Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 22 – Four former
Soviet political prisoners have resumed the publication of the “Chronicle of
Current Events,” the information bulletin about violations of human rights and
official persecutions that circulated in samizdat between 1968 and 1983. The
new version is being distributed via the Internet.
The four are Viktor Davydov, Aleksey
Manninkov, Kirill Podrabinek and Aleksandr Skobov. Davydov, who was confined to
a Soviet psychiatric prison between 1979 and 1984 for his dissident activities,
talked about the new undertaking with VOA Russian Service journalist Danila
Galperovich (golos-ameriki.ru/content/hronika-davidov-interview/3017425.html).
Davydov said that the new “Chronicle”
was as it were the realization of the Soviet-era anecdote in which Andropov
tells Brezhnev that Lenin has disappeared from the mausoleum and has left a
note saying “”I’ve gone to Switzerland; it’s necessary to begin everything over
from the beginning.”
Approximately the same logic, he
suggested, was behind the decision to begin publishing anew the “Chronicle.”
Indeed, the very same person who began it in 1968, Natalya Gorbanevskaya,
suggested during her visit to Moscow two years ago that Russian human rights
activists needed to take that step in the face of increasing repression.
Unfortunately, soon after she made
this proposal, Gorbanevskaya died; and nothing much happened until this past
summer when his group began publishing the new “Chronicle” on the
Internet. Because they had all been
involved with such things in the past, they “knew what to do.”
In Russia today, “the law simply
does not work, and therefore the only remaining hope, the single algorithm
which works just as was the case in the USSR are public campaigns.” And such campaigns are possible only if information
is disseminated and if there is attention from the outside world. That is what the
original “Chronicle” did and what the new one is doing.
Like its predecessor, the new “Chronicle”
focuses on two things: violations of human rights inside the country and the
resistance of civil society to these violations. Today, Davydov said, the
publication understands under the word “country the Russian Federation and
Crimea even though “from the point of view of international law,” the latter
isn’t part of Russia.
Also like its predecessor, the new “Chronicle”
maintains a list of political prisoners. The most recent one includes 218
names. Only about a third of these are
people who are being persecuted for participation in political activities.
Nearly half are those, mostly Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims, are on it
because they are involved in religious life.
Both those categories were part of
the lists maintained by the original “Chronicle,” but there are also new groups
including foreigners seized abroad and brought into Russia where they are tried
under Russian law, Davydov pointed out. He noted that half of those on the list
are in isolators but others are under house arrest
The activist continued that “a
totalitarian system does not have any mechanisms which could change the behavior
of the ruling group from the inside. Any attempts to do so are put down by
repressive actions. [In Soviet times,] dissidents appealed to international
human rights organizations and foreign governments and there was a result.”
“The very same methods need to be
used again now,” Davydov said, because the mass media have kept most people
from knowing what is really going on. “Those
who know and understand can find a common language with people abroad and in
this way change the situation.”
Given the globalized nature of the world,
there is no possibility of isolating Russia today behind an iron curtain –
North Korea is the exception that proves the rule, he suggested – and “therefore
in principle we have already seen what was the case in the Soviet Union and we
know precisely what will be occur again if the current political course of confrontation
with the entire world continues.”
Davydov’s effort is important in and
of itself; but it is also a reminder of something else. Many are talking about
the ways in which Vladimir Putin is restoring authoritarian or even totalitarian
aspects of the past, but few are discussing what that requires from an international
community that does not want that trend to continue.
That discussion, which will
necessarily focus not only on increased dissemination of information to the
peoples of the Russian Federation via various channels but also on recreating
institutions to engage in the increasingly difficult task of keeping track and
analyzing what is going on in Putin’s empire.
The relaunching of the “Chronicle of
Current Events” is a reminder that what we need to do next is to restore the
well-forgotten old.
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