Human rights movement in the Soviet Union
They received warnings from the police and the KGB; some lost their jobs, others were imprisoned or incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals; dissidents were sent into exile within the country or pressured to emigrate.
[2]: 145 The documentation of political repressions as well as citizens' reactions to them through samizdat (unsanctioned self-publishing) methods played a key role in the formation of the human rights movement.
[c 1] The prototype for this type of writing was journalist Frida Vigdorova's record of the trial of poet Joseph Brodsky (convicted for "social parasitism" in early 1964).
[c 4] It documented the extensive human rights violations committed by the Soviet government and the ever-expanding samizdat publications (political tracts, fiction, translations) circulating among the critical and opposition-minded.
[8] The first Soviet dissidents to appeal to the world public were Larisa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov, who wrote an open letter protesting the trial of samizdat authors Alexander Ginsburg and Yuri Galanskov in January 1968.
On 5 December 1965 (Soviet Constitution Day) a small rally in Moscow, which became known as the (glasnost meeting), the first public and overtly political demonstration took place in the post-Stalin USSR.
Provoking measures ranging from expulsions from universities to lengthy labor camp terms for some of the participants, the regular meetings served as an incubator for many protagonists of the human rights movement, including writer Alexander Ginzburg and student Vladimir Bukovsky.
Some later human rights activists came from a circle of reform communists around Pyotr Grigorenko, a Ukrainian army general who fell out of favor in the early 1960s.
Others who made an impact on the future movement were religious activists, such as Russian Orthodox priest Gleb Yakunin, who penned an influential open letter to the Patriarch of Moscow Alexius I in 1965, arguing that the Church must be liberated from the total control of the Soviet state.
A succession of writers and dissidents warning against a return to Stalinism were put on trial, and the beginnings of political liberalization reforms in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Prague Spring) were crushed with military force.
Critically minded individuals reacted by petitioning against abuses and documenting them in samizdat (underground press) publications, and a small group turned towards protesting openly and eventually began to appeal to the international community.
[11] Avoiding moral and political commentary in favor of close attention to legal and procedural issues, they demanded that the existing laws and rights formally guaranteed by the Soviet state be observed.
It provoked a number of demonstrations and petition campaigns, mostly in Moscow and Leningrad, which emphasizes issues of creative freedom and the historical role of the writer in Russian society.
Mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin with the help of writer Yuri Galanskov and student Vladimir Bukovsky organized an unsanctioned rally on Pushkin Square ("glasnost meeting").
Such focus on openly invoking rights was seen by many fellow dissidents to be utopian, and the demonstration as ineffective, carrying the risk of arrest, the loss of careers or imprisonment.
At his own closed trial in September 1967, Bukovsky used his final words to attack the regime's failure to respect the law or follow legal procedures in its conduct of the case.
[16]: 87–95 The judicial trial of [Yuri] Galanskov, [Aleksandr] Ginzburg, [Alexey] Dobrovolsky and [Vera] Lashkova, which is taking place at present in the Moscow City Court, is being carried out in violation of the most important principles of Soviet law.
[11]: 151 In January 1968, linguist Larisa Bogoraz (wife of imprisoned writer Yuli Daniel) and physics teacher Pavel Litvinov wrote an open letter protesting the trial of Ginzburg and Galanskov.
In April 1968, marking the declared International Human Rights Year by the United Nations, anonymous editors in Moscow released the first issue of the Chronicle of Current Events.
"Over the 15 years of its existence, the Chronicle expanded its coverage to include every form of repression against the constituent nations, confessional and ethnic groups of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
While Issue 1 was a short publication, focused mainly on the January 1968 trial of Alexander Ginzburg and Yury Galanskov and public reactions to those closed judicial hearings in Moscow, the last published (circulated) and translated issue, No 64, was over one hundred pages long and its contents listed trials, arrests and the protests and conditions in and outside labour camps, prisons and psychiatric hospitals all over the Soviet Union.
The Soviet press routinely attacked dissidents for tenuous links to émigré organisations like the Frankfurt-based NTS or National Alliance of Russian Solidarists.
[30] As many of the bulletin's contributors and editors were closely linked to the Initiative Group for Human Rights in the USSR, the crackdown also lead to sentences for several of its members.
Despite efforts to exclude the clauses, the Soviet government ultimately accepted a text containing unprecedented commitments to human rights as part of diplomatic relations between the signatories.
"[40]: 99–100 [42] In the years 1976-77 members of the dissident movement formed several "Helsinki Watch Groups" in different cities to monitor the Soviet Union's compliance with the Helsinki Final Act:[40]: 159–166 Following the example, other groups were formed: Similar initiatives began in Soviet satellite states, such as the informal civic initiative Charter 77 in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Workers' Defence Committee, later Committee for Social Defense, in Poland.
[48] In 1977-1979 and again in 1980-1982, the KGB reacted to the Helsinki Watch Groups by launching large-scale arrests and sentencing its members to in prison, labor camp, internal exile and psychiatric imprisonment.
The Ukrainian group also had representatives abroad, with Leonid Plyushch in France and Nadiya Svitlychna, Pyotr Grigorenko and Nina Strokata in the United States.
In the early 1980s, with the Soviet Union's international reputation damaged by the invasion of Afghanistan, persecution of dissidents and human rights activists intensified.
[52] In 1980, Andrei Sakharov was forcibly exiled from Moscow to the closed city of Gorky to live under KGB surveillance and to disrupt his contact with activists and foreign journalists.
The death Anatoly Marchenko, a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, in prison after months on hunger strike in 1986 caused an international outcry.
