SOVIET UNION: Killing the Spirit of Helsinki

A tough new crackdown on dissidents

Five years ago, at the 35-nation Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (C.S.C.E.), the Kremlin leadership pledged to respect “fundamental freedoms” and assure a freer movement of people and information. That formal commitment has never amounted to more than a gesture, grudgingly given and speedily withdrawn. Nonetheless, the spirit of Helsinki briefly lifted hopes of Soviet dissidents, encouraging the emigration of Jews from the U.S.S.R. and spawning a host of human rights groups. Those hopes now lie in ruins. Arrests of dissidents have soared, while Jewish emigration has plummeted, from a monthly average of 4,275 in 1979 to 1,625 so far this year. To some observers, it appeared that Moscow wanted to demonstrate its contempt for the Helsinki pledge by orchestrating the current anti-human rights campaign to coincide with this month’s meeting of the C.S.C.E. signatories in Madrid. The conference was convened to review compliance with the pledge on human rights and other agreements made in Helsinki.

Just as the conference opened, the Soviets moved to arrest one of the most prominent Jewish activists in the U.S.S.R., Computer Scientist Victor Brailovsky, the former editor of the underground cultural journal Jews in the U.S.S.R. He was charged with “defaming the Soviet state and social system” by organizing a press conference during the Madrid meeting, where he announced a hunger strike by 140 Soviet Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate. Brailovsky’s wife Irina reported that before he was sent to an isolation cell in Moscow’s Butyrki Prison a KGB man taunted him, saying, “You won’t survive a year in our prison camps, but a three-year sentence will finish you off for sure.”

At the Madrid conference, British Delegate John Wilberforce noted that 300 Soviet citizens have been arrested since Moscow stepped up its efforts a year ago to extinguish all forms of dissent. The KGB has arrested or exiled 44 members of five regional Helsinki Watch Groups that were set up to monitor the U.S.S.R.’s human rights record after the Helsinki pledge. Many have been jailed on trumped-up criminal charges, such as rape and possession of weapons—offenses that are calculated to discredit the dissidents with the average Soviet citizen. Treatment of Helsinki Watch members in the Ukraine has been particularly harsh. Olha Heyko, 27, was attacked and severely beaten (presumably by KGB-hired thugs) before she was tried and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment this year. Journalist Vyacheslav Chornovil, 43, and Composer Mykola Horbal, 39, were accused of attempted rape and sentenced to five years at hard labor.

Despite the persecution, newcomers have joined the Moscow, Ukrainian and Lithuanian Watch Groups even as their founding members were sent to prison. The founder of the Helsinki movement, Physicist Yuri Orlov, 55, is now serving seven years in a concentration camp; nonetheless, he managed to smuggle out an appeal to the Madrid conference, asking the participating countries to press for the release of Soviet political prisoners. Sovietologists estimate that there are about 10,000 such prisoners. One of the most active organizations monitoring human rights is the recently formed Prison Camp Watch Group, which has members in three different concentration camps. Says Ludmilla Thorne, director of the Center for Appeals for Freedom in New York City: “The emergence of this Helsinki unit is a sign of the amazing tenacity of the opposition.” The Watch group has even issued five reports on the plight of political prisoners that have been circulated in the U.S.S.R.

The morale of Soviet dissidents has not yet recovered from the forcible exile from Moscow last January of their undisputed leader, Physicist Andrei Sakharov. The Nobel Peace prizewinner is being held incommunicado, under tight surveillance, in the provincial city of Gorky. Since Sakharov’s banishment, a number of groups he supported have been crippled. For example, the KGB has arrested the three leading members of the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, a group that publicized the Soviet practice of confining dissidents in police-run mental hospitals.

Lately, dissident literary figures have become targets of the crackdown. Two weeks ago, Lev Kopelev and his wife Raisa Orlova, both literary critics, left the U.S.S.R. for West Germany, following a long campaign of harassment and official vilification. Novelist Vladimir Voinovich complained last week that he could not obtain permission to emigrate, although a Soviet official had warned him that he might suffer an auto “accident” if he did not leave the country. One of the Soviet Union’s most talented writers, Georgi Vladimov, has been under constant threat of arrest because he is the Moscow representative of Amnesty International, the organization that reports on political prisoners around the world. Early this month Vladimov was summoned to Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison for interrogation by the KGB. In the process, Vladimov suffered a heart attack.

Religious dissidents have also suf fered. So far this year, 45 Evangelical Baptists have been arrested, including three prominent pastors. The Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers in the U.S.S.R. has been slated for extinction by the KGB. The committee’s founder, the Rev. Gleb Yakunin, an Orthodox priest, was sentenced to five years in a labor camp plus five years of exile for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” On television last June, the widely revered Father Dmitri Dudko confessed to having slandered the Soviet system. The priest reportedly yielded to threats that all his parishioners would be arrested if he did not recant. Significantly, denunciations of Fa ther Yakunin in the Soviet press at the time of his trial prompted 250 people from all over the U.S.S.R. to apply for membership in his committee to defend the country’s believers.

Reported by Bruce Nelan/Moscow and Dorothy Ferenbaugh/New York