter from A. FRENKEL (Kuibyshev city NKVD) to NKVD chief YEZHOV: malfunctioning of troikas, unburied bodies of Enemies of the People, and poor safety measures during interrogation. [R 31 October 1937] total 2 pp.
↩︎ - 31 October 1941* – Report to NKVD chief BERIA. The activities of a special NKVD division at front, from 22 June until 19 October 1941: 657,364 arrested and 10,201 shot. [R 31 October 1941] total 3 pp.
↩︎ - 4 October 1956*, St 1061 – Secretariat. Creation of the “Mill”, a fake border post in the Far East used from 1941 to 1949 to test the loyalty of individuals, who were then arrested and imprisoned; many were shot. [R 4 October 1956, St 1061] total 9 pp.
↩︎ - 4 October 1956*, St 1061, p. 8. See note 10.
↩︎ - 6 October 1952 – Note from MGB chief IGNATIEV to Central Committee. Request from LEONID BREZHNEV, general secretary of Moldavian Communist Party, banishing “Socially Dangerous Elements”. Agreement to increase numbers to be exiled from Moldavia [R 6 October 1952]. 2 pp.
↩︎ - Variety of indigenous, loosely Christian sects.
↩︎ - 29 December 1975*, 3213-A – KGB report. ANDROPOV on the attitude of the “French and Italian Communist Parties” toward human rights issues. Includes information on conviction of dissenters since 1958 [R 29 December 1975, 3213-A]. 5 pp.
↩︎ - Article 70: Imprisonment for 3-10 years, with or without 2-5 years of subsequent banishment (internal exile).
↩︎ - Article 190: Imprisonment in a corrective labour colony for up to three years, or corrective labour for up to one year, or a fine.
↩︎ - 3 September 1953** – Secretariat. Creation at Ministry of Internal Affairs of Special Division No.12 for “special assignments” (diversion, sabotage, assassination) abroad [R 3 September 1953]. 7 pp.
↩︎ - Yakov Etinger, “The Beria Affair forty years on”, Russkaya mysl (Paris) 18‑24 November 1993 (in Russian).
↩︎ - 25 December 1962*, 3265-S – KGB report (Semichastny), approved by Central Committee. Change in procedures for informing relatives about prisoners’ date of death (execution) in the Stalin era. [R 25 December 1962, 3265-S] total 4 pp.
↩︎ - 4 October 1956*, St 1061. See note 10.
↩︎ - Vladimir Vysotsky, “Ballad of Childhood”, Songs and Verse, 1981, pp 16-18.
↩︎ - 22 August 1956, St 21/4 – Secretariat. Report of Central Commission overseeing re-examination of cases, Region by Region, of those convicted of political, administrative, and economic crimes. Responses by Minister for Internal Affairs (6 October 1956) and the Central Committee Administrative Department (2 November 1956) are included in file [R 22 August 1956, St 21/4]. 26 pp.
↩︎ - 29 December 1975*, 3213-A, p. 3. See note 14.
↩︎ - 5 March 1957, 465-S – KGB report (Serov). Anti-Soviet events during local elections. [R 5 March 1957, 465-S] total 3 pp.
↩︎ - 19 December 1957* – KGB report. ACADEMICIAN LEV LANDAU’s admiration for the Hungarian insurgents and comments about “Bolshevik fascism” [R 19 December 1957]. 17 pp.
↩︎ - Lev Landau (1908-1968) became a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1946. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1962.
↩︎ - 12 July 1984* (Pb) [1.4] – Politburo discussion. The rehabilitation of MOLOTOV, KAGANOVICH, KHRUSHCHOV and STALIN. [R 12 Jul 84, Pb, para 13] total 6 pp.
↩︎ - Vyacheslav Molotov was Stalin’s Prime Minister (1930-1941) and Foreign Minister (1939-1949). Removed with Lazar Kaganovich and Georgy Malenkov from the Central Committee and Politburo in 1957, all three were expelled from the Party in 1961.
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3.2: OUR “THAW”
↩︎ - See, for example, Andrei Amalrik’s “Open letter to Anatoly Kuznetsov”, Chronicle of Current Events, 31 December 1969 (CCE 11.14 [1]).
↩︎ - The Chronicle was a typescript journal produced every 2 to 4 months in Moscow between 1968 and 1982 by an “anonymous and changing group of human rights activists” (Reddaway).
↩︎ - 11 May 1987 (6/2140), p. 7 in 1 February 1987*, 183-Ch – KGB report (Chebrikov). The numbers then serving a sentence under Articles 70, 190-1 and 142 of the RSFSR Criminal Code; terms for release (see Notes) were eased. [R 1 Feb 87, 183-Ch] total 9 pp.
↩︎ - 29 December 1975*, 3213-A, p. 2. KGB report. ANDROPOV on the attitude of the “French and Italian Communist Parties” toward human rights issues. Includes information on conviction of dissenters since 1958. [R 29 December 1975, 3213-A] total 5 pp.
↩︎ - Peter Reddaway, “Reassessing the Past. Sovietology and Dissidence: New Sources on Protest”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report, Vol 6, No 5, 29 January 1993, pp 12-16.
↩︎ - See 21 April 1971 (St 2/2), p. 6. Central Committee. Measures to halt the spread of samizdat. [R 21 April 1971, St 2-2] total 6 pp.
↩︎ - 19 June 1975 (St 173/4), p. 3. KGB report. About the negative state of mind among Soviet artistic youth; and the Izmailovo unofficial art show. [R 19 June 1975, St 173-4] total 11 pp.
↩︎ - 20 May 1975 (No 97), p. 9 in 19 June 1975 (St 173/4). See note 35.
Contemporary reports in the Chronicle, (e.g. CCE 35.10 [30]) describe exhibitions in Izmailovsky park and elsewhere.
↩︎ - 5 April 1975 (784-A). KGB report. Writer Vladimir VOINOVICH intends to set up a branch of the PEN Club in Moscow. [R 5 April 1975, 784-A] total 3 pp.
↩︎ - Andrei Tverdokhlebov was arrested in 1975 (12 April 1975, 878-A). KGB report. The criminal activities of Andrei TVERDOKHLEBOV as a member of the Committee for Human Rights, and the Moscow branch of Amnesty International. [R 12 April 1975, 878-A] total 3 pp.
Tverdokhlebov was tried a year later (CCE 40.2).
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3.3: REBELLIOUS YOUTH
↩︎ - Peter Reddaway, “Reassessing the Past”, 29 January 1993, p 15 (see note 17, above).
↩︎ - KGB report 12 December 1976 (2798-A) pp. 3-24, in 28 December 1976 (St 37/14) file, p. 10. Secretariat. Long report from KGB, analysing the negative state of mind among Soviet youth and students. [R 28 December 1976, St 37-14] total 24 pp.
↩︎ - Table One, 12 December 1976 (2798-A), in 28 December 1976 (St 37/14 file (p. 11). See note 40.
↩︎ - 28 December 1976 (St 37/14) file, p. 17. See note 40.
↩︎ - Rudenko report (28 March 1974, No 34), pp. 3-11, in 16 April 1974 (St 121/23) file. 8-page report from R.A. RUDENKO, USSR Procurator General, on combating crime. An exchange of opinions in the Secretariat about his report. [R 16 April 1974, St 121-23] total 11 pp.
↩︎ - Table Two, 12 December 1976 (2798-A) in 28 December 1976 (St 37/14 file (p. 13). See note 40.
↩︎ - 12 December 1976 (2798-A), p. 18 in 28 December 1976 (St 37/14 file. See note 40.
↩︎ - 28 December 1976 (St 37/14) file, p. 21. See note 40.
↩︎ - 26 December 1986*, 2521-Ch [2.2; 3.3; 4] – KGB report (Chebrikov). Proposal to issue State pardons for special categories of criminals [dissidents] on condition that they cease their “anti-Soviet” activities. [R 26 Dec 86, 2522-Ch] total 6 pp.
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3.4: LAW AND EXPEDIENCY
↩︎ - Article 190-3 prohibited “violation of public order by a group, either in coarse manner or in disobedience of the lawful demands of representatives of authority”. It was introduced in 1996 to deal with public demonstrations.
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3.5: GLASNOST
↩︎ - KGB head Semichastny reported to the Central Committee (6 December 1965, 2685-S^) that about 50-60 people gathered around the Pushkin monument that day. Thirty years later his report was published in Nezavisimaya gazeta (5 December 1995).
↩︎ - 23 December 1965, 2843‑S, pp. 6-7. 5 January 1966*, St-132/11 – Secretariat. Completion of investigation into case against ANDREI SINYAVSKY and YULY DANIEL; preparations for trial. [R 5 January 1966, St 132-11] total 9 pp.
↩︎ - 3 February 1966, pp. 8-9 in 5 January 1966*, St-132/11. See note 50.
↩︎ - 16 February 1966, No. 346-Z – KGB (Zakharov) and Procurator General Rudenko report on reactions to trial of ANDREI SINYAVSKY and YULY DANIEL. [R 16 February 1966, 346-Z] total 4 pp.
↩︎ - 18 February 1966^, Yakovlev and Chauro note to Central Committee. See Politburo decision of 21 February 1966 (Pb 255)^.
↩︎ - The first issue of A Chronicle of Current Events (31 April 1968) reported on the Galanskov-Ginzburg trial and the protests and numerous petitions that preceded and followed it.
↩︎ - 5 December 1991*, No 90-680 [4] – Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. Annulment of BUKOVSKY’s 1967 conviction. [R 5 Dec 91]
↩︎ - 3 April 1968 (718-A), p. 2 in 15 April 1968 (Pb 79/XI) file – Politburo. Plan of response to protests about the trial of GINZBURG and GALANSKOV: arrest Pyotr GRIGORENKO; send Alexander YESENIN-VOLPIN to the USA; banish Pyotr YAKIR and Pavel LITVINOV from Moscow [R 15 April 1968, Pb 79-XI] total 7 pp.
See also Issue 2 of the Chronicle of Current Events (30 June 1968): “The campaign against those who signed letters”.
↩︎ - No date (Pb 615), p. 7 in 15 April 1968 (Pb 79/XI). See note 56.
↩︎ - 16 May 1968, Pb 81/XVI, pp. 6-8. Politburo. Pyotr GRIGORENKO’s activities in response to the trial of GINZBURG and GALANSKOV [R 16 May 1968, Pb 81-XVI]. 8 pp.
↩︎ - 16 May 1968, Pb 81/XVI, p. 1, handwritten annulment of Decree. See note 58.
↩︎ - 15 April 1968*, Pb 79/XII – Politburo. Proposal to revoke the Soviet citizenship of Ilya GABAI and Anatoly MARCHENKO [R 15 April 1968, Pb 79-XII]. 3 pp.
↩︎ - 20 January 1977*, 123-A, p. 5. – KGB report. Measures to halt the anti-Soviet activities of the “Helsinki Watch Committee in the USSR“: Yury ORLOV, Alexander GINSBURG, N.D. RUDENKO, Tomas VENCLOVA [R 20 January 1977, St 1-15]. 6 pp.
↩︎ - 1 April 1978*, 785-A – KGB memorandum. Arrangements for the trials of “anti-Soviet elements” such as Anatoly SHCHARANSKY, LUBMAN, FILATOV, NILOV, Alexander GINZBURG, Yury ORLOV and Zviad GAMSAKHURDIA [R 1 April 1978, 785-A]. 4 pp.
↩︎ - 11 January 1978 (26-A), p. 5 in 25 December 1977. Completion of criminal investigation of Anatoly SHCHARANSKY [R 25 December 1977, 12643-A]. 6 pp.
↩︎ - 25 December 1977. See note 63.
↩︎
JUDGEMENT IN MOSCOW
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The Bukovsky Archives 