Dispatches From Kiev
Seeley, John R.
KIEV, 24 November 1964. (AUP) Peace descended again this morning on the campus of the University of Kiev following a night of all-out battle between students and the constituted authorities....
...Afterwards, the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Higher Education—the supreme executive authority over the province's system of higher education—observed drily "Students will see what it is to throw themselves on the mercy of the state authority and state courts...
...Some, who have been carefully observed for a long time, are known as anti-Soviet in outlook...
...Appearing to be occupied with these self-styled "duties," they have dearly evaded the necessity to pay all the attention they have to the instruction and supervision of the Soviet youth entrusted to them by the same State...
...The action of a few students has created a false air of struggle in which political epithets and propaganda are employed...
...Those students who did not voluntarily walk to the specially organized arrest-center (it was announced this morning) have been additionally charged with "resisting arrest," a most serious charge in the Soviet Union...
...Before the arrests, the Rector issued a pro forma legal warning which, according to Soviet authorities, gives a proper, legal base for the subsequent charges of trespassing...
...Acting with petty bourgeois motives on the basis of marginal incrementalism, personalism, careerism, bureaucratism, honorism and the cult of personality, they have, it appears, engaged in state-aided and state-sponsored "researches...
...The events of the night reached a climax when masses of students were dragged by armed reserves, specially summoned for the occasion, from a building which, it was announced, they had illegally invested...
...What is shocking is that such manifestations of bourgeois, muddled thought, and individualistic and personalistic action could have taken place in an advanced group to whom so much has been given...
...Vladimir Semichastny, Chief of the K.G.B., warned some months ago that increased criminal and subversive influences would make themselves felt on campus as the western powers sought to make trouble in the socialist countries, in order to divert attention from deepening difficulties at home...
...There can thus be in principle no conflict between Marxist-Leninist aims and any actions we might take under these powers...
...Exception will be made for a number of students so young that their cases are reserved for the Kiev Court for Children and Family Cases...
...The Universities are, as at present constituted, the people's Universities, governed under public law in the interests of all correctly oriented Soviet students...
...This appeal was regarded as an additional offense...
...This was officially regarded as offering an additional affront to the "Soviet way of doing things...
...academic life...
...Indeed, the University authority's role appears to have been limited...
...The neglected students become a new proletariat, alienated from the productive processes of learning...
...All authorities asserted this morning that self-evidently no such problem exists...
...The Board's action stemmed, however, from the unfolding of their own dialectical role in the historical process...
...With perhaps a strained effort he also assimilates the students' objectively criminal activity to the decadent practices of Western University students, such as "rags" (collective joking) and "panty-raids" (endeavors by male students to secure the underwear of females...
...The following from Pravda, Ukraine continues from 24 November...
...The enormous extension of plant and capacity undertaken under the current seven-year plan, and the irresistible migration of students to our Universities prove their essential soundness...
...Enough premeditated brutality had already occurred, however, to let these Western observers imagine the rest...
...This is objective sabotage...
...Said the Chairman: "The new regulations are actually the old rules, derived directly from Leninist principles, appropriately reformulated for the historical moment, and taking into account the proper social-strategic considerations...
...The bulk of the students at Kiev are not involved or interested in these trump ed-up issues: they are only the dupes and camp-followers of a determined and noisy element of parasites, who pose as dissident and self-appointed "leaders...
...More to follow re court dispositions, penalties, when available: KIEV, December 15, 1964...
...Article 125 guarantees all Soviet citizens "freedom of street processions and demonstrations...
...The whole matter is receiving a great deal of study in various centers, since some have allowed it to call into question Marxist-Leninist doctrine and inviolable Party policy...
...The same Soviet of Instructors had previously weakened the position of the Academic Board by publishing a statement, hastily developed at the hight of the crisis, apparently taking the students' statement of issues at face value, and further (while regretting their methods) appearing to support their mistaken, idealistic and ahistorical reasoning...
...The University also has forces of its own, the "People's Guard" group who appear on ordinary University occasions complete with uniforms, small-arms and ammunition, but they were not required last night...
...They had also appealed, unsuccessfully, to Article 125 of the Soviet Constitution to justify their disobedience of what they said was "unsocialistic and Stalinisttype regulation...
...it infuriated the militiamen who tramped on students' legs, slapped "impudently offered faces," twisted arms, and, it is said, threw some students downstairs, and dragged others down with heads bumping from stone step to stone step...
...Proper order must be restored, with all parties restricted to their proper spheres...
...The Board members, continuing their program of destalinizatiori, however, went as far as could be expected under proper socialist norms, to modify, or rather explicate, the necessary regulations...
...KIEV, December 17, 1964...
...When, in place of a disciplined work-force, we have individuals, and when in place of celebrations of solidarity we have mut terings of "Trotskyite," "Menschevik," "administration time-server," "students' dupe," "Stakhanovite" (in a derogatory sense) and the like, it is time to talk of purges and new brooms...
...Foreign tourists who happened to be visiting the University at the time of the disturbance were ejected from the building, whose windows were then papered over so that the process of "removing" the students was carefully screened from non-offittial view...
...Whatever mitigatory impact such "explanations" might be thought to have, they neither bear on guilt nor remedy...
...Correct identification of the enemy will set things right, and further steps, under Party vigilance, may be left to the naturally associated students and administration...
...The saboteurs, at Kiev and other Universities, are the professors...
...In their case, since such debate serves to sharpen the internal contradictions of their system, they are welcome to it...
...Tass...
...This remark evidently referred to one of the issues, as the students interpreted it...
...The story is still incomplete...
...They had claimed that students in the Soviet Union should be subject with regard to political action only to Soviet law and Soviet courts, and not also to University disciplinary action based on non-objective law and informal judicial processes...
...Unrest continues at the University of Kriev even following the arrest and arraignment last month of nearly eight hundred students and sympathizers on very serious anti-state charges...
...In a developed socialist society it has no application...
...Said another, with properly orthodox concern for social solidarity: The worst consequence has been the subjective division of the socialist University into false strata or partitions of so-called "students," "faculty" and "administration," and within these into factions, cliques, splinter-groups and foci of deviation...
...The students, evidently wrongly impressed with the vision and methods of Ghandi, counterposed only limp bodies to the action of the state authorities...
...Mikhail Stolpin, who is "ex officio" one of the members of the academic board at the University of Kiev—evidently in his capacity as regional governor rather than board member, since he defined the issue as one of "demonstrating that Soviet law will be upheld in this province and illegal and counterrevolutionary activities dealt with in exemplary fashion...
...For want of proper Marxian instruction, the students' resentment then directed itself upon the governing authorities of their own (People's) University...
...The comrades of the Academic Board have properly rejected this demand as counter-legal, since "the authority of the people resides solely in the Academic Board itself...
...He also points to "the vice of the students' virtues": a great many had in the previous summer been vitally engaged in the Conquest of the Virgin Lands program, and had now returned to a situation where, lacking the resistant wilderness "there was nothing for them to throw themselves against...
...Forces employed were solely those of the province...
...We do not wish to see in Soviet society the kind of so-called University not uncommon in the capitalist-imperialist states where "debate" is thought to constitute a positive good and no official limits are recognized with respect either to manner or matter...
...Some "sociologists" (recently returned from Poland) have come to conclusions which they are not unwilling to give to the people...
...Said today's edition of Pravda of the Ukraine: We must not be taken in by the merely verbal claims of those seeking to destroy our Soviet institutions by "appeals" intended solely to fur ther disturbances Such counter-revolutionary activity is intolerable...
...Many have attended so-called "study-groups...
...These, rather than confess their errors, sought to hide their subversion behind the smokescreen of "socialist criticism" of the administration...
...Says one, with penetrating dialectical reasoning: The students in their subjectivity, and guided by a species of bourgeois direct-perspectivism, mistook their real enemy...
...The operation was ordered by and carried out under the control of the chairman of the Kiev regional Soviet, Mr...
...While retaining "reserve powers," given them under Soviet law and the law of the province, they declared "These will be applied only conformably to the Soviet constitution and in the socialistic spirit...
...Many of these "leaders" have shown pro-Western sympathies, and some have associated with Westerners...
...Another observer, despite a certain psychologism and situationalism derived from contacts with certain Western circles and ideologies, makes some interesting observations...
...The "faculty"—the instructors meeting collectively supposedly only for consultative purposes on appropriate matters—has recommended that student discipline be administered by a sub-committee of its Central Committee, instead of by the Rector and duly delegated officers...
...He points to the unusual atmospheric temperature (16° C.) at the time of the ill-considered outbreak...
...Journalistic jackals in Wall Street are expected to distort the troubles at Kiev last night into a question of "freedom" in U.S.S.R...
...The people's courts will know how to make the sanctions correspondingly severe...
Vol. 12 • April 1965 • No. 2
