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ERZEUGT DURCH JUTOH - BITTE REGISTRIEREN SIE SICH, UM DIESE ZEILE ZU ENTFERNEN

Financial Times, Thursday, July 27, 1978

Soviet dissent after the trials

Shaken, but Ready to Rise Again

With sentencing of Dr. Yuri Orlov, Alexander Ginzburg and Anatoly Shcharansky, an uneasy sense of ideological calm has settled over Moscow. The Soviet authorities’ bid to destroy the groups set up to monitor the 1975 Helsinki accords has shaken the dissident movement, which never, in any case, contained more than a few hundred activists, and it will need time to reorganise.

However, it is virtually certain that the authorities’ attempt to crush dissent through long prison and exile sentences, but without full recourse to Stalin’s bloody methods, will fail.

With each wave of arrests and trials since the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in 1966, the end of the dissidents has been predicted. On each occasion, they have resurfaced with renewed energy.

The resilience of Soviet dissent lies in the facts that it is both an inevitable response to the complete lack of individual political rights, and a specific subculture which, because its members have chosen to join it fully aware of the risks they run, is ineradicable under present circumstances.

The Soviet Union, although more tolerant than it was in Stalin’s time, employs intensive police surveillance, ubiquitous informers, eavesdropping and letter opening. The Soviet citizen has in practice no right to free speech or assembly, no ability to form independent organisations or to publish opposing opinions. As the trials of the dissidents demonstrated, there is no guarantee of due process of law.

The dissident movement has various elements—democratic dissidents, nationalists, the religious rights movement, Jews seeking to emigrate—but in general consists of people who have dedicated themselves to working for the creation of reliable political rights as the only means through which their other goals can be effectively realised.

The dissidents are self-selected. They know their activities will end their careers and could mean that they go to prison. The need to be prepared to accept the grim consequences is why the dissident movement is so small numerically, but also so wide in influence (almost everyone in the Soviet Union is aware of it) and so difficult to suppress. Any dissident gathering is peopled by those who have been to the labour camps or are soon to go, and they are hard to intimidate.

The present campaign against dissent, which is only the latest of a series dating from the late 1960s, began with the seizure of Alexander Ginzburg in February 1977 outside a pay telephone booth near his wife’s apartment. It grew out of a basic feature of Soviet life, the Soviet desire to make solemn international human rights commitments without loosening the State’s total control.

The Soviet authorities signed the Helsinki accords aware that they could not honour them. With their formation of the Helsinki agreement monitoring group in May 1976, the dissidents accepted the implicit challenge to hold the authorities to their word.

The arrest of more than 20 members of “Helsinki” groups in Moscow, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, and Armenia in the last year and a half and the sentencing of 16 of them has deprived the movement of its most effective leaders but has far from destroyed it.

On July 16, the day after Anatoly Shcharansky was sentenced, remaining Moscow dissidents crowded into the apartment of Dr. Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, to reiterate their determination and announce the appointment of a new member of the Moscow-based Helsinki Group, Professor Sergei Polikanoff, a nuclear physicist and corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Professor Polikanoff said he was joining the group in light of recent “significant losses” and would contribute to its work in any way he could.

The disparity between the freedoms the Government professes to guarantee and those it actually grants is typical of the Soviet Union. The authorities make human rights commitments because they want to attribute the apparent unanimity of Soviet society to Marxist development rather than to the absence of freedom. Unanimity in the Soviet Union, exemplified perhaps in the Supreme Soviet, which may be the world’s only parliament never to have voted no, is always held to be voluntary.

Soviet authorities may thus ignore ostensible rights and freedoms but can never disavow them. When two dissidents went to the Moscow City Council last year to say that they planned to hold a demonstration in Pushkin Square to mark United Nations Human Rights Day, they were not told that such a demonstration would he illegal, but merely advised that if hooligans from nearby cafes decided to beat them up, it would be exclusively their fault.

The atmosphere of unreality which this situation creates is part of the life here and limits the extent to which the dissidents, who always attempt to take human rights commitments literally, can pressure the authorities to honour the rights the authorities have themselves promulgated.

When, however, the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki agreements in which it derived tangible benefits such as Western agreement to the European territorial status quo in exchange for specific Soviet undertaking on human rights, the situation changed. If the West was serious about compliance, the Western powers would need information about Soviet violations which only the dissidents could supply and, for the first time, the dissidents would have a directly concerned external ally.

The crackdown on dissent, which has been unprecedentedly thorough has often been depicted as a response to President Carter’s human rights campaign. In fact, the interrogations and searches which are normal preparations for arrest, began before President Carter assumed office and the authorities would have almost certainly acted to suppress the Helsinki group regardless of who had been in the White House.

The Soviet Union was born of a successful conspiracy and perhaps acting out of unconscious memory, the authorities immediately suppress any form of independent organisation. This is in no way surprising. The Communist Party’s dominance of all organisational life—political, religious or cultural—means there is a social vacuum in the Soviet Union which would immediately draw in a wide range of discontented elements were it allowed to be utilised.

The Helsinki group, in the eight months during which it operated freely, established a network of contacts all over the country, and began receiving an enormous volume of mail. If allowed to exist, it could have become an institutionalised internal opposition with wide sources of information and important foreign contacts.

President Carter’s human rights campaign far from inspiring the arrests, may actually have helped the dissidents in the long run, by emphasising to the Soviet leader the continuing outside interest in the dissidents’ fate.

The international reaction to persecution of dissidents for attempting to exercise rights officially endorsed by the Soviet Government and generally acknowledged to be basic to human dignity, sets limits on Soviet behaviour the system would never generate itself. There will be no protest demonstrations in Red Square if Dr. Sakharov is arrested but the Soviet authorities must consider what would happen outside the country and to the Soviet Union’s prestige.

Part of the reason the Soviet Union signs international human rights agreements in the first place is because it wants international respectability. The Soviets will probably continue to sign such documents if, for no other reason, out of a reluctance to disqualify themselves as suitable signatories.

What the Soviet authorities may not fully realise is that the rest of the world, which does not accept the Soviet definition of the individual as without political rights before the State, will probably continue to react. The continuance of mendacious political trials backed by the full authority of the Soviet State is likely, therefore, to be a source of tension between Russia and the West for years to come.

It may be hoped, however, that, the dissidents’ selfless activities—so apparently fruitless—may over time and with the help of this Western reaction be a source of pressure on the Soviet Union to become less closed and rigid.