Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union. David Satter
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Western Freedoms in Russia
“These people are only guilty of gathering information. We have no free Press in this country, if, under these conditions, they are arrested for gathering facts, then how can you continue to speak of the Helsinki Agreements?”
The speaker was Dr. Valentin Turchin, leader of the Soviet branch of Amnesty International. The scene was his apartment shortly after the arrest this month of three members of various unofficial Helsinki monitoring committees: Dr. Yuri Orlov, Mr. Alexander Ginzburg and Mr. Mikola Rudenko.
His audience consisted of three westerners and a group of dissidents including Orlov’s wife, Irina, the veteran dissident Mrs. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who was to get her exit visa a few days later, Father Gleb Yakunin, leader of a committee to defend religious rights, and Mr. Evgeni Yakir, a Jewish activist. They represented the 50 or so people in various dissident movements who can be considered activists.
Support from Outside
All look to the outside world for moral, political, and psychological support, aware that they are striving for freedoms in the Soviet Union that are guaranteed as a matter of course in the West. To work for western freedoms in the Soviet Union is to give up any hope of being integrated into Soviet society. Prominent dissidents face arrest and imprisonment, and an assured end to their careers. Among the well-known dissidents, only Dr. Andrei D. Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, still holds a job. He works alone, doing purely theoretical work as a senior scientific associate in the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences. Almost all the others were fired as an immediate consequence of their decision to speak out.
Dr. Orlov, a physicist and corresponding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences, was removed from his position as senior scientific associate in an institute near Moscow in 1973, after writing a letter to Mr. Leonid Brezhnev deploring the “shabby campaign in the Press against Dr. Sakharov.” Dr. Turchin, also a physicist, was demoted from chief of a laboratory, after issuing a public statement in defence of Dr. Sakharov. He was publicly denounced at a meeting attended by 300 of his colleagues, not one of whom voted publicly in his favour, and was eventually fired in July, 1974.
Father Yakunin lost his job in 1965 after protesting against what he considered violations of the rights of believers and many of the Jewish “refuseniks,” persons who requested visas to Israel but were turned down, lost their jobs as soon as they applied to emigrate, and are now working in Moscow as night watchmen and lift operators.
Because of the economic consequences, dissent in the Soviet Union is not a youth movement. Most of the dissidents are over 40 and in severe financial straits, earning money by giving private lessons or doing translations. Many are scientists or mathematicians, a reflection of the fact that these professions are considered necessary to the State and have always enjoyed slightly more freedom from ideological control as a result.
Decision to Speak Out
Having lost their jobs in a society where the State is the sole employer, the active dissidents learn that it’s almost impossible to find new ones. Most institutes or publishing offices have a “first department” with links to the KGB and access to detailed personal and political information about a prospective employee. In addition, in many institutes an applicant must be approved by both the institute and the local party organisation, and an employee’s social and political record is subject to periodic review. If an active dissident is ultimately offered some kind of work it may be as a manual labourer. Mr. Vladimir Slepak, an engineer by training and a member of the Helsinki monitoring group who has been trying for the last seven years to emigrate to Israel, has not worked since 1972. In that year he was offered and turned down a job as a loader in a concrete plant.
The decision to speak out, to refuse to lie “quieter than the water and lower than the grass” was at one time or another taken by all the active dissidents. In itself, however, the act of speaking out will not usually lead to imprisonment and arrest. The Soviet Union today is a more liberal country than it was 15 or even ten years ago, when it was possible to receive a prison sentence just for possessing Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward. The circulation of works of literature in typescript (samizdat), was also major crime. Now imprisonment and arrest come when the dissidents try to exercise those freedoms which they have supported orally.
This is what happened with the formation of the dissident Committee to Monitor Soviet Observance of the Helsinki Accords, which during recent months were the focus of Soviet dissident activity. The Helsinki Group members gathered information on Soviet human rights abuses, interviewed affected individuals and held Press conferences exactly as if they were citizens of a Western democracy. The arrests of Dr. Orlov, February 10, Helsinki Group member Mr. A. Ginzburg, on February 3, Ukrainian Helsinki group leader Mr. Rudenko, and Ukrainian Helsinki group member Olexy Tikhy on February 5 were a means of demonstrating to them that they are not.
Dissidents learn to live with uncertainty. The Soviet Government operates in secrecy and it is hard to judge the mood of the authorities. For many months it appeared possible that the Soviet authorities would tolerate the existence of the unofficial Helsinki monitoring committee because of their justification in the light of the Helsinki agreement and the obvious violation of the spirit of the agreement which arresting the members of the monitoring committees would represent.
Solzhenitsyn Fund
Now, however, it is clear that the Soviet authorities will continue to punish organised dissident activity even when it conforms to internationally accepted standards of human rights. Under these circumstances, Soviet dissidents form an important category of the population. They are the only group in the Soviet Union which openly challenges the authorities.
The dissident subculture is populated by people who know each other well and can always be found at each-others’ homes. None can be confident that their actions are unknown to the KGB. Many, like Mr. Ginzburg, are chronically ill, the legacy of unrelenting pressures and years in a camp. Dissidents cannot speak freely on the phone (if their phone has not been disconnected) or in their apartments for fear of bugging. Outsiders must be treated with suspicion because a neighbour or casual friend could be an informer.
They do, however, have two institutions. The Solzhenitsyn fund was set up by exiled author Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 with royalties from his book about Stalinist prison camps, the Gulag Archipelago. Since then, the fund has dispersed 270,000 roubles (£210,000) to about 1,500 political prisoners or their families. The fund was administered until his arrest by Mr. Ginzburg who said its purpose was to assure that “political prisoners today had a chance to survive.” It is undoubtedly a source of irritation to the authorities because it takes the illegitimacy of political arrests for granted and works to mitigate the severity of State punishment.
Unofficial Chronicle
The Chronicle of Current Events, also operates unofficially and has become an important part of the Soviet scene. Now in its ninth year, the Chronicle appears once every two or three months in typewritten carbon copies. Probably no more than a few hundred copies of each issue are produced, but the Chronicle circulates widely by hand and contains the most recent dissident information, including searches and arrests. The Chronicle’s accuracy and impartiality have led many to suggest that it is the best newspaper in the Soviet Union.
The dissidents inevitably become outcasts despite this pressure however, their way of life has a certain attraction which the Soviet authorities have at various times indirectly acknowledged. The Communist Party newspaper Pravda, in its attack on the dissidents on February 12, said that there are still people in the Soviet Union, who are attracted by talk of greater freedom in the West, and thus it was necessary to be politically vigilant as “never before.”
There are at least several hundred people in Moscow who, although not active dissidents, are willing to risk signing petitions in support of arrested dissidents. At least 1,000 have made personal contributions to the Solzhenitsyn Fund. A petition circulated on behalf of Mr. Ginzburg was signed by more