Soviet Dissent Goes Abroad

...Not until June 18, 1969, almost one month after Western newsmen in Moscow were shown the petition (May 22), did a copy of the original arrive at U.N...

...The exhibition, however, is really an international undertaking, with works lent from collections in Venezuela, Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as numerous public and private collections in the United States, including that of the artist's widow, Mrs...

...The idea of "international control" carried the kind of implication which could only have encouraged the dissenters in their new thrust...

...The former army officer had a practical suggestion to offer his audience which was eventually to carry the strategy of the dissenters a major step forward in the internationalization of their grievances...

...The gap was filled shortly afterwards by the well-read Ivan A. Yakhimovich, a graduate philologist who had been serving as chairman of a Latvian collective...

...The white one, in the bottom third to the left, bears an inverted...

...But it was not only in the circles of writers with their popular following among students that the Jewish issue was burgeoning...

...Selection of personnel, he said, should be based upon the scientist's "ability" and "usefulness" and not his "passport...

...It was the first time an ethnic group in the Soviet Union had been advised to appeal to an international organ...

...Now the suppression of the novels of the brilliant Alexander Sol-zhenitsyn, to provide but one example, would be accompanied by arrests, trials, and incarceration of others who have dared to deviate from the prescribed ideological path...

...As early as 1965, a prolific religious writer, Anatoli Levitin, in private correspondence with high Soviet religious officials, had urged that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be given "wide publication...

...Delivered, appropriately enough on the anniversary of Babi Yar in 1966, he put the following demand to the authorities: "Let the Jews know Jewish history, the Jewish culture, and the Yiddish language and be proud of them...

...He further disclosed that the legally binding and all-embracing International Covenants on Human Rights (Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), which had been adopted by the U.N...

...Exposure of anti-Semitism is but one facet of the dissenters' objective...

...As early as October, 1959, the novelist and essayist, Viktor Nekrasov, published a letter in Literaturnaia Gazeta which touched upon official efforts to erase the fact of Jewish martyrdom at Babi Yar...

...What Sakharov, the physicist, wrote in his essay was more explicit: Was it not disgraceful to have a speech at the Moscow Party conference by the president of the Academy of Sciences [Mstislav V. Keldysh] who is evidently either too intimidated or too dogmatic in his views...

...The petition of the fifty-two asserted: We appeal to the United Nations because our protest and complaints, addressed for a number of years to the highest state and judicial authorities in the Soviet Union, have elicited no response of any kind...

...Yevgenii Yevtushenko's poem, Babi Yar, published two years later in the same journal, again reminded a wide audience that only a "steep precipice" remains as an "epitaph" to those massacred at Babi Yar...

...in March, 1966, warning that the Sinyavsky-Daniel court decision "creates an extremely dangerous precedent," was met by cold indifference, if not outright hostility, by the state bureaucrats...

...Mail of the dissenters was carefully watched and efforts by them to transmit the petition through U.N...

...The petition of a large number of intellectuals to the Presidium of the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party WILLIAM KOREY is director of the B'nai B'rith International Council...

...Two years later, five Russian Baptist women privately complained to the United Nations that religious rights in the Soviet Union had been violated...

...The Crimean Tatars had been deprived of their autonomous republic by Stalin and then dispersed with the loss of forty-six per cent of their population...

...In a letter addressed to chief Party ideologist Mikhail Suslov (with the request that its contents be made known to all members of the Party Central Committee), Yakhimovich called attention to Articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration which cover, respectively, "freedom of thought, conscience and religion" and "freedom of opinion and expression...

...No longer was it only or even primarily the Soviet Constitution to which they addressed themselves...

...Fully a third of the signers of the petition to the United Nations are scientists...

...Pyotr Grigorenko, the remarkable former Soviet army officer, appears to have been the first to see the implications of using publicly an international standard...

...However, an individual member-state cannot be prevented from speaking before the Commission on a specific instance of violations of human rights...

...The right of Jews to preserve their own national culture is a theme that has by no means been neglected...

...Author's emphasis) The dissenters, in their appeals to public opinion both within and outside the Soviet Union, have not hesitated to expose overt expressions of the more vulgar types of anti-Semitism...

...Their appeal expresses the view that "the defense of human rights is the sacred duty of this [U.N.] organization...

...Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, a professor at Pratt Institute in New York and writer in the field of architecture...

...One piece of hanging sculpture in the show is made of a piece of plexiglass through which bent chrome-plated steel rods have been threaded to form a series of extended irregular elipses...

...A leading biologist and member of the Academy of Sciences, Kon-stantin Skriabin, expressed concern at a meeting of the Party Central Committee in March, 1962 (the proceedings of which were published in Pravdd), that the internal passport of Soviet citizens with its nationality designation was being used in a discriminatory manner in the appointment of scientific cadres...

...This major document which, as the author acknowledged, was "formed in the milieu of the scientific and scientific-technological intelligentsia," offered "general principles" upon which the international policies of the major countries must be based...

...The popular poet went further...

...The Commission on Human Rights, the principal U.N...

...The dissenters would soon turn to that device themselves...

...He declared: "If you cannot obtain a solution of the problem within the country, you have a right to appeal to the United Nations and the international tribunal...

...Appeals fell on deaf ears...

...Genocide Convention...

...Commission on Human Rights gives particular attention to the KochDuring his lifetime, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was acclaimed for his teaching and his writing, and his designs for industry were appreciated by those for whom they were produced...

...He was deprived of this position in 1961 because he had protested to Khrushchev against anti-Jewish discrimination in the Soviet Army...

...But such vehemence is a measure of the sensitivity of the Soviet authorities to questions raised in the world forum about their repressive acts...

...A painting done in 1926, titled "Tl," is done with oil on metal...

...Feinberg, for example, was so badly mauled that blood gushed from his face and some of his teeth were broken...

...On March 17, 1968, Grigorenko addressed the representatives in Moscow of the Crimean Tatars who had gathered together to honor the popular writer, A. Kosterin, on the occasion of his seventy-second birthday...

...It has a solid black ground on which three circles have been placed, one in roughly each third of the picture, but unaligned...

...He linked the obvious attempt to suppress a key element in Jewish ethnic consciousness—the martyrdom of the holocaust—with traditional Russian anti-Semitism...

...Natalia Gorbanevskaia, unlike the others, escaped arrest only because of her advanced pregnancy...

...The Soviet Constitution, for them, had been emptied of democratic meaning, of "socialist legality...

...organ dealing with human rights and to which allegations about violations are eventually brought, might become a forum for the discussion of their complaint if a state chooses to raise the issue...

...After two years of effort, the dissenters began to despair of either moving the authorities or rallying broad sectors of public opinion...

...Many of those who knew him can now fully appreciate his artistic productivity, and the many more who did not know him—and who were only marginally acquainted with his work, if at all—may "discover" him...

...An account describing in some detail the anti-Jewish atmosphere surrounding the courtroom proceedings in Kiev against the young Jewish engineer, Boris Kochubiyevsky (who was sentenced to three years incarceration for alleged "slander" against the Soviet state) has recently been circulated by the dissenters...

...The Galanskov-Ginsburg trial did indeed display many of the earmarks of the Stalinist era, both being charged with connections with a foreign anti-Soviet emigre organization...

...Still, the dissenters' strategy could prove useful...

...The thaw of mild liberalism that had characterized the Khrushchev period had come to an end...

...He and his colleagues were apparently planning to put the Covenants to some pertinent use...

...prominent scientists, too, were beginning to raise their voices...

...Yev-tushenko was later to explain that he deliberately selected the Babi Yar theme because "the problem of anti-Semitism" continues to exert "a negative consequence" in Soviet public life...

...Since its origin, the United Nations has received probably as many as one-quarter million complaints, all of which have been pigeonholed...

...Accompanying the change of strategy was a significant modification in the character of the grievances which the dissenters publicly advanced...

...Yakhimovich was to acknowledge, on the eve of his arrest, March 25, 1969 (for allegedly "slandering" the Soviet state) that indeed, he was in "debt" to the "Reflections" of Sakharov...

...Active NGO's oriented to human rights were the "rubbish" whose ouster from the United Nations the Soviets sought...

...The fact is that the United Nations has no machinery for dealing with petitions protesting human rights violations...

...Now that memories of the personality have faded, and his many books, while still valid artistic expressions, have been crowded on the library shelves by volumes on the new technology, perhaps his "art work" can find its rightful and deserved place...

...In a letter to members of the Party Politburo and the Central Committee written shortly after the Galanskov-Ginsburg trial held in January, 1968, Grigorenko pointed out that the world was celebrating International Human Rights Year...

...Grigorenko, in his speech, offered the Tatars advice that had the effect of deepening and extending the international perspective of the dissenters...

...The graceful bend of his clear plexiglass sculptures has the line of a portion of an orbit, and the perspective of lines and geometric forms, with no recognizable earth objects, instantly calls to mind outer space...

...in New York, where, in 1947, the last retrospective of Moholy's work was shown at the Guggenheim's predecessor, the Museum of Non-Objective Paintings...

...Now the basic standard had become an international instrument, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948...

...Details of the intensifying repressions have been publicly aired by the well-known Soviet writer, Anatoly Kuznetsov, since he defected to the West...

...He told them that the deprivation and oppression to which they had been subjected by Moscow constituted "genocide, pure and simple," and, therefore, the U.S.S.R...

...Thus, the petitions endorsed the principle of ethnic equality and ethnic culture, and sharply criticized state authorities for arresting intellectuals in the Ukraine and the Baltic areas who had vigorously espoused indigenous cultural rights...

...The appeal of the fifty-two to the U.N...

...Part of the price he paid for being so multi-faceted and so attractive as a personality was that his work as an artist was overshadowed by his other accomplishments...

...He complained about plans to transform the site of the "colossal tragedy" of Babi Yar into a soccer stadium, and he demanded that a "tribute of respect" for the martyred dead be built there instead...

...The desperate cry of a leading dissenter, Vladimir Bukovsky, at his trial in September, 1967, typified the sense of hopelessness: "Isn't the Constitution the basic law of our country...

...Herein lies the rationale for the dissenters' internationalization strategy...

...The Universal Declaration of Human Rights constituted the core of the "general principles...

...The relevance of international standards for giving effect to human rights had also entered into the thinking of members of the scientific community...

...they saw to it that Western newsmen were fully informed of their protests, and, at times, they sought support from foreign Communist Parties...

...When challenged in December, 1962, by Party boss Nikita Khrushchev, who proclaimed that anti-Semitism did not exist in the U.S.S.R., Yevtushenko retorted at the meeting of Soviet intelligentsia which the Party had organized that the problem "cannot be denied and it cannot be suppressed...

...Deviation or opposition (for example, to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) was punished by intimidation, conviction, or incarceration in a mental institution...

...Several delegates chose the opportunity to express sharp criticism of the book...

...human rights instruments and, more importantly, to educate the Soviet public as to their existence and value was clearly apparent by the end of 1968...

...How widespread the passive support for the views of the dissenters is, cannot be determined...

...public information offices in Moscow were rebuffed (the U.N...

...Moreover, according to The New York Times Moscow correspondent, signers were under strong official pressures to remove their names...

...Babi Yar is a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where the Nazis had massacred tens of thousands of Jews...

...But the vigor of the governmental response to their activities suggests that the dissenters are by no means an isolated group without influence...

...Conventions are binding treaties which have the force of international law upon those which ratify them, and, Grigorenko told his listeners, the Soviet Union had ratified the Genocide Convention...

...He emphasized that the Soviet Union must fulfill the Universal Declaration "in practice" and not ignore it...

...For almost a decade, Soviet intellectuals had been expressing in a variety of forms their dissatisfaction with the failure of the post-Stalin regimes to come to grips with this issue...

...If it did, world public opinion would be sensitized, which is certainly an objective of the internationalization strategy...

...headquarters in New York, forwarded by the London-based Amnesty International, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) holding consultative status with the United Nations...

...The number of active dissenters, to judge from the signers of various petitions, runs to several hundreds...

...The most striking expression of this theme is to be found in the "Chornovil Papers" (a collection of papers by Ukrainian dissenters assembled by a Ukrainian writer, V. Chornovil) which carries a remarkable speech prepared by the young Ukrainian literary critic, Ivan Dzyuba...

...Significantly, a sizeable percentage of them come from the ranks of that most pampered segment of Soviet society—the scientific intelligentsia...

...The Grigorenko letter was vague in citing specific articles of the Universal Declaration...

...The determination to use U.N...

...Again the invective "Zhid" was heard being flung by state-organized groups against Boris' brother, while other insinuations, no less racist, were directed against witnesses...

...It was no mere international standard like the Universal Declaration that the U.S.S.R...

...His paintings and sculpture have been little known since his untimely death in 1946, outside of a few esoteric circles and among those still alive who remember him...

...Freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly—the classic rights of the individual—now constituted the aspiration of the dissenters...

...Is it not disgraceful to allow another backsliding into anti-Semitism in our appointment policy (incidentally, in the highest bureaucratic elite of our government, the spirit of anti-Semitism was never fully dispelled after the 1930s...

...For the first time since 1947 a major exhibition of his Work was mounted in 1969, and the acclaim it has been accorded in showings across the country would seem to insure a place of permanence for Moholy-Nagy on the rolls of artists of distinction throughout the history of fine art...

...The Guggenheim holds the largest number of the artist's works in the public domain and contributed thirty-five works to this show of 120 pieces, which includes painting, collage, photographs, sculpture, and theatrical design...

...The public airing in the Commission had the effect of triggering strong reactions in Western Communist parties which, in turn, obliged the Soviet Party's Ideological Commission to chastise sharply the Kichko book...

...It is difficult to realize that Moholy is not still alive, so timely is his work for the space age...

...A nongovernmental organization, the American Jewish Committee, distributed to Commission members copies of the virulently anti-Semitic work, Judaism Without Embellishment, by the Soviet Ukrainian writer, Trofim K. Kichko...

...had violated...

...in order to bring Soviet legislation and the structure of Soviet daily life into correspondence with it...

...The result was the appearance of a movement of vigorous dissent expressing itself mainly in the form of petitions presented to the state...

...Such opinion, as sparked by discussion in the Commission, could conceivably affect Soviet internal policy...

...In June, 1968, there appeared in Moscow for private circulation (later published in The New York Times) the essay "Reflections on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" drafted by Andrei D. Sakharov, a leading Soviet physicist who had contributed significantly to the development of the hydrogen bomb...

...The petition of the fifty-two eloquently speaks of the despair: The hope that our voices might be heard, that the authorities would put an end to the lawless acts to which we have repeatedly called their attention—this hope has proved to be in vain...

...Protests and demonstrations led, in an escalating spiral, as reported in the Western press, and in documents issued by the dissenters, to further arrests and trials...

...This is not to say that the dissenters neglected international opinion...

...Soviet Dissent Goes Abroad by WILLIAM KOREY The recent appeal of fifty-two Soviet citizens to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, asking it "to come to the defense of human rights that are being trampled upon in our country," dramatized a major shift in strategy of dissenters in the U.S.S.R...

...One circle is blue and red, another gray and red, and the third white...

...The Commission looks over summaries of the complaints in closed session but is not permitted, as a body, to discuss them, let alone act upon them...

...General discussion might, though not necessarily, follow...

...stood in violation of the U.N...

...The appeal to international standards implied that the target to which the dissenters would inevitably turn was the United Nations...

...Three years later he was stripped of his rank for speaking critically of Soviet authorities...

...The campaign was signalled in April, 1969 by an editorial in Izvestia, the headline of which summed up the objective of the Soviet effort: Rubbish Which Should Be Chucked Out...

...Since the trial and conviction in February, 1966, of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two prominent dissident Soviet writers who had published their works abroad under pseudonyms, Soviet intellectuals in any way critical of the Kremlin regime have been subjected to an increasing degree of state pressure and harassment...

...The 1964 session of the Commission on Human Rights offers a precedent...

...With ethnic rights emerging as a central concern of the dissenters, it was scarcely surprising that the Soviet Jewish question would become a critical feature of their agitation...

...Sakharov proposed that the goal of international policy is "to insure the universal fulfillment of the Declaration of Human Rights" and, to achieve this aim, there must be "international control" over the observance by all governments of the Declaration...

...Initially, opponents of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial focused their protest upon what they regarded as simply the violation of the artistic rights of the two authors...

...But the dissenters' principal focus was internal, with the Soviet Constitution, particularly the clauses dealing with freedom of speech and the independence of the judiciary, depicted as the standard to which state officials must conform, and from which they were charged with departing...

...During 1968, the grievances were broadened to encompass the ethnic-linguistic-cultural rights of the numerous Soviet nationalities (Ukrainian intellectuals had been addressing themselves to such rights as early as 1966...

...Though obliquely put, the reference to anti-Jewish discrimination in the uses of the internal passport was not lost upon Skriabin's colleagues...

...During 1967, with the authorities embarking upon a series of arrests and trials of writers and those demonstrating on their behalf, the dissenters presented their demands in terms of legal rights...

...Grigorenko, in a letter to the Soviet procurator-general written in either November or December, 1968, complained that the text of the Universal Declaration had been published in the Soviet Union in only "a small number of copies and only for the use of jurists...

...It was no doubt the fear that one or another international non-governmental organization in consultative status with the United Nations might provide documentation to stimulate discussion in the Commission of the issue raised by the Soviet dissenters that led the Soviet representative at the United Nations to launch this past year a massive campaign of intimidation of the NGO community...

...Between 1966 and 1968, the dissenters addressed their concern to high Party officials and focussed upon rallying public support among Soviet citizens within the country...

...Soviet intellectuals like Kosterin have been attempting to have the authorities restore their rights...

...The "Year" was designated as such by the General Assembly to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration...

...Grigorenko was a major general during World War II and, after the war, taught at the prestigious Frunze Military Academy...

...Like Grigorenko, he pointed to the commemoration of International Human Rights Year and commented that the Galanskov-Ginsburg trial had already abridged the "Year's" observance in the Soviet Union, thus "handing the enemies of Communism trump cards to be used against us...

...The show was put together through the cooperative efforts of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum CHARLES-GENE McDANIEL is a Chicago writer and editor...

...In 1968, the dissidents shifted the focus of the appeal...

...International law is on your side...

...Reaching the United Nations was no simple matter...

...Grigorenko noted that the "Year" had begun in the USSR with "an unprecedented violation of human rights" which "nailed [it] to a pillory of shame in the eyes of all the world...

...General Assembly in December 1966, had not even been published in the U.S.S.R...

...To many a Russian intellectual, the post-1966 developments were seen as the re-emergence of Stalinism...

...Natalia Gorbanevskaia, a young poetess who managed on August 28, 1968 to deliver to newspapers abroad a report of the demonstration in Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, highlighted the bigotry of the KGB, the security police: "As they ran up to us, they shouted, 'These are all Zhidy [kikes]' and 'Beat the anti-Soviets!'" She disclosed that two Jews—Viktor Feinberg and Pavel Lit-vinov—were subjected to particularly brutal beatings...

...office in the Soviet Union, unlike those in every other country, is manned exclusively by Soviet nationals...

...It was hardly accidental that when the police raided his apartment in November, 1968, they confiscated his personal typewritten texts of both the Universal Declaration and the Covenants...

...There is a certain naivete in this move of the dissenters...

...Especially noteworthy was the ardent defense of the rights of the Crimean Tatars...