Challenge and Reprisal

"If they beat me, I will admit anything," Soviet Historian Pyotr Yakir told a journalist before he was arrested last year. "I know this from my former experience in the camps. But you'll know it won't be the real me speaking."

Last week Yakir was paraded before 300 foreign and Russian newsmen for an extraordinarily confessional press conference at Moscow's Journalists' Club. Looking remarkably fit despite 15 months of pretrail detention and interrogation, the leonine-headed dissident recited a prepared statement in a monotone while smoking Bulgarian cigarettes and sipping Caucasian mineral water. Along with his convicted codefendant, Economist Viktor Krasin, Yakir repeated the recantations that had earned them both relatively mild sentences (three years in prison and three years of exile) at their trial on charges of subversion (TIME, Sept. 10).

Latest Effort. Yakir, who has already served 17 years in Soviet prison camps, insisted that he had worked for foreign anti-Soviet organizations and received payment from Western journalists for passing on material critical of the U.S.S.R. The dissident movement, said Yakir and Krasin, was a foreign plot. For longtime Moscow hands, the chilling recital recalled the public confessions at the purge trials of the 1930s. Soviet spokesmen went out of their way last week, however, to insist that the conviction of Yakir and Krasin did not represent a return to Stalinism.

Broadcast on Soviet state television, the press conference was the latest effort by the Kremlin to dismiss domestic critics of the regime as foreign agents even as the state further terrorizes the dwindling band of dissidents. At the same time, a massive Soviet press campaign was mounted against the two towering spiritual leaders of Russia's "democratic movement," Physicist Andrei Sakharov and Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn. With an evident absence of spontaneity, hundreds of indignant letter writers spewed forth abuse against the two intellectuals in the pages of Pravda, Izvestia and other official newspapers. In part, the list of Sakharov's and Solzhenitsyn's accusers read like an "S. Hurok presents" concert program. Violinists David Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan wrote that Sakharov is "stirring up the dying coals of the cold war." Dmitri Shostakovich, who once praised Stalin for his "wise and delicate" musical advice, joined Aram Khachaturian and other composers in accusing Sakharov of debasing "the honor and dignity of the Soviet intelligentsia." Scientists, writers, even farmers and factory workers chimed in with other messages of accusation against the two dissidents.

Legal Action. This highly orchestrated campaign is obviously calculated to prepare public opinion for legal action against Sakharov, who helped develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb, and Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prizewinning author. Just as obviously, bold recent statements by both men to foreign journalists have strained the Kremlin's tolerance close to the breaking point.

Speaking of East-West detente at a Moscow press conference last month, Sakharov warned that "rapprochement without democratization is very dangerous. It might lead to very grave consequences inside our country and contaminate the whole world with an antidemocratic character." This was strong criticism indeed of Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev's policy of seeking economic cooperation abroad while putting down dissent at home. Sakharov compounded his offense by recommending one action that the U.S. Congress could take to open Soviet doors --adopting the Jackson Amendment, which would bar most-favored-nation economic status to countries restricting emigration.

As for Solzhenitsyn, he has tried to counter the attacks on his loyalty and integrity by revealing details of official harassment, including secret police threats to murder him and his family. In another statement issued to Western newsmen last week, he disclosed that a Leningrad woman had hanged herself after five days of interrogation by the KGB had forced her to reveal the whereabouts of a hidden Solzhenitsyn manuscript. Police seizure of this unpublished work--a documentary record of Stalinist concentration camps--has greatly alarmed the author because 200 of the prisoners he interviewed for the book are still alive. They are now subject to reprisal, as is Solzhenitsyn.

Assessing the impact of these repressive acts on East-West detente, TIME Moscow Correspondent John Shaw cabled last week that "the Soviet leaders are setting the stage for the meeting of the European Security Conference in Geneva on Sept 18. They are putting the West on notice that they are eager to import foreign technology, but are adamant in rejecting the 'freer flow' of ideas proposed by Western ESC nations. The Soviets have revealed that dissent is a live issue at home, contradicted their claim that the dissenters are few and unimportant, reverted to Stalinist methods of marshaling opinion, and openly challenged the West as to how firmly it is prepared to stand by its humanist beliefs. Soviet suppression of dissenting opinion, in short, has become as much of a challenge to the West as the recent Soviet MIRV (multiple targetable re-entry vehicles) tests that violated the spirit of the SALT talks and of Nixon-Brezhnev summitry."

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