Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR
In late 1968, Ivan Yakhimovich, a philologist and chairman of a collective farm in Latvia, wrote a letter to the Communist Party expressing his concern for the fate of arrested samizdat authors Yuri Galanskov and Alexander Ginzburg.
[3]: 24 After the letter by Yakhimovich was widely publicized, he was expelled from the Communist Party, arrested and later committed to a psychiatric hospital without trial.
It was addressed to the United Nations and exhorted it to investigate human rights abuses in the Soviet Union:We appeal to the United Nations because our protests and complaints, addressed for a number of years to the higher state and judicial offices in the Soviet Union, have received no response of any kind.
[7] This designation was followed by the names of fifteen dissidents: The Muscovites Tatyana Velikanova, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Tatyana Khodorovich, Sergei Kovalev, Victor Krasin, Aleksandr Lavut, Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov, Yury Maltsev, Grigory Podyapolsky, Pyotr Yakir and Anatoly Yakobson, Vladimir Borisov from Leningrad, Ukrainians Genrikh Altunyan and Leonid Plyushch, and the Crimean Tatar activist in Uzbekistan Mustafa Dzhemilev.
[6] On 20 May 1969, without consulting the other members of the group, Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin passed the text to foreign correspondents and a representative of the United Nations in Moscow.
Written by Natalya Gorbanevskaya and Lyudmila Alexeyeva, it provided information about the case against Anatoly Marchenko and about the use of punitive psychiatry against Ivan Yakhimovich and Pyotr Grigorenko.
[9]: 253 As the letter reached the West through samizdat distribution and was picked up by shortwave radio stations, the members of the group were interrogated and some arrested.
As the appeal reached the Western media, UN information centers around the world were instructed by its secretariat not to forward petitions to New York.
[4]: 162 When these appeals to the UN went unanswered, the Initiative Group turned to other recipients: The World Health Organization and the International Congress of Psychiatrists for cases involving punitive psychiatry, the Papacy for the arrest of religious dissenters, news agencies such as Reuters, and simply "public opinion".
Some, like Sergei Kovalev and Anatoly Yakobson, saw their activity as strictly humanitarian and avoided actions that might be construed as treasonous or anti-Soviet; others like such as Pyotr Yakir, Victor Krasin and Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov, believed that they were engaged in a political struggle with the Soviet regime, and were open to cooperation with the NTS, an émigré anti-communist organization founded in 1930.
In a televised testimony, they recanted their "anti-Soviet activity" and renounced the Initiative Group as a fraudulent undertaking whose real purpose was the deception of international public opinion.
[4]: 169 Between July 1972 and December 1973, the Initiative Group issued only two documents, rejecting the accusations and reporting the conditions and procedure of interrogations.
The action had been conceived in the Gulag by astrophysicist Kronid Lyubarsky as part of an ongoing campaign for the recognition of inmates' status as political prisoners.
Wives of inmates smuggled information about the planned action out of the Mordovian and Perm labor camps and out of Vladimir prison to the Moscow dissident community.
[13] In the name of the Initiative Group, a statement was distributed explaining the origins of the action and contradicting the Soviet regime's claim that it did not have political prisoners.
While the press conference was in progress, inmates in Vladimir Prison and in camps in Perm and Mordovia conducted a hunger strike.
