ANDROPOV AND THE DISSIDENTS

...And reports have been received in Moscow of increased cruelty in many camps where political prisoners are held, and that the health of many of them has now deteriorated...

...The dissident movement of the 1960s was, however, a new phenomenon, which is why it exerted a special influence on the atmosphere in our society...

...A new confrontation between the U.S.S.R...

...There can be a variety of reasons here—political or ideological lapses, religious fanaticism, nationalistic quirks, cases of personal failure and humiliations— blaming society for a failure to appreciate someone's merits and potential and, finally, in a number of cases, psychological instability...

...That persecuting anyone for criticism is forbidden in our country is also indicated there with perfect clarity...

...Many of the dissidents considered it possible to address various sorts of appeals to Andropov...

...There has been no change in Andrei Sakharov's status last year—he remains in exile in Gorky...

...Emigration by Armenians, Germans, and other nationalities also has come to a standstill...

...It is another matter when a few individuals, isolated from our society, set out on the path of anti-Soviet activity, break laws, supply the West 99 with material for slander, sow false rumors, and attempt to attack our society at various points...

...Thus, for example, in a report made in 1977 —published in Pravda, September 10, 1977— in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Feliks Dzerzhinski (1877-1926, first head of the Cheka), Andropov said...

...And we must deal with all this...

...The number of people who continue to speak and work openly in directions the authorities find objectionable has been reduced to a few dozen...

...The Brezhnev era with its slogan of "stability," its prevailing bureaucratic style, and its enshrinement of mediocrity was not particularly rich in striking events...

...Considerable attention has also been focused on the relations between the authorities and the various opposition movements...

...Despite Andropov's attitude toward the dissidents, some observers have voiced the opinion that precisely because the new leader of the Soviet Communist party was so recently head of the KGB, he would be more liberal now, in order to disassociate himself, to some degree, from the KGB...

...Are there no such people in the KGB...

...has always known opposition in one form or another...

...On the other hand, they appealed openly to public opinion at home and were seen and supported by foreign public opinion and the foreign press whose 97 statements were, like a magnified echo, heard in many corners of our land...

...It cannot be otherwise...

...Those efforts, ultimately, have been almost entirely successful...

...there still exist so-called dissidents...

...Even someone like Vladimir Bukovsky, usually inclined to making very harsh statements, wrote (Newsweek, November 22, 1982...

...A broad interpretation of this article has affected people performing useful work in the service area and small manufacturing...

...Everyone, of course, was aware of Andropov's decidedly negative attitude toward the dissident movement...

...The amnesty did not even affect religious dissidents with relatively short sentences, or those sentenced (under article 162 of the RSFSR's criminal code) for engaging in forbidden economic transactions...

...At the time, it was not the organizations of the blue- and white-collar workers but 100 the party district committees that established a rule that any invitation to a factory or institute should require permission from higher levels of the party...

...The enormous efforts made over the last 15 years by the press, film, and television to celebrate the "glorious Soviet Chekists" has not led to any observable increase in the KGB's popularity...

...The publicist V. Abramkin, who was preparing for his release after a second term, was sentenced right in the camp to a third term for "anti101 Soviet propaganda...

...I would ask the bourgeois ideologists to have a look at the 49th clause in the new, projected constitution, where the Soviet citizen's right both to criticize and make suggestions is clearly stated...

...Sergei Khodorovich was arrested in Moscow in the last few years...

...By November 1982 we could observe a near-total cessation of what had recently been known as the democratic movement...

...Thus the party's monopoly on ideology had been broken—which is the principal reason for the campaign Brezhnev launched against all forms of dissidence...

...But are we supposed to believe that among important party figures there are no moral cripples at all —no bribe-takers and extortioners, no people abusing their power, no fakers, careerists, degenerates, and none that are mentally unstable...

...Instead of legalizing their activities, the authorities now have driven them still further underground...

...Even after that, dissidents would sometimes speak at student debates, and hundreds of students paid them serious attention...

...Others assume that the liberalism of the revamped Politburo cannot consist of more than a few symbolic acts: allowing Sakharov to return from exile, freeing some political prisoners, and so on...

...It would not be hard to demonstrate that the U.S.S.R...

...By putting this word into circulation, bourgeois propaganda intends to create an image of a Soviet system that does not tolerate independent thought in its citizens, persecutes anyone "who thinks differently," that is, as they say, who doesn't adhere to the official line...

...Moreover, since January 1983 there has been a step-up in pressure on the few well-known dissidents still at liberty...

...Until the mid-'60s, nearly all opposition groups were illegal and underground...

...In the years 1980-82 the authorities had stepped up their pressure not only on the dissidents but on society as a whole...

...Yet although Andropov ran the KGB longer than any of his predecessors, he succeeded to a greater degree than any of its other leaders in keeping his own reputation from being identified with that of the KGB...

...every month...

...There is no support in this country for those renegades, nor can there be any...

...Meanwhile, it is precisely those groups that speak out vehemently against political repression in the U.S.S.R...

...The woman who published the religious almanac Hope was sentenced to one year in prison and five years of exile...

...The building of a new society, of the new Communist civilization is a complicated and difficult process...

...Western public opinion could not, in any given case, distinguish the healthy from the sick and protested nearly all cases of forced hospitalization as if they were identical...

...has been severely curtailed...

...In this instance the authorities displayed a certain "flexibility...

...those who took part in it belonged primarily to the intelligentsia...

...In the first six months to a year he will be sensitive to increasing pressure, especially on the humanrights front, since as the former head of the KGB, he is a very easy target...

...The new law on amnesty has caused a decrease in the number of statements concerning the authorities' liberalism...

...He usually acted less like a professional Chekist than a politician to whom the party had vouchsafed control over the KGB...

...Indeed, the amnesty places skyjackers and murderers on an equal footing with vagrants and beggars, for neither category was released...

...It would be unrealistic to expect the Soviet Union immediately to change its policy of support for Vietnam and the new Cambodia, or that Soviet military forces would be pulled out of Afghanistan without long negotiations...

...The prejudices in Andropov's assessment of the dissident movement are quite obvious...

...The opposition, of course, often disturbed the peace of the powers-that-be, but it has been of vital importance in trying to restore our society to health...

...One of the problems he faces is the tarnished image of the Soviet Union among Western left-wingers...

...The primary reason for this long quotation is that today Yuri Andropov is the head of both the Communist party and the Soviet state...

...As mentioned earlier, there were indeed a few mentally ill people among the dissidents, and this probably gave the KGB the idea in the '60s and '70s to place not only the sick but the healthy in psychiatric hospitals...

...This consideration, purely practical but politically expedient, should also be kept in mind with regard to all the other dissidents who today are being subjected to increasingly severe camp regimes or are languishing in prison...

...Socialism, in its developed phase, is not proof against there being a few individuals whose behavior accords with neither the moral nor the legal codes of Soviet society...

...There have been alcoholics and mentally ill people in the movement...

...Among some intellectuals Andropov even had a reputation of being a "closet liberal" who was not the complete master of the KGB since the majority of his assistants were active members of Brezhnev's "Dniepropetrovsk Mafia...

...The democratic movement has ceased to be replenished by well-known members of the Soviet intelligentsia, its passive support and its influence on society have diminished, and samizdat has come to a near-complete halt...

...There have been, however, a few cases in which people known to be mentally ill were declared to be of sound mind and sent to labor camps, although they had been treated for various mental illnesses...

...The emigres have expressed similar assumptions...

...It was the result of the shortcomings and faults of Soviet society and of the Soviet government itself...

...But Andropov is a clever guy, and he will try to improve his image...

...In spring 1983 the cases of people who had been arrested in the spring and summer of 1982 came to trial...

...And if we are speaking of the active members of the oppositional tendencies in Moscow and in the provinces, there were only some few thousand of them, which is not a large figure in the Soviet scheme of things...

...Translated from the Russian by RICHARD LOURIE q 102...

...It is no secret to anyone that "dissidence" has become a profession in itself, very well paid in foreign currency and other such remunerations, in essence little different from the way the imperialist special services pay their agents...

...They operated in full view of the authorities and therein lay their vulnerability...

...But it would not be realistic to imagine things otherwise, that among a quarter of a billion Soviet citizens there would be no individuals whatsoever whose thoughts on one subject or another differed from those held by the great majority...

...Some of the dissidents are in prison, or being held for investigation in "corrective labor" camps, or in internal exile...

...In our country, changes at the top always bear with them a great many hopes and misgivings...

...A still larger percentage of the wellknown dissidents are now living abroad...

...The writer L. Borodin, who had been in court before and had thereafter published a series of works abroad with the Posey publishing house, was sentenced to ten years in a corrective labor camp and five years of internal exile...

...nor will it increase society's control over the agencies of the state...

...The ideological and political basis of internal opposition has always been greatly varied, ranging from counterrevolutionary monarchistic and bourgeois trends to leftliberal and left-socialist trends...

...The same holds true for the dissidence to be found in the literature of that period, primarily connected with the name of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn but also linked to the writings and statements of General Grigorenko, Gleb Yakunin's and D. Dudko's religious opposition, Academician Sakharov's early writings, and those of a great many others...

...One of the more important features of the opposition movement of the '60s and '70s was that it attracted not only young people but many others who had achieved renown in our society: leading scientists, writers, actors, musicians, artists, old Bolsheviks and the children of well-known political figures of the past, popular journalists, and even a Soviet general...

...Or, rather, the dissidents strove for the status of a legal movement...

...That terror was directed against entire classes, even against whole separate nationalities...

...The "victory" of the mighty state machine over the uncoordinated groups of dissidents will do absolutely nothing to foster socialist democracy in our country...

...I am certain that many of the more brilliant dissidents would find very favorably inclined audiences at the factories, the kolkhozes, and the universities...

...He is more intelligent than the others, and I think that we can expect him to be more successful...

...And a still greater number of the rank and file have curtailed their activities out of weariness and disillusionment or as a result of pressure and persecution...

...Translated into Russian, the word means "someone who thinks differently...

...Precisely because Soviet society's ideological and political unity has become an important source of its strength, the enemies of socialism have concentrated their most intensive attacks on that unity...

...During the mid-'70s, between 3,000 and 10,000 Jews left the U.S.S.R...

...It is not my intention here to trace the history of the opposition movement in the U.S.S.R...

...It will not help revive the life of our society or create independent social instincts in people, all extremely important for a socialist society...

...The fact that Andropov had been the head of the KGB for many years, that Aliev, a new member of the Politburo, had emerged from the ranks of the KGB, and that our new Minister of Internal Affairs Fedorchuk had been well known in the Ukraine for his stern measures against Ukrainian dissidents did not in itself dispel those hopes...

...Whatever contradictions may have existed among the leaders of the KGB—for example, between Andropov and his first deputy, Tsvigun, Brezhnev's brotherinlaw—there was no doubt that Andropov bore personal responsibility for all the basic acts of repression against the dissidents...

...Those actions would show that he is flexible and striving to make changes...

...V. Albrekht, a member of the "Amnesty" group, 0. Radzinsky, a member of a Moscow pacifist group, and several people in the Baltic Republics and the Ukraine also have been arrested...

...The forms and methods employed by the authorities to crush it were not uniform either...

...That amnesty, however, did not include political prisoners, not even those who had been sentenced to short prison terms or had only a few months left to serve in prison, exile, or camp...

...The emigration of Jews to Israel and the U.S.A...

...The fact that such people were directly involved in the movement made it extremely difficult for the authorities to crush it...

...And this is precisely why they cannot bring themselves to speak out at factories, kolkhozes, or offices, for they would be chased right out of such places...

...Every possible opportunity must be taken to halt the slide toward a new and even more dangerous "cold war...

...This is connected with the incredible fuss kicked up by Western propaganda on the notorious issue of "the so-called dissidents...

...Five of the seven young intellectuals who had been members of a previously existing group of "young socialists" or "Eurocommunists" (names given the group by Western journalists) were released after a year of investigation and imprisonment as part of a partial amnesty...

...Now, some months after Brezhnev's death, such statements are becoming rare...

...Certain new phenomena observed in the last few months may indicate new ways in which psychiatry is being abused in the U.S.S.R...

...For example, it was known that on Andropov's initiative, M. M. Bakhtin, an outstanding literary scholar whose books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais are now considered classics, was brought back to Moscow from his exile in Saransk...

...These were open, legal statements...

...The writer G. Vladimov—who had two books published by Posey and was subjected to two searches in 1982—received permission to leave the country...

...They wrote a statement condemning the form their activities had taken but without renouncing their beliefs...

...He is capable of taking any road...

...and the West is still not inevitable, and has not yet reached the critical level of the "cold war" of the 1940s and '50s...

...Summoned to the KGB or the Procurator General, they are threatened with criminal prosecution if they do not desist from their "anti-Soviet" activities, that is, from criticizing this society...

...This image has nothing in common with reality...

...Thus, for example, Pavel Litvinov has written: Andropov is entirely opportunistic...

...I remember how insistent many institutions of learning were in their invitations to Solzhenitsyn in the mid-1960s when the present dissident movement had only just begun, and what success his speeches enjoyed...

...Moreover, Andropov had much more power as a member of the Politburo than as head of the KGB...

...The forensic experts now diagnose such cases as a "stable remission" and not "incipient schizophrenia" as was usually done in the past...

...Stalin's horrendous terror in the '30s and '40s is in no way to be explained by the actions of these relatively small groups...

...But the movement found a response in a much larger group of the intelligentsia and even of blue- and white-collar workers, and it influenced the way they thought and related to the world around them...

...It is possible that Andropov might take that route...

...On the other hand, the stakes involved in such confrontations are much higher today than they were 25 or 30 years ago...

...But if there is the slightest chance of improving Soviet-American relations by, say, releasing Orlov, Kovalev, or Shcharansky and allowing them to emigrate, it would be unwise not to make use of that opportunity...

...This movement was strengthened by the attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and Stalinism, and by the attempts to limit the legal rights of individual citizens and national groups...

...The connections between various emigre groups and their friends in the U.S.S.R...

...There are exceptions, but they are very rare...

...But this is an extremely difficult task when an authoritarian government has the powerful KGB at its disposal...

...In spring 1983 a few such groups were uncovered and their leaders arrested...

...But the authorities prohibit such contact...

...Piotr Yakir spoke dozens of times at various institutions in Moscow...

...I have been familiar with this movement and its main figures for close to 20 years...

...The Soviet Union has quit the International Psychiatric Association for reasons obvious to all...

...What I guess is that he will try to relax the ideological rift with the Western left in order to increase his influence abroad...

...The roots of this movement reach back to the dark days of the Stalinist period when crimes committed by the state were the norm...

...But now forced hospitalization has come to a temporary halt...

...Some of those with an oppositionist cast of mind, chiefly the young, have attempted to protect themselves by crossing over into illegal forms of activity...

...Every "operation" against such people as Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Grigorenko, Neizvestny, Zinoviev, Voinovich, Vladimov, Rostropovich, Chukovskaya, Litvinov, and many others demanded a great deal of the authorities' time and energy and required decisions on the highest level...

...98 The changes in the party's leadership had given rise to some hopes in dissident circles, hopes shared by a part of the creative intelligentsia who had been counting on the new leaders to display a certain liberalism...

...Fewer and fewer Russian books published by emigrê authors are making their way into the Soviet Union...

...as it went through several ups and downs over a period of 18 years—a movement extremely heterogeneous in its aims, content, form, and methods...

...A policy that provides for stepped-up repression of opposition groups in the Soviet Union is in open contradiction to its proclaimed foreign policy, which takes a stand against the arms race and the deployment of new American missiles in Western Europe...

...The audiences at the military academies then paid great attention when the old Bolshevik A. V. Snegov recounted the crimes of Stalinism...

...Samizdat," which was born of this opposition movement, was far from being a clandestine or underground phenomenon—it was one of the forms of unofficial and uncensored publication possible at the time...

...If he wishes to display good will to the West . . . he should free Andrei Sakharov from exile in Gorky and give amnesty to all the leading dissidents still in prison, people like Orlov and Shcharansky...

...All the wellknown groups that promote organized opposition, including the Helsinki Group and Amnesty, have in essence ceased to function...

...Andrei Sinyaysky (Abram Tertz) and Yuli Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) began their activities in the utmost secrecy...

...Shortly after the accession of Yuri Andropov to the Soviet leadership, the secret police gave Medvedev a "stern warning" against expressing his political views in print...

...Surely the KGB, which Andropov had headed from 1967 to 1982, could not boast of enjoying any special affection among Soviet citizens...

...The dissident movement of the '60s and '70s was not, of course, either a mass or a nationwide movement...

...When evaluating the chances and character of various members of the Politburo and so, for example, comparing Chernenko, Brezhnev's undoubted favorite, with Andropov, a significant portion of the intelligentsia clearly favored the latter...

...The most convenient means for Andropov to display any liberalism was an amnesty, long expected and in fact proclaimed at the Soviet Union's 60th anniversary...

...Morally and mentally defective people can be found in any large human group...

...There has now been an official announcement that Jews will no longer be given permission to emigrate...

...And I am able to say that among its members there have been some failures and people ready to accept remuneration for their dissidence, as well as people who chiefly sought renown dreaming of a write-up in the New York Times or a BBC program...

...However, Stalin's punitive machine did at times direct its blows against opposition groups it uncovered and that did in fact exist...

...It is no secret that the question of who would be Brezhnev's successor was discussed in the last few years not only by foreign observers but also by all Soviet citizens interested in politics...

...EDS...

...Thereafter that number decreased rapidly, and less than 1,000 Jews emigrated in 1982...

...The Soviet nation's moral and political unity, so vaunted by the Soviet press, is in fact one of the myths of Soviet propaganda...

...The changes in the Soviet leadership have been of great interest not only because they represent shifts of emphasis in the U.S.S.R.'s foreign and domestic policies...

...have also shown a significant decline...

...he had been managing the "Social Fund to Aid the Families of Political Prisoners" founded by Solzhenitsyn in the '70s...

...In this arena the Soviet Union is not only banking on negotiations with America and the European states but on the support of many social groups in the opposition camp in the West...

...The existence of the so-called dissidents only became possible because the enemies of socialism brought the Western press as well as diplomatic, intelligence, and other special agencies into the picture...

...Don't we know of many cases in which KGB men have sold out their country for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and remained in the West, switching sides at once to the CIA...

...In his public statements, he stressed that constant battle against the dissidents was one of his more important duties as chairman of the KGB...

...For a 44year-old man who is not in the best of health, this essentially means life in prison...

...The dissident movement was not primarily the result of actions taken by foreign ideological or intelligence services...

...But the protests that stemmed from the arrest and trial of Sinyaysky and Daniel, and from subsequent political trials, were neither illegal nor clandestine...

...With the grayness, sluggishness, and emptiness of the last years of the "Brezhnev era" in mind, someone remarked: "Let it even be worse—as long as it's going to be different...

...That very term "dissident" is a clever propaganda invention, designed to mislead public opinion...

...The dissident movement that began in the mid-1960s may well have been one of the most important events in the country's internal life even though the official press and histories will long pass over it in silence or distort its basic causes and character...

...Certain Western politicians hurl what they take to be a "clever" question at us: they ask how we can explain that after 60 years of Soviet power in the U.S.S.R...

...During the Khrushchev years too, small opposition groups with a variety of programs sprang up...

...It is natural for him...

...Arrests on a variety of charges have also been resumed...

...This movement is stimulated by the general dissatisfaction, felt by great numbers of people, with the conditions in our country, the deficiencies in supplying and organizing production, the despotism and corruption of the local officials...