Turning the pages back... March 20, 1983 (03/17/02)

Turning the pages back...

March 20, 1983

Twenty years ago, 10 Soviet political prisoners wrote an open letter to U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The letter reached the West months later and was the subject of a news story in The Ukrainian Weekly on March 20, 1983. The prisoners of Camp No. 36, part of a vast penal complex in Perm, Russian SFSR, asked Mr. Reagan to help form an international commission to inspect Soviet labor camps.

The letter, a copy of which was provided by the External Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, was signed by Mykola Rudenko, Oles Shevchenko, Myroslav Marynovych, Viktor Nekipelov, Alexander Ogorodnikov, Henrich Altunian, Antanas Terliatskas, Viktor Niytsoo, Norair Grygorian and Vladimir Balakhonov. They said that Soviet abuses of political prisoners were "so widespread that it is no longer merely a question of violations of human rights, but of premeditated inhumanity, of physical and psychological torture, of terrorizing the spirit and exhibiting moral contempt for culture."

Mr. Rudenko, then 62, a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, was sentenced in 1977 to seven years in a labor camp and five years' internal exile, a form of enforced residence. Mr. Marynovych, another member of the group, was sentenced a year later to an identical sentence. The other Ukrainian, Mr. Shevchenko, was sentenced in 1980, also to 12 years' labor camp and exile. The other prisoners were from a variety of ethnic backgrounds (Estonian, Lithuanian, Russian, Armenian) and dissident movements.

The political prisoners wrote: "It is often difficult for a resident of the West to imagine the atmosphere of lawlessness in which the inmates of Soviet political prison camps exist today. Recently (end of 1981 - first half of 1982) the conditions of our imprisonment have worsened so sharply that we feel compelled to appeal to you. It is probable that this 'tightening of the screws,' or, as the saying went during the Stalin years, 'clamp-down,' is equally the result of individual instances in which the regime has disgraced itself (Poland, Afghanistan) and of the general crisis that the system is undergoing. The invariable companions of a tyranny growing decrepit - cruelty and absurdity - today permeate all spheres of our life, all aspects of our prison existence."

The dissidents suggested the formation of "an impartial commission of independent and politically unaffiliated Western humanitarians - writers and lawyers" who, "after visiting the camps of any country ... could draw up an authoritative conclusion about the contingent of prisoners here and, consequently, about the moral right of the government of this country to condemn others for using imprisonment to suppress dissent."

"Knowing of your resoluteness in the defense of freedom and humanity in the world, Mr. President, we appeal to you to support the creation of such a commission," they wrote. "The existence of political prisoners in our enlightened age is as anachronistic as the slave trade. The champions of the primacy of morality in the whole world have long since known that no measures or spheres of trust can be extended to a country that incarcerates in prisons and camps its political, national, religious and moral opposition."

Source: "Political prisoners seek Reagan's aid in urging inspection of Soviet camps," The Ukrainian Weekly, March 20, 1983, Vol. LI, No. 12.

| Home Page |