Soviet Union: The Submarine Conspiracy

How widespread is dissent in the Soviet Union? Perhaps the only people who know are officials of the KGB (secret police), whose job is to crush it. Only occasionally does an open act of defiance occur, such as last year’s small protest in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Last week news of an especially intriguing act of dissidence came to light.

According to the report, three naval officers, who served aboard a nuclear submarine, were arrested last June in Tallin in the Soviet Republic of Estonia. The men—a senior officer named Gavrilov, a lieutenant named Ponomarev and an unidentified officer—drew up a 26-page document advocating radical changes in Soviet policy. They were arrested after a page of the text was discovered on a mimeograph machine in one of the officers’ homes.

Suspicious Nature. The appeal is patterned on an essay written by Soviet Physicist Andrei Sakharov and smuggled to a publisher in the West last year. Sakharov called for increased freedom of thought in Russia and a deliberate convergence of the U.S. and Soviet systems. The Tallin Three goeven farther. While openly praising the West, they condemn Communism for its low standard of living and call upon the people to rise against the regime. The document ends with the words: “Fight for your political rights! Don’t be slaves without a conscience! Democrats of the U.S.S.R., unite, fight, win!”

Western experts in Moscow cannot remember ever having seen such an inflammatory document. Most protests in the Soviet Union carefully stress the need for reform within the Communist system. Furthermore, unlike other appeals that have borne the signatures of individuals, the Tallin document is signed by an organization that calls itself the Democrats of the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Baltic Republics. The unusual nature of the document has, in fact, caused some suspicion that it may have been written by an anti-Communist group in Western Europe and then seized upon by the KGB as a pretext for cracking down on dissident elements. According to one account, the KGB has used the appeal to justify sweeping investigations not only in Tallin, but also in other places, including Leningrad, the Azerbaijan city of Baku and the Siberian industrial center of Khabarovsk.

Even if the document is a fabrication, the scope of the investigation that it prompted suggests that the KGB is deeply worried about political dissent. If it is genuine—and it may well be—it would indicate a startling depth of protest, reaching even into the ranks of Russia’s most elite naval force.