User:Nkrita/Workpages/Misc Notes

~~ Dumping ground and experiments ~~

Issue	Editor	Comments
1–10	Natalya Gorbanevskaya	3 years incarceration in a psychiatric institution (1970–72); emigrated to France in 1975.
11	Galina Gabay
12	Yelena Smorgunova
12	Yuli Kim
11–27	Anatoly Yakobson	Emigrated to Israel in 1973.
28–30	Tatyana Khodorovich	Emigrated to France in 1977.
28–30; 32–53	Sergei Kovalev	7 years labor camps, 3 years internal exile (1975–85).
28–30; 32–53	Tatyana Velikanova	4 years labor camps, 5 years internal exile (1980–88).
31; 54–55	Alexander Lavut	3 years labor camps, 3 years internal exile (1980–86).
56–58; 60–64	Yury Shikhanovich	5 years labor camps, 5 years internal exile (1983–87).

Approach

"founded on the idea of civic protest as an existentialist act, one not burdened with any political connotations."

Legalism

Esenin-Volpin etc.

If we are not going to turn away, to remain silent, what language can we use to speak to power without losing our independence, without becoming trapped by doctrine and a political cat-and-mouse game? We were lucky to realize that the law could be this language – the only language in which the state is obligated to speak with its citizens; a language that is not part of the sphere of politics and political dogma; a language that prescribes equality for all participants in the conversation, whether an individual, a collective, the society, the “people,” or the state.

Larisa Bogoraz

Human rights ideas

By the late 1960s, the explicit language of human rights began to gain more prominence among dissidents' public utterances.

Starting in April 1968, the covers of the Chronicle of Current Events quoted not the Soviet constitution, but article 19 of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on freedom of expression.

In June 1968, Andrei Sakharov, the co-inventor of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, wrote an essay titled Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, in which he emphasized the convergence of the two superpowers. Arguing that intellectual freedom was essential to human society, Sakharov listed several recent political cases, trials and expulsions, and ended with a plea for their review and for abolishing laws violating human rights. As a result, Sakharov was banned from conducting any military-related research. The essay circulated in samizdat, and the principles Sakharov outlined in it would serve as further inspiration for the emerging human rights movement. According to historian Alexander Daniel, "Once this essay had appeared, the concept of human rights was no longer merely an aide for moral orientation; it had taken on a new character (not only for Russia, but for the whole world), that of political philosophy."

In August 1975, with the conclusion of the Helsinki Final Act and its human rights clauses, dissidents began to shift toward using the language of international law and human rights. This was exemplified by the Moscow Helsinki Group. In its documents, the group based its activities upon the human rights provisions of the Final Act, and made few references to Soviet legislation.

//

Further unease with the was by the publication of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962.

Significance and Legacy // CHRONICLE

The Chronicle of Current Events played a historic role in the beginnings of independent public opinion in the Soviet Union.

The Chronicle of Current Events was an important milestone in the periodical tradition of samizdat. If you don’t count Aleksander Ginzburg’s journal Sintaksis of 1959-60 and a few of the SMOG (an unofficial artistic youth group) journals of the early 1960s.  Sintaksis and the SMOG publications were poetic collections and cannot be considered a source of “mass information” in the strict sense of the word.  Consequently, it was the Chronicle that marked the beginning of (underground) free press in Russia in the second half of the twentieth century. +++ Radiohttp://www.memo.ru/history/diss/chr/engabout.html

Through such media organs as Radio Liberty, Voice of America, the BBC, and the Deutsche Welle, samizdat materials offered to and published by Western correspondents were rebroadcast into the Soviet Union and became available to segments of the Soviet population who had no other means of learning about the movement.

The Chronicle played an important role in the consolidation of civil and human rights activity in the USSR. Its method of dissemination and, in particular, its mechanism for collecting information resulted in the creation of a unified information field that included all the significant manifestations of dissident and, in several cases, non-dissident, public activity. (national, religious)http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/chr/engabout.html

In this capacity, the Chronicle facilitated the emergence of a dedicated Soviet human rights movement. This movement included figures such as Valery_Chalidze, Yuri Orlov, and Lyudmila Alexeyeva. Special groups were founded such as the Action Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR (1969), the Committee_on_Human_Rights_in_the_USSR (1970) and the Helsinki Watch Groups in Moscow, Kiev, Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Erevan (1976–77). With the appearance of these human rights organizations, the approach of the Chronicle ceased to be unique. However, it never lost its importance as a record of the dissident movement even after the appearance of the Helsinki movement.

At the present time, researchers have at their disposal several basic sources for studying the history of Soviet dissidence and the human rights movement in the USSR, for example, the Radio Liberty Samizdat Archive, which publishes the limited-circulation “Collection of Samizdat Documents” and “Samizdat Materials.”  Another important source is the bulletin News from the USSR published since 1978 by Kronid Lyubarsky in Munich. But the Chronicle of Current Events remains for researchers the first and most important source.  It is precisely for this reason that the scholarly-informational and educational organization Memorial made the decision to make the Chronicle maximally available, placing its texts on the Internet for all of those interested.

The purpose of our group is reflected in our name: the defence of human rights in the USSR. In calling ourselves the Initiative Group we also wish to make another point: To underline our right to freedom of association. The Initiative Group has no set program, no bylaws, and no defined structure. Each of us has the right to abstain from signing a document of the Group, and each of us has complete freedom when acting in his or her own name.

The members of the Initiative Group have been brought together by certain common views. All of us - believers and atheists, optimists and sceptics, those who believe in communism and those who don't - are united by our sense of personal responsibility for everything that is happening in our country and by our conviction that recognition of the individual's innate value forms the basis for any normal life of a society. That is why we have adopted the cause of human rights. We understand social progress to mean an increase of freedom above all. We are also united in our determination to act openly, in the spirit of the law, regardless of our personal opinion of particular legislative acts. The Initiative Group does not get involved in politics. We don't lobby for any specific government measures. We only say: don't violate your own laws. While we don't engage in politics, we have no intention of becoming reconciled to the punitive measures directed against dissenters. Resistance to illegality, to the abuse of power, these are the tasks of the Initiative Group. The Initiative Group does not believe that it is attacking the state when it criticizes specific actions of the authorities. Some people, in the belief that protests harden the government's attitude and lead to more severe repression, criticize - while inwardly sympathizing with their views - those who speak out openly against illegality in our country. In fact, non-resistance, the humiliating submission to authority which implicitly sanctions violations of our rights, provides a fertile field for repression. Silence encourages evil and corrupts people, breeding hypocrisy and cynicism. Society needs glasnost. Publicity inhibits tendencies toward extremism and violence of both rulers and ruled. In our country it is common to reproach anyone who appeals to foreigners. Unfortunately, no other means exist to publicize the violations of rights taking place in the USSR other than informing people abroad about them. News from abroad, even if only a little bit of it, reaches some Soviet citizens. And besides, we can always hope that our leaders will take International public opinion into account. We have appealed to the UN Human Rights Commission five times. The Commission has tailed to respond to our appeals. Perhaps there exist reasons for this, which are unknown to us. In this letter we wanted to explain why we nevertheless do not consider our appeals to have been made in vain.

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http://www.memo.ru/2008/05/05/40_XTC.htm http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2176103

Politics/HR

Jimmy Carter began his incumbency with several human rights declarations. Six days after his inauguration, the State Department protested publicly against the persecution of the Charter 77 human rights group in Czechoslovakia, a group ot intellectuals, which demanded compliance with "basket three" of the Helsinki final act. One day later the State Department published a second declaration, in which Washington openly took the side of a Soviet dissident: "All attempts on the part of Soviet authorities to intimidate Mr. Sakharov will not silence legitimate criticism within the Soviet Union and stand in contradiction to internationally recog nized norms of behavior."

A short time later, in Moscow, Andrei Sakharov published a letter from President Carter which contained a promise of future efforts toward the release of political prisoners: "Human rights," wrote Carter, "are a central concern of my administration." Henceforth the entire world showed intense interest in the fate of Sakharov and his colleagues.

http://www.worldsecuritynetwork.com/Human-Rights/friedbert-pflueger/U.S.-Human-Rights-Policy-Friedbert-Pfluegers-Lecture-and-Lessons-at-the-Kings-College-in-London

Washington began to lodge complaints with the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. On March 1, 1977, Carter met with the exiled Russian Vladimir Bukovsky in the White house.

Leading Foreign Minister Gromyko to speak of a "poisoned atmosphere".

Sakharov-memoirs!

www.memo.ru/history/diss/carter_engindex.html