Crackdown on Dissent

EVEN as the U.S.S.R. reaches westward to conclude agreements on commerce and cooperation with the U.S. and Europe, the Kremlin has seemed increasingly anxious to prevent detente from penetrating Soviet borders. Since Richard Nixon's visit to Moscow last May, the screws have been clamped ever tighter on expressions of dissent in Russia. Now some Western observers think that the Soviets are poised on the brink of the most massive crackdown since Stalin's death.

The prime target of official ire is a ragged, typewritten newsletter called the Chronicle of Current Events. The organ of the loosely knit Democratic Movement in Russia, the Chronicle provides accurate and exhaustive news of the arrests and trials of dissidents that are not reported in the official press. In spite of frequent efforts by the KGB (secret police) to halt the Chronicle's widespread underground circulation, 27 issues have appeared regularly since publication began in 1968. The KGB recently stepped up its drive to stamp out the journal. Scores of suspects have been rounded up and interrogated in an effort to identify the Chronicle's anonymous editors, its nationwide network of correspondents and its typists, who laboriously copy the paper so that it may be passed on like a chain letter.

A key move in "Case No. 24," as the campaign against the Chronicle is called by the KGB, was the arrest of Historian Pyotr Yakir, 49 (TIME, July 3), for protesting Soviet violations of civil rights. The son of a Red Army general who was executed during the military purges in 1937, Yakir spent his childhood and much of his adult life in prison. Before his rearrest last June, he told friends that he felt he no longer had the strength to resist torture. He is reportedly under brutal KGB pressure to denounce his associates, some of whom are suspected of being Chronicle editors. There are reports that the KGB has threatened Yakir with an extra year of imprisonment for every issue of the Chronicle that appears from now on. Moscow intellectuals worry that if Yakir succumbs to pressure, the government may stage show trials, with the historian as the principal defendant and witness.

Ulcers. These fears have been reinforced by the chilling tale of Poet Yuri Galanskov, 33, who died on a prison operating table last month. According to accounts that recently reached the West, Galanskov, who suffered from bleeding ulcers, was not allowed to receive medical care after his imprisonment in 1967 for having edited an underground literary magazine. Instead, he was fed prison fare of salt fish and black bread, and was forced to work in a camp factory. When Galanskov developed a perforated ulcer, he was operated on by another inmate, a former army doctor who was not a qualified surgeon. Just before his operation, Galanskov managed to sneak a letter home saying: "They are doing everything to hasten my death." The treatment of Galanskov has aroused anxiety over the condition of other sick political prisoners, such as former Major General Pyotr Grigorenko, 66, a war invalid, and Writer Vladimir Bukovsky, 30, who suffers from a lung disease.

Judging by the latest issue of the Chronicle, which was recently smuggled out to the West, repressive measures against dissidents are by no means confined to Moscow. From the Ukraine, where more than 100 intellectuals have been arrested since last January, the Chronicle reported the trial of eleven members of the Movement for Ukrainian National Rights, a moderate group devoted to Ukrainian civil rights. Charged with disseminating "anti-Soviet" propaganda, the defendants were sentenced to an average of ten years' hard labor and exile. Among those convicted was Danylo Shumuk, 58, who had previously spent 28 years in prisons and camps--in prewar Poland for being a Communist, under Nazi occupation for the same reason, and under the Soviet government for "Ukrainian nationalism." After his release in 1967, Shumuk wrote his memoirs of prison life and apparently circulated the work of Yugoslav Writer Milovan Djilas (The New Class), for which he has been sentenced to an additional 15 years. His wife has also been arrested and his two-year-old son placed in an orphanage.

From the remote Buryat Autonomous Republic, the Chronicle reports the arrest of five Buddhist scholars charged with organizing a Buddhist religious group that was alleged, most improbably, to have Zionist ties. The paper also provided fresh details of the widespread riots in Lithuania last May (TIME, July 31). From Leningrad, the Chronicle identified secret police personnel of a prison psychiatric hospital where warders inject political prisoners with dangerous drugs.

All these measures may ultimately test how much the West--and the U.S. Congress in particular--will tolerate for the sake of trade and better relations with the Soviet Union. Soviet treatment of Jews has already put most-favored-nation status for the U.S.S.R. in jeopardy in Congress (TIME, Sept. 25). Two weeks ago, Hubert Humphrey warned Premier Aleksei Kosygin and other officials in Moscow that congressional concern for the plight of Soviet Jews remains a serious obstacle to the conclusion of multibillion-dollar trade deals with Russia. Mass trials of dissidents like Yakir, who happens to be Jewish, are likely to provoke Congress further.

In what may have been a canny move by the Kremlin to quiet unfavorable American opinion, a leader of the Russian Democratic Movement was allowed to tour U.S. universities this month. He is Physicist Valery Chalidze, 34, who called for amnesty for all Soviet political prisoners in a speech at Washington's Georgetown University last week. Other leading Russian intellectuals and artists, including Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and Physicist Andrei Sakharov, have made similar appeals. Determined to return to Russia, where he is regarded by the KGB as a dangerous troublemaker, Chalidze told TIME: "Even if the Soviet authorities will only let people out for purposes of propaganda, it is still a victory in the struggle for human rights. Let them send Grigorenko and Bukovsky out for propaganda too." Chalidze's friends in Moscow worry that the Soviets will not let him re-enter the country, or will arrest him if they do. Under the present grim conditions, there is a diminishing chance that the Chronicle will survive to report Chalidze's fate.

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