On the Matter of Aleksandr Ginzburg
LITVINOV, PAVEL & ESENIN-VOLPIN, ALEKSANDR & SOLZHENITSYN, ALEKSANDR & LEVITIN-KRASNOV, ANATOLY & BUKOVSKY, VLADIMIR
On the Matter of Aleksandr Ginzburg After the arrest in Moscow on February 3 of 41-year-old poet Aleksandr Ginzburg, a leading critic of Soviet repression, Radio Liberty broadcast to the USSR...
...ALEXSANDR SOLZHENITSYN, exiled Nobel laureate, now lives in Vermont...
...He now lives and teaches in New York: News has come which we are reluctant to believe...
...Clearly, a violation of the Helsinki agreement and the human rights Covenant cannot be considered an internal affair of the USSR, Czechoslovakia or any other country bound by these documents...
...This connection was confirmed by the signature of Leonid Brezhnev on the Final Act of the Helsinki agreement, where the Covenant is mentioned...
...This group, headed by the well-known scientist, Yuri Orlov, [who was himself arrested February 10—Ed], was organized in May of last year...
...Only the most energetic protest by the international public can prevent a new wave of repressions against the participants in the human rights movement in the USSR VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY, now 34 years old, began defying the Soviet authorities as a teenager by publishing unauthorized poetry, organizing unofficial art exhibitions, possessing banned books such as Milovan Djilas' The New Class, participating in human rights demonstrations, and informing the West about political torture in the USSR...
...Below are excerpts from their Russian texts...
...Among these, the most important involve the free flow of information, justice and the right to emigrate...
...It is struggling to have the Soviet Union observe the conditions of the agreement which concern human rights...
...it reflects the decision of the Soviet authorities to crush by hunger and poverty hundreds of families of persecuted and imprisoned people, and to force thousands of others into fear and silence...
...Perhaps the Soviet authorities wanted to demonstrate by this arrest that they are unconcerned about criticism from Western public opinion...
...And we expect that to happen this time, too...
...In 1960, he was given two years for publishing anthologies of poetry...
...Charity has a long tradition in the West, especially charity toward families of political prisoners...
...He now teaches mathematics at Boston University: That a member of the group monitoring the Helsinki accord in the USSR is undergoing terrible political persecution is very alarming not only for Alex Ginzburg and broad circles of dissidents in the Soviet Union, but also for the fate of international relations in our dangerous times...
...ALEKSANDR ESENIN-VOLPIN, son of Sergei Esenin, a prominent poet in the early post-revolutionary years, was placed in "mental hospitals" several times in the late 1960s for his persistent protests against human rights violations...
...It is an essential link in the steady preparation of the Soviet rear: to make sure that it does not interfere with the external offensive that has been waged so successfully in recent years and that will be even more widely developed—against the power, the spirit and the very existence of the West...
...this is actually philanthropic work...
...it is clear to everyone that he was arrested precisely for that activity...
...The question that must be confronted is not what sort of agreements the West can conclude with the East, but whether Western countries can achieve implementation of these agreements with Communist states...
...Since his release in 1972, Ginzburg has dedicated all his time and energy to providing aid for Soviet political prisoners and their families...
...He received political asylum from Switzerland in 1975: The arrest of Aleksandr Ginzburg in Moscow gives evidence of the beginning of a new campaign of repression against dissidents by the regime...
...On the Matter of Aleksandr Ginzburg After the arrest in Moscow on February 3 of 41-year-old poet Aleksandr Ginzburg, a leading critic of Soviet repression, Radio Liberty broadcast to the USSR statements from well-known Soviet dissidents now living in Western Europe and the United States...
...Their hopes have not been justified...
...The aim of this campaign is to silence the democratic intelligentsia in the Soviet Union...
...in 1967, five years for defending the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel...
...The arrest of Aleksandr Ginzburg the main representative of the Russian Social Fund in the USSR, is not the usual act of violence against a single dissident...
...This reprisal concerns people in the West more than it might seem at first glance...
...ANATOLY LEVITIN-KRASNOV, a religious writer, spent 10 years in Soviet prisons for his Christian convictions...
...Bukovsky is currently in Paris: The arrest of Aleksandr Ginzburg symbolizes the Soviet regime's attitude toward human rights in the USSR...
...And regardless of the accusation invented by the regime against Ginzburg...
...PAVEL LITVINOV, grandson of Maxim Litvinov, Stalin's foreign minister during the 1930s, was exiled to Siberia for four years after taking part in a Red Square demonstration protesting the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces...
...My friend Alex Ginzburg, who has already served two prison terms, has been arrested...
...The Soviet Union is bound by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which took effect on March 23, 1976...
...They probably also hoped that by making this arrest they would succeed in frightening the Moscow group monitoring the Helsinki agreement, to which Ginzburg belongs, without encountering any serious reactions in the West...
...As for Aleksandr Ginzburg, he has overcome arrest and harassment before...
...After many years in prisons and psychiatric hospitals, he was released late in 1976 and sent abroad in exchange for the Chilean Communist leader, Luis Corvalan...
...By arresting Ginzburg on February 3, the regime once again proved that it never intended to observe the conditions of the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference...
...But his case once more raises the interesting question of what the Soviet authorities have in mind when they sign an international agreement on human rights and permit violations such as his latest arrest in their own country...
Vol. 60 • February 1977 • No. 5
