SOVIET COLLECTIVE FARM CHAIRMAN PROTESTS TRIAL OF INTELLECTUALS
[Typewritten copies of scores of letters protesting recent trials of political dissenters are reportedly circulating in all major Soviet cities.
[Some of the social forces behind this development are described in the March 6 Christian Science Monitor (Boston) by Paul Wohl, as follows:
["The Soviet Union's hundred million citizens of less than thirty years of age are speaking up. The country's more than four million graduate students and its 400,000 scientists are stirring. The younger writers, teachers, and artists are in the forefront of the protest movement."
{Of course, this is a precursor of deeper stirrings among the masses, especially the young generation of workers. [One letter, signed by over 200 persons, including many scientists, protested the "tendentious" procedures at the Moscow trial of Aleksandr Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Aleksei Dobrovolsky, and Vera Lashkova, which took place January 8- 12, 1968. The letter stated:
("The conduct and outcome of this trial alarms us greatly. In recent years there have been several violations of legality, especially in political trials. From trial to trial (these violations) become increasingly rude and obvious. In the latest trial they took on a character of complete arbitrariness....Under these circumstances no one can feel safe."
[The letter demanded a review of the Ginzburg-Galanskov trial with representatives of the public present, "especially from among the signers of this letter." Like many others, it called for punishment of those responsible for the improper procedures.
("The blatant arbitrariness of the KGB (the secret police) and the violation of principles of the Soviet constitution" were also denounced in another letter signed by sixty-four intellectuals.
{An open letter by Y. Shiffers, a theater director, declared that if the illegalities were not corrected, "I beg to join my name to those of the innocently sentenced."
(More recently, ninety-nine Soviet mathematicians, including seven Lenin Prize winners, signed a joint statement protesting the incarceration in a mental hospital of Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin, who has been prominent among those actively fighting such injustices as those against Ginzburg and Galanskov.
(Outstanding among these growing expressions of protest is a letter by Ivan A. Yakhimovich, chairman of the Ya'una Gvarde (Young Guard) collective farm in the Kraslava district of Latvia, the text of which we reprint below. Yakhimovich was singled out for praise by the Soviet paper Komsomolskaya_ Pravda in 1964 as an "honest and just" Communist and a model farm director. His letter is addressed primarily to Mikhail A. Suslov, the chief Politburo ideologist, who is credited by some as the foremost advocate of stamping out intellectual dissent and discontent.
[The Yakhimovich document is most striking as a symptom of conflicting currents within the ruling Communist party in response to the pressures exerted by diverse sectors of the masses. ]
*x* * *
I do not have sufficient informa-— tion to judge the degree of guilt of those persons subject to repression, but of one thing I am firmly convinced and one thing I know -- the type of trial that took place in the Moscow City Court January 8- 12, 1968, is causing enormous damage to our party and to the cause of Communisn, both in our country and elsewhere.
We celebrated the glorious anniversary [of the October Revolution], we pride ourselves on our achievements in economic and scientific techniques, and we ourselves, at the very time the United Nations has declared 1968 the Year of the Defense of the Rights of Man, are handing the enemies of Communism trump cards to be used against us. It is absurd!
We were naked, hungry, indigent, but we won, because we placed in the foreground the liberation of man from injustice, outrage, lack of rights, etc., and we can lose everything, despite our rockets and hydrogen bombs, if we forget the origins of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
From the time of Radishchev [eighteenth-century writer sent to Siberia for opposing serfdom], the trials of writers have always been an abomination in the eyes of progressive, thinking people. What were our homegrown leaders thinking of when they shut Solzhenitsyn's mouth, made a fool of the poet Voznesensky, "punished" Sinyavsky and Daniel with forced labor, and involved the KGB in spectacles with "foreign enemies"?*
* Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, best known for
One must not subvert the confidence of the masses in the party; one must not speculate with the honor of the state, even if a certain leader wants to end "samizdat." ["Samizdat," literally self-publication, is Soviet slang for the uncensored material that circulates widely in typed or handwritten form. The recent political trials aim to stifle this phenomenon, which has become prevalent since 1956. ]
Samizdat can be destroyed only by one means: the development of democratic rights, not their violation; observation of the constitution, not its violation; the realization in practice of the Declaration of Human Rights, since [former Foreign Minister] Vishinsky signed it in the name of our state, not by ignoring it.
Incidentally, it appears that Articles 18 and 19 of the Declaration read: "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion... Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
You know Article 125 of our constitution perfectly well; I shall not quote it. I only want to recall the thought of V.I.Lenin to the effect that "we need full and true information, and truth should not depend upon the question of whom it should serve." ("Works," fifth edition, Vol. 54, p. 446.)
I believe that the persecution of young dissenters in a country where more than fifty percent of the population is younger than thirty years of age is an extremely dangerous line -- adventurisn. It is not toadies, not a public of yesmen (O Lord, how they have multiplied!),
his novel of Stalin's prison camps, protested in May 1967 against the refusal by the authorities in recent years to publish his works. Despite strong pressure on his behalf by many writers, the censors still refused in December 1967 to allow the monthly Novy Mir to print one of his works.
Andrei Voznesensky was involved in a dispute with the bureaucratic masters of the Soviet Writers Union in June 1967, when, because of his support to Solzhenitsyn, they refused on various transparent pretexts to let him travel to the USA for a poetry reading.
Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel are the two writers jailed in February, 1966, primarily for having their anti- Stalinist satirical writings printed abroad without benefit of censor. not mama's boys who will determine the future, but rather those very rebels, as the most energetic, brave, and highprincipled members of our young generation.
It is stupid to see in them the enemies of Soviet power, and more than stupid to let them rot in prisons and make mock of them. For the party, such a line is equivalent to self-strangulation. Too bad for us if we are not capable of reaching an understanding with these young people. They will create, inevitably they will create, a new party. Ideas cannot be murdered with bullets, prisons, or exile. He who does not understand this is no politician, no Marxist.
You, of course, remember the "Testament of Palmiro Togliatti" [former head of the Italian Communist party, who died in 1964]. I have in mind this part of it:
"A general impression has been created of foot dragging and opposition in the matter of a return to Leninist norms, which would insure both within the party and outside it more freedom of utterance and discussion on questions of culture, art, and politics as well.
"It is difficult for us to explain to ourselves this foot dragging and this opposition, particularly in view of contemporary conditions, when the capitalist encirclement no longer exists and economic construction has attained grandiose successes.
"We have always proceeded from the thought that socialism is a system in which there exists the broadest freedom for the workers who participate in the cause, who participate in an organized way in the leadership of social life as a whole." (Pravda, September 10, 1964.)
Who benefits from a policy of foot dragging and opposition? Only overt or covert Stalinists, political bankrupts. Remember: Leninism -- yes! Stalinism -no! The 20th congress of the party did its work. The genie is at large and cannot be confined again! By no forces and nobody!
We are on the eve of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Soviet army ([February 23]. We are on the eve of the consultative meeting of the fraternal Communist parties [in Budapest]. Do not complicate your work for yourselves, do not darken the atmosphere in the country.
On the contrary, Comrade Podgorny {Soviet president] could amesty Sinyavsky, Daniel, Bukovsky,* and order a review of
* Vladimir Bukovsky was sentenced to three years in jail September 1, 1967, for having led a demonstration for free speech in Moscow in January 1967.
the case of A. Ginzburg and others. The Moscow City Court, in this last case, permitted the grossest violations of legal procedure. Prosecutor Terekhov; Judge Mironov; the commandant of the court, Tsirkunenko, should be punished in the appropriate fashion, primarily for acting like idiots and abusing their power. One cannot achieve legality by violating the laws. We will never permit anyone to prostitute our Soviet courts, our laws, and our rights. They should be thrown out with a vengeance, for they are doing Soviet power more harm than all your NTS's, BBC's, and Radio Liberty's taken all together. [NIS, the Narodno- Trudovoi Soiuz or People's Labor Alliance, is a reactionary white emigre organization which Ginzburg and Galanskov were charged with being agents for, a charge they consistently denied. ]
Let Novy Mir again print the works of A. Solzhenitsyn. Let G. Serebryakova publish her Sandstorm in the USSR and E. Ginzburg her Journey into the Whirlwind. * Anyway, they are known and read; it's no secret.
* Both Galina Serebryakova and Evgenia Ginzburg (no relation to defendant Aleksandr Ginzburg) are Communist party women who were jailed in the Stalin purges, and since "rehabilitated." The book titles named are their accounts of that experi-
I live in the provinces where, for every electrified home, there are ten unelectrified, where in the winter the buses can't get through, and the mail is late by whole weeks. If information has reached us on a broad scale, you can well imagine what you have done, what kind of seeds you have sown throughout the country. Have the courage to correct the mistakes that have been made, before the workers and peasants take a hand in this affair.
I don't want this letter to be passed over in silence, for the cause of the party cannot be a private cause, a personal cause, and, even less, a secondrate cause.
I consider it the duty of a Communist to warn the Central Committee of the party and I insist that all the members of the Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union be acquainted with the contents of this letter.
The letter is addressed to Comrade Suslov with this in view.
With Communist greetings!
I.A.Yakhimovich
ence, which have circulated widely as "sanizdat" but which the censors will not publish. Editions of both books have appeared in the West.
THE FREE