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From International Socialism (1st series), No.65, Mid-December 1973, p.18.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
THE PAST few months have seen a series of trials and sentences of leading oppositionists in Russia, Ukraine and other republics of the USSR, marking the temporary halt to almost a decade of agitation for democratic rights.
Despite the claims of the capitalist press, the movement for the restoration of Leninist norms on questions such as workers’ democracy, human rights and the nationalities question was not the concern of only a small group of Moscow intellectuals but a movement whose membership and dynamic reflected the massive discontent to be found in every sector of Soviet society.
Between the years 1966-72, its ranks included some of the most courageous and politically aware workers, students, officers, and intellectuals who managed to overcome the inertia and profound sense of pessimism and passivity fostered by the bureaucracy.
This threatened the bureaucracy and forced it to launch an all-out campaign against any manifestation of socialist dissent – particularly against those oppositionists who criticised the policies and privileges of the bureaucracy itself. Thus on 30 December 1971 the Central Committee of the Communist Party gave the KGB secret police a free hand in liquidating all forms of underground literature, especially the Russian Chronicle of Current Events and the Ukrainian Herald, two journals which gave expression to the many currents of dissent.
The direct result was the wave of arrests which swept the USSR in the first four months of 1972. According to the Chronicle, issue 26, the repression was particularly severe in the Ukraine, where more than 200 activists were arrested.
The first wave of arrests began in Lviv, in the western part of the Ukraine on 12 January 1972, and spread to Kiev the following day. There were raids on flats in Moscow on 14 January and against this background administrative action was taken against Pyotr Yakir for the first time.
Those arrested were accused of being involved with the production and distribution of these underground journals. But in fact, the arrests were used by the bureaucracy as a pretext for silencing those socialists who criticised the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the rehabilitation of Stalin, and the use of administrative methods to stifle any political discussion in the USSR.
By the middle of 1972 the KGB had accomplished its task and the Chronicle and Herald never appeared again.
Yet one important fact discredited the KGB effort. For some reason the racist and reactionary underground journals Slovo Natsii (Word of the Nation) and Veche continued to appear, curiously unhampered by the massive arrests and the Central Committee’s resolution.
The two men allegedly most responsible for compiling the Chronicle, Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin, were tried in late August and early September this year, each receiving sentences of three years imprisonment and three years exile.
Public protest from the West was aroused not only by the sentences but also by the crudity of the methods used by the secret police. The use of the ‘public confessions’, reminiscent of the Stalinist purges of 1933-38, was so transparent a tactic that even the British Communist Party protested against the use of ‘administrative measures to suppress dissent.’ [1]
As a result of these protests the bureaucracy was forced to retreat and soon after this public fiasco it was announced that Krasin and Yakir would only serve the terms of exile.
But not a word of protest has been heard about the extremely harsh sentences in the Ukraine even though the socialist opposition there is far more significant.
Ivan Dzyuba, the author of a marxist critique of the bureaucracy’s nationalities policy [2] and a central figure of the Ukrainian opposition, was sentenced to five years imprisonment and five years exile at a secret trial on 6 March. Another prominent dissenter, Vyacheslav Chornovil, the author of the Chornovil Papers, a documentation of the secret trials of 1965-66 [3], and an active supporter of the Moscow-based ‘Action Group in Defence of Civil Rights in the USSR’, was sentenced to seven years hard labour and five years exile.
Others, such as the physician Mykola Plahotnyuk and the mathematician Leonid Plyushch were put into the Dnipropetrovsk psychiatric prison. Plyushch, a co-member with Yakir of the ‘Action Group’, was diagnosed by the infamous ‘psychiatric specialist’ D.R. Lunts, who stated that Plyushch showed signs of ‘creeping schizophrenia, with messianic and reformist ideas’. [4]
While the scope and severity of these sentences in the Ukraine can be partially explained by the zealousness of the lower levels of the bureaucracy and also by the lack of Western press coverage, the main reason for this massive repression lies in the fact that the democratic movement in the Ukraine has substantial support among the working class.
The movement does not simply argue for greater national rights as some Western specialists would have us believe. On the contrary, Dzyuba and others have argued that ‘national problems are always social problems as well, problems of political class strategy.’ [5] The bureaucracy, which is predominantly Russian or else Russified, discriminated against the language of the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian population in the education, cultural and economic institutions, so forcing them into lower-paid and less satisfying jobs.
The nationally conscious sector of the working class has played an important role in demanding democratic rights for the class not only on the question of discrimination but also against the bureaucracy’s ‘re-Stalinization’. [6] In western Ukraine the working class had the experience of underground political armed struggle against both Hitler and Stalin which was only liquidated by Stalin’s troops in the early years of the 1950s. Unlike the Russian opposition, the Ukrainian movement has forged many links between the working class and the left-wing intelligentsia and it is for this reason that the bureaucracy’s fear has shown itself in the use of such repressive ‘administrative measures’.
The bureaucracy’s real test is yet to come. The experience of the massive arrests of 1972 and the trials of 1973 clearly shows that the movement can be easily isolated when it places its organisational and theoretical emphasis on the intelligentsia and ‘Party liberals’.
The working class is now just beginning to re-emerge after years of forced political passivity. The unprecedented number of strikes in the past few years has once again revealed the true nature of the relationship between the Communist Party and the working class. In the Novocherkassk ‘riots’ of 1962 the bureaucracy thought nothing of shooting down workers protesting against the rise in the price of food. In 1969 when workers from the Kiev hydro-electric station marched in the streets carrying banners such as ‘All Power to the Soviets’ the administration sacked many workers and imprisoned their leaders. [7]
The unrest in the USSR is continuing and so is the repression. No doubt we will soon see another British Communist Party statement lamenting the bureaucracy’s use of ‘administrative measures to suppress dissent’ – this time against the working class.
1. Morning Star, Tuesday, September 11, 1973.
2. Ivan Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification?, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, second ed. 1970.
3. Vyacheslav Chornovil, Chornovil Papers, London: McGraw-Hill 1969.
4. Ukrainian Dissident Framed by KGB, in Intercontinental Press, vol.11, no.12, 2 April 1973, p.374.
5. Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification?, p.193.
6. See petition of the 139 in M. Browne, Ferment in the Ukraine, London: Macmillan 1971, p.l92.
7. See Andrea Martin, Ukraine: Unrest and Repression, London: Committee to Defend Ivan Dzyuba and Vyacheslav Chornovil, October 1973, for workers’ document.
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