A Chronicle of Current Events (Russian: Хро́ника теку́щих собы́тий, romanized: Khronika tekushchikh sobytiy)[1] was one of the longest running samizdat periodicals of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.

[3] In 1973 the novelist and literary critic Lydia Chukovskaya wrote:[4] ... the persecution of samizdat, of A Chronicle of Current Events, of Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and hundreds of others cannot be called ideological struggle.

It is an attempt once again to silence human voices through the use of prisons and camps.Despite constant harassment by the Soviet authorities more than sixty issues of the Chronicle were compiled and published (circulated) between April 1968 and August 1983.

No other samizdat publication covered the entire country for so long, recording every aspect of human rights violation committed by the post-Stalin Soviet authorities at national and local level.

[7] Its editors and contributors were particularly affected by the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to which the third issue of the periodical[c 2] and many subsequent reports and "Samizdat update" entries were devoted.

By the mid-1960s critically minded adults and youngsters in Moscow (later they would be known as dissidents) were confronted by a growing range of information about ongoing political repressions in the Soviet Union.

[11]: 147 For the circle of future editors, this picture was amplified by Anatoly Marchenko's My Testimony, a seminal text which began circulating in samizdat in December 1967.

[13][14]: 58  Through other contacts and friends, sometimes during prison or camp visits, older and younger generations in Moscow began to learn of the repressive measures being used in Ukraine and the Russian provinces.

The White Book), the new periodical would process the steady flow of information by circulating regular reports and updates about searches, arrests, trials, conditions in prisons and camps and extrajudicial measures against protest and dissent—at least for the duration of 1968.

[15]: 44 [16]: 285  Unlike these single-issue periodicals, which mainly circulated among their respective groups, the editors and contributors to the new publication[17] aimed to cover a broader spectrum of political repression and appeal to a wider audience.

[13] A turning point for the young dissident movement came in 1967 when Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Dobrovolsky and Vera Lashkova were arrested in Moscow for producing literary samizdat magazines.

At the same moment Alexander Ginzburg was detained for collaborating with Galanskov on the White Book, a volume of documents about the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.

The Galanskov-Ginzburg trial, delayed until January 1968, and the public protests before and after the accused were convicted, formed the main subject of the first issue of the Chronicle, circulated in Moscow in June 1968.

Known for its dry, concise style, it documented the extrajudicial harassment and persecution, the arrests and trials of those who opposed the regime for its denial of their rights; it carried further reports about their subsequent treatment in prisons, labor camps, and mental asylums.

The authorities thought otherwise, as is reflected in the list of people harassed, detained and imprisoned for their part in the periodical's production and circulation (see Section The Editors).

[21]: 84 As the first compiler of the Chronicle and its typist, Gorbanevskaya produced the "zero-generation" copy based on information from her friends in Moscow, using a typewriter purchased on the semi-legal grey market.

Kovalev acted as chief editor, while Velikanova was responsible for collating material and organizing apartments for meetings, with Khodorovich serving as a major conduit for information.

[c 13] Under pressure from KGB General Yaroslav Karpov, Yakir and Krasin agreed to appear on Soviet television, recant their past activities, and urge their fellow activists to stop the publication of the Chronicle.

As a reaction to the new situation, the Chronicle's editors prefaced Issue 28 (31 December 1972) with a declaration stating that they had decided to resume publication because they found the KGB ultimatum to be "incompatible" with "justice, morality and human dignity".

After some discussion those closely involved in the production of the journal decided to change the periodical's established policy of anonymity, to the extent of naming themselves as distributors: they did not then or subsequently admit to being authors and editors of the Chronicle.

It was signed by all three of them and consisted of a few short sentences: Since we do not consider, despite the repeated assertions of the KGB and the USSR court instances, that A Chronicle of Current Events is an illegal or libelous publication, we regard it as our duty to facilitate as wide a circulation for it as possible.

The second part consisted of a number of regular headings: "Arrests, Searches, Interrogations", "Extra-Judicial Persecution", "In Prisons and camps", "Samizdat update", "News in brief", "Corrections and additions".

I consider the Chronicle's thirteen years of publication a genuine miracle, and I consider it as well an expression of the spirit and moral strength of the human rights movement in the USSR.

(Andrei Sakharov, 1981)[34]A contemporary samizdat publication similarly concerned with protest and dissent, Bulletin V (Бюллетень В) began to appear in the later 1970s,[35] at first with a restricted list of recipients.

It was issued for four years (1980–1983) and placed greater emphasis on speed of publication, attempting to appear once a fortnight, if not once every week, acting primarily as a source of information for others.

On return in 1987 from exile in the Soviet Far East Alexander Podrabinek started the weekly Express-Chronicle newspaper; at the same time Sergei Grigoryants founded the Glasnost' periodical and became its chief editor.

The USSR News Brief: Human Rights ("Вести из СССР – права человека")[38] issued fortnightly in Munich (in Russian), developed out of the samizdat tradition represented by the Chronicle but adopted a different model.

1–11, covering 1968 and 1969, formed The Annotated Text of the Unofficial Moscow Journal, "A Chronicle of Current Events", in a book titled Uncensored Russia.

This 1972 volume was produced by British academic Peter Reddaway who edited and translated the texts, apportioning the items to thematic sections in his book (e.g. Chapter 12, "The Crimean Tatars") rather than preserving the sequence and structure of the original issues.

[44] One who restored the prompt translation and publication of the Chronicle in English after a halt at the height of détente in 1977 was Marjorie Farquharson, Amnesty's researcher on the USSR from 1978 to 1991.