Notes from the Underground

Soviet newspapers almost never mention the acts of protest against government policy that have become commonplace in Russia during the past few years. Scarcely ever do they speak of the arrests and other reprisals against dissenters that are now taking place with increasing frequency in the Soviet Union.

Despite the blanket of official silence, there is one publication in Russia that records the protests and persecution of the country's dissenters. It is a small, often tattered, clandestine newsletter called Chronicle of Current Events. Despite constant KGB (secret police) efforts to stamp it out, the Chronicle, which usually runs no more than 40 typescript pages, circulates among intellectuals in major Soviet cities with the speed of a brush fire.

The Chronicle appears through what Russians call samizdat, which means self-publishing; it is a play on the Soviet term Gosizdat, the state publishing house. Behind closed doors, readers type copies of the newsletter, which they pass on to friends in chain-letter fashion. Fresh news items for the paper are sent back to the anonymous editors by the same chain of communication. Though anyone who copies or circulates the Chronicle faces severe penalties, ten issues of the Chronicle have appeared since it was launched in 1968. The front page of a recent issue carries a quotation from the U.N. Bill of Human Rights and a list of the cases reported in the issue (see cut).

Dispassionate Tones. Along with foreign short-wave broadcasts, the Chronicle has become a main source of information for Soviet intellectuals. It broke the news of the arrest of three naval officers for having drafted an appeal for free speech (TIME, Oct. 31). It was the only publication in Russia to re port on such historical documents as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's letters to the Writers Union about the banning of his works. The Chronicle regularly offers listings of the latest officially forbidden books by both Western and Russian authors circulating in samizdat editions in the Soviet Union.

Dispassionate in tone, it prints terse bulletins about the condition of political prisoners, like the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, together with their labor-camp addresses. Top KGB investigators, prosecutors and judges who are involved in important political cases are identified by name for the record. The avowed purpose of the Chronicle is to secure civil rights for Soviet citizens within the letter and spirit of the constitution. Summaries of recent items:

> Alexander Daniel, the 20-year-old son of Yuli, was denied admission to Tartu University in Estonia, although he had been accepted earlier and had graduated at the top of his high school class. Recently he was fired from a menial job in the computer center of the Moscow Engineering Institute. At a meeting called to discuss young Daniel's case, the rector of the institute, Nikolai Strel-huk, expressed particular dissatisfaction about the number of Jews, like Daniel, who had been hired at the institute.

> On July 11, Genrikh Altunian, a Soviet army major and a teacher at the Military Institute of Kharkov, was arrested after a house search had turned up copies of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and issues of the Chronicle. He was expelled from the Communist Party, cashiered from the army and jailed in a KGB isolation prison.

> A KGB investigator, Nikolai Danilov, left his work on the island of Sakhalin and took a job as a legal-aid consultant in a Leningrad law office. He was arrested and confined in a special insane asylum for political offenders, where he is being "treated" with insulin shock.

> In Leningrad last December, three intellectuals were tried and sentenced to hard labor for "producing, harboring and circulating works of an anti-Soviet nature." These included Milovan Djilas' The New Class and Barry Goldwater's Why Not Victory? and The Conscience of a Conservative.

Ominous Forecast. In instances where Western specialists could check the veracity of the Chronicle reports, they have proved to be accurate. That only makes the newsletter's prediction about Stalin seem more significant. Issue No. 10, which has just begun to circulate in Russia, reports that the Soviet leaders are planning a major campaign to "rehabilitate" Stalin on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of his birth next Dec. 21. Major articles in Pravda and Izvestia are in preparation, together with a four-volume edition of his works. Posters and a statue are also being made ready for the event. As if to confirm the Chronicle's prediction, two pictures of Stalin last week appeared in a photo exhibit of Soviet history in Moscow. Since the Kremlin's attitude toward Stalin often has been a barometer of the government's willingness to repress dissenters, rehabilitation of the defamed dictator would portend an even bleaker era for the readers of the Chronicle.

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