Soviets stifle groups checking pact

Press, 26 May 1977, Page 9

Soviets stifle groups checking pact

(From the “Economist") I Londonl The Soviet Government] will have something to celebrate on June 15, when 35 countries meet in Belgrade to discuss what the 1975 Helsinki conference has done to help “co-operation and security" in Europe. It has muffled, if not quite silenced, the group of harassed Soviet dissidents who have been trying to check their Government's observance of the Helsinki agreements. Since February, the main group in Moscow, and affiliated groups in Kiev, Vilnius, and Tiflis, have lost 10 members who have been arrested, and almost all their documents have been confiscated. The formation of the Hel-i sinki monitoring committee was the most important development in the Soviet dissident movement for many years. The committee managed to draw together, for the first time, most of the different strands of So-i viet dissent — Jews wanting: to emigrate, religious dis- ] senters, and members of the democratic movement — around the theme of Soviet’

[violations of an international ’agreement. But the last three I months have seen the arrest I of Professor Yuri Orlov, the [Moscow group’s energetic leader; of two other Moscow members, Messrs Alexander Ginzburg and Anatoly Shcharansky; and of the leader of the related Ukrainian group, Mr Mikola Rudenko. Another member of the Moscow group, Mrs Lyudmila Alexeyeva, has emigrated to the West, and yet another, Mr Yuri Mnyukh, will soon follow her. Only five members of the Moscow committee are still operating and one of these, General Peter Grigorenko, is ill. The arrests have caused a falling off in the supply of volunteers for typing documents and interviewing complainants. Even typewriters are in short supply. The vital flow of letters to the committee describing human rights violations in all parts of the Soviet Union has fallen off drastically; so has the number of travellers .arriving in Moscow with a | story to tell. The authorities have been tightening the [ screws on known intermediaries and couriers, and

i there are reports of people being pulled off trains. [ Against these odds, the committee recently produced its first documents in many weeks — a couple of reports on groups of Soviet citizens such as Christian Pentecostalists and people of German origin who have been denied the right to emigrate. But the committee’s problems continue. The surviving members of the group have their apartments searched. Mrs Malva Landa, who joined the original committee with Mr Orlov and Mr Ginzburg a year ago, is due to go on trial next week for what the authorities blandly call “negligence” in connection with a fire which broke out in her apartment last December while she was at Moscow airport in an unsuccessful attempt to say goodbye to the departing dissident, Mr Vladimir Bukovsky. i If found guilty, Mrs Landa ‘could face a three-year i prison sentence. The Orlov 'group would then be reduced to four people trying to bear 'testimony about the Soviet [ Union’s unwillingness to honour the document it signed at Helsinki.