The Human Rights Movement During Detente 335 accepted to hold a second show of their works in two weeks in the open air The exhibit opened in Izmaylovo in a eld beyond the park Sixty- ve artists took part not only from Moscow but from Leningrad Vladimir Sverdlovsk and other cities the majority of them were non- conformists although also members of the Union of Artists About 15 000 people visited the exhibit This time the authorities simply observed it from the sidelines After such a success the unof cial artists nally found a space for their shows They received permission to hold a show in the Central Home of Art Workers In the fall of 1975 a 10-day show took place in Leningrad and in Moscow at the National Economic Achievements Exhibition Similar exhibits followed in subsequent years although each time organizers had to ght for many of the paintings particu- larly disliked by of the cultural administration and they did not win all of these struggles A painters section was founded within the City Committee of Graphic Artists and all the non-conformists were accepted thus providing them with membership in a union with of cial status relieving them of the necessity of explaining to the police that they were not parasites They now had registered employment From time to time exhibits were permitted at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 19803 But when Muscovites and Leningraders conceived of an international festival Paris-Moscow with simul- taneous shows in both of these cities festival participants were taken to the police station under administrative arrest before the opening A re was started in the room of art collector Ludmila Kuznetsova where the paintings for the exhibition were stored and soon after under threat of arrest she was forced to emigrate The festival did not open 46 The Moscow Helsinki Watch Group On May 12 1976 at a press conference called by Sakharov Yury Orlov announced the creation of a group to promote compliance with the Helsinki accords in the USSR It became known as the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group 47 Its appearance and the wave of support it generated in the Soviet Union and in the West marked the entry of the human rights movement into a new period the Helsinki period This sudden strength was the result of ten years of work by human rights activists in a time of repression when open statements by ac tivists had been rare and had drawn little attention In the late sixties it had seemed and the KGB leadership supposed that the human rights movement was nished It is otherwise impos sible to explain why the government took the unusual step in August 336 Movement for Human Rights 1975 of publishing in newspapers the complete text of the Final Act of the Helsinki Accords including the humanitarian articles Up until then almost total silence had prevailed within the country on the in- ternational obligations of the Soviet Union with regard to human rights The relevant documents had been published only in special editions with very limited circulation It is possible that the Soviet leadership was in this instance overcome by a desire to boast to its own people of its success in Helsinki for many years they had worked toward such an agreement By the terms of the Final Act the Soviet Union received some substantial bene ts most important of these was recognition of the posh-World War II boundaries in Europe in ex change for the promise to observe human rights Neither the Soviet leaders nor their Western counterparts had counted on substantial changes in Soviet internal politics The commonly held opinion was that the humanitarian articles of the Final Act were nothing more than a joint gesture by the signing governments in deference to public opin- ion in democratic countries But Soviet citizens reading the text of the Final Act in the papers were stunned by the humanitarian articles it was the rst they had heard of any kind of international obligations in the human rights eld of their government A spontaneous reaction was to refer to the Helsinki accords when appealing to Soviet o icials in cases where they had refused to satisfy a vital need of the petitioner In evaluating the Final Act most human rights workers leaned more toward West- ern commentators than toward their own compatriots who lacked ex- perience in the issues involved Human rights activists thought the Final Act was regressive in comparison with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants on Human Rights But there were some above all Yury Orlov who saw in this document anew idea Orlov had devoted years to searching for ways to create a dialogue between the government and the society He considered such a dia- logue the only means of liberalizing the regime and resolving the eco nomic political and moral crisis confronting the Soviet Union He twice attempted to appeal directly to the government once in 1956 when he lost his job for it and was forced to move out of Moscow to Armenia and again in 1973 After working in Armenia for fteen years during which time he became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences he returned to Moscow and soon after sent a letter to Brezhnev Orlov received no direct response although he once again found himself without work Similar unsuccessful appeals by Sakharov Turchin Medvedev Chalidze Solzhenitsyn and others during 1970 74 convinced him of the necessity of nding intermedi The Human Rights Movement During Detente 337 aries who would persuade Soviet leaders to listen to their own citizens The natural allies of the human rights movement were the publics of the countries of the free world since their moral values coincided with the traditional values of Western democracies and the organic pluralism and political neutrality of the human rights movement in the USSR placed it outside the struggle of political forces in the West making it possible for the movement to be supported by both the left and right An attempt was made in 1968 to appeal directly to the public opin- ion of the West with the petition by Larisa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov in connection with the trial of the four The rst public association founded by human rights activists the Initiative Group for the De- fense of Human Rights in the USSR appealed to the West to the UN in its very rst document The members explained this measure by the absence of answers to direct appeals to Soviet authorities and the evident intention of the authorities to prosecute for such ap- peals After this experience there were constant individual and collec- tive letters to various public organizations and public gures in the West All of these appeals contained information about the harassment of Soviet citizens for the independent public positions and called on Westerners to help those persecuted The West was not to the fate of dissenters in the USSR Starting with the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel and perhaps even earlier the cases of Pasternak and Brodsky the Soviet leaders experi- enced pressure from the Western public and made concessions at the time since they were striving to preserve in the West the impression that the USSR was a democratic state Sometimes there were obvious concessions by the authorities for example the release of Brodsky and Sinyavsky before they had served their sentences and the repeal of the death penalty for the hijackers Less visible but still a signi cant result of this pressure was a certain restraint in the harassment of dis- senters I believe that without the consideration of public Opinion in the West the harassment of both human rights activists and members of other movements would have been far more ef cient and would have encompassed far wider circles and possibly would have been much harsher The help of citizens of the West was from the very beginning based chie y on professional solidarity writers helped writers scientists aided scientists nationalist organizations abroad helped people of their nationality religious organizations supported their fellow be- lievers Amnesty International was concerned about all prisoners of conscience But even this support was limited to protests about the fate of people who were suffering from persecution No one in the 338 Movement for Human Rights West appealed to the Soviet leaders with a demand that they observe human rights and the law although the West was vitally interested in this for the sake of its own security A rm guarantee of such security can only be expected from an open society Where the authorities are under the constant active control of the public This is possible only under a real observation of civil rights by the authorities But the gov- ernments of democratic countries did not demonstrate interest in the status of human rights in the USSR The Soviet Union had rati ed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the UN the international covenants on political and economic rights But not once did the ap propriate international organizations try to verify it the Soviet Union was fu lling its obligations and urge them to ful ll them The Initia tive Group in particular constantly appealed to the UN but did not receive a single answer Orlov saw an Opportunity to use the Final Act with its unwieldy formulations and purposely convoluted language to spur the West on to a mediating role The Final Act pointed out to the signatory coun- tries the legitimacy of mediatory functions in the area of human rights by declaring them to be an indissoluble part of the major goal of the Helsinki accords the preservation of peace In this light the question of the degree of freedom given to citizens and the freedom of information available under di erent governments ceased to be a simple matter of internal affairs and became a general concern in the case of violations of the humanitarian articles just as of any other articles it would be normal for the other partners to apply appropriate pressure In Orlov s View the rights of citizens enumerated in the humanitarian articles were to be treated as minimal international standards for countries who had signed the Helsinki accords Orlov took the spontaneous response of his fellow citizens to the Helsinki accords as a guide to action especially since the Final Act contains a direct appeal to the citizens of signatory countries to assist their gov- ernments in observing the Helsinki accords because more govern- mental efforts for the preservation of peace might well prove inade quate The original declaration of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group read that the group would limit its activities to the humanitarian articles of the inai Act The group announced that it would accept informa tion on violations of these articles from citizens compile documents and familiarize the public and signatory governments of the Helsinki accords with their contents 49 The eleven persons who signed the con- stituent document of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group were Lud milla Aleseyeva myself Mikhail Yelena Bonner Alek sandr Ginsburg Pyotr Grigorenko Aleksandr Korchak Malva Landa The Human Rights Movement During Detente 339 Anatoly Marchenko Yury Orlov Vitaly Rubin and Anatoly Shcharan- sky Most of the founders had been long-time participants in the hu- man rights movement Rubin and Shcharansky had been active in the Jewish Movement for Emigration to Israel The Moscow Helsinki Watch Group was the rst independent public group to be joined by Jewish refuseniks The Moscow Helsinki Group called on other countries to create sim- ilar groups but the rst response was from the Soviet non Russian republics On November 9 1976 the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was announced on December 1 the Lithuanian Helsinki Group on Janu- ary 14 1977 the Georgian Helsinki Group and on April 1 the Arme- nian Helsinki Group All of these groups were composed primarily of members of the corresponding national movements In the Ukraine Lithuania and Armenia the Helsinki groups were the rst open social- action associations Similar groups appeared outside of the Soviet Union In September 1976 the Committee for the Defense of Workers which became the Committee for Social Defense in the summer of 1977 was formed in Poland and on January 1 the Charter 77 group appeared in Czechoslovakia Although these associations did not call themselves Helsinki groups they took positions on civil rights based on the constitutions of their ovVn c0untries and on international agree ments on human rights signed by their governments In Hungary Romania and East Germany the same demands were made In the United States the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Eu rope or the Helsinki Commission was formed of six congressmen six senators and one representative each with consultative authority from the US State Department the Defense Department and the Department of Commerce 50 After the Helsinki meeting at which the Final Act was signed a delegation of American congressmen visited Moscow Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick met with Yury Orlov Valentin Turchin and refuse- nik Veniamin Levich to hear their views on the Final Act She was im- pressed by what they told her and later introduced a measure for the creation of the Helsinki Commission making direct use of the opin ions of Moscow activists The commission was to facilitate the ful ll ment of the obligations of the signatory countries to the Helsinki ac- cords 51 Later public Helsinki groups were formed in the United States and in Western European countries Thus the Moscow Helsinki Group was the seed from which the in- ternational Helsinki mOVement grew Its purpose was to bring the civil rights situation up to the standards de ned in the Final Act in those countries where they fell short The Moscow Helsinki Group not only initiated a whole era of similar associations but it stimulated the 34o Movement for Human Rights appearance of several specialized human rights associations in the Soviet Union On January 5 1977 the Working Commission to Investigate the-Use of for Political Purposes connected to the Moscow Helsinki Group was announced 52 On December 27 1976 the rst document of the Christian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Religious Be- lievers in the USSR was released The Christian Committee in turn served as a model for the Catholic Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Religious Believers The appearance of these groups coincided with the initial operations of the Russian Fund to Aid Political Prisoners founded by Solzheni- in Switzerland in 1974 and with the organizational channels to transmit that aid Funds came from abroad and were distributed in the USSR by Aleksandr Ginzburg who was helped by those who pre viously collected funds within the USSR They remained anonymous but their function changed they received funds from the distributor and were accountable to him Thus within a short period of time the human rights movement created a network of open associations At the time of course they Were few and there were no more than a few dozen participants but the human rights movement nevertheless now became visible stimu- lating others to join Western sources primarily those stations broad- casting to the USSR revealed the existence of the movement to Soviet citizens The contacts of the Moscow human rights activists noticeably broad ened Long-standing relations with Ukrainians Crimean Tartars and Lithuanians had by 1974 been supplemented by contacts with Georgia Armenia and the German Movement for Emmigration to West Germany news of which was regularly published from 1974 on The Helsinki groups in the non-Russian republics were not in an way branches of the Moscow Group even though they had the same general goal compliance with the humanitarian articles of the Final Act This brought the national movements closer in ideology and orga- nization to the human rights movement From 1974 the Chronicle of Current Events section on the persecu- tion of believers became a regular feature It contained reports on the Russian Orthodox Catholic Baptist Pentecostal and Adventist churches All such contacts went through the Moscow Helsinki Group and were strengthened due to efforts on its part Baptists had their own long-standing human rights organization the Council of Relatives of Evangelical Christian Baptist Prisoners which regularly gave its The Human Rights Movement During Detente 341 informational Bulletin of the Council of Relatives of ECB Prisoners to the Moscow Group and the Chronicle The Moscow Group made use of these materials in one of its rst documents no 5 53 thus confer- ring international publicity on the practice of taking children from Baptist and Seventh Day Adventist families who gave them religious instruction Millions of Soviet citizens learned of this Practice through radio broadcasts Believers of all faiths began bringing their problems to the Moscow Helsinki Group Representatives of the Pentecostalists regularly went to Moscow to meet with Moscow Helsinki Group members and Moscow Group en- voys visited Pentecostal communities on several occasions Formerly rare and super cial contacts between Moscow human rights activists and the independent Adventist Church groups became constant and friendly 54 In time both the Pentecostalists and the Adventists arranged for the systematic collection of information on human rights violations within their communities and created their own human rights groups in 1978 and in 1980 Moscow Helsinki Group members helped publish and send to the West the rst collection of Pentecostal documents My People Let us Leave This Country Through the Moscow Group hu man rights groups of Baptists Pentecostalists and Adventists were put in touch with the Christian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Religious Believers in the USSR For the rst time joint human rights statements by Russian Orthodox and Catholics were made as a result of contacts facilitated through the Moscow Helsinki Group Many messengers made their individual way to the Moscow Group often from isolated areas a long distance from Moscow from which there had previously been no news of independent civic activities and no means of contact They came asking that illegal actions taken against themselves or those close to them be publicized In this way kolkhoznik Ivan Kareysha from the village of Vysokoe in the Vitebsk oblast came to the Moscow Helsinki Group He had been expelled from his kolkhoz because of complaints he made about the local au- thorities and was seeking to be reinstated Taking upon itself the func tion of collecting and producing information on human rights viola- tions the Moscow Group became the voice for civil demands from all strata of Soviet society from citizens of various ethnic and religious groups and members of different faiths The group provided the con- necting link between different dissident movements previously iso- lated from each other they adopted the tactics of the Moscow Group to stimulate the mediation of the West between the Soviet government and its citizens Participants in the national and religious movements also began to address appeals to the Belgrade Conference to the gov- 342 Movement for Human Rights ernments that had signed the Helsinki accords the Congress and President of the United States world opinion and people of good will By 1976 the annual Constitution Day December 5 demonstrations in Pushkin Square begun in 1965 showed the effects of increased interest and sympathy toward the human rights movement Formerly several dozen people usually the same every year participated Vol unteer police would circle the demonstrators and without a word ob serve the silent ceremony At six in the evening the demonstrators would bare their heads for a few minutes as a sign of mourning for constitutional freedoms and the victims of lawlessness 55 But in 1976 the crowd lled the public garden on Pushkin Square Volunteer police tried to prevent Sakharov and those with him from reaching the Push- kin statue by encircling and forcing them to one side But about fteen regular participants reached the statue I was among them At six o clock the people who had gathered around joined in removing their hats Those who bared their heads far outnumbered those who did not For the rst time the demonstration was not conducted in silence Pyotr Grigorenko gave a short speech a few words mentioning the participation of Vladimir Bukovsky then languishing in the Vladimir Prison in the preparations for the rst demonstration He concluded thank you all for coming here to pay your respects to the millions who perished Thank you for your sympathy for prisoners of con science In response the crowd cried We thank you Bukovsky was released two weeks later he was sent directly out of the country in exchange for Secretary of the Chilean Communist Party Luis Kor- valan Similar demonstrations occurred in 1976 for the rst time in Leningrad and Odessa also near Pushkin monuments in both cities These events although on a small scale were an indication of social cohesion rm enough for coordinated statements on general themes The almost simultaneous formation of Helsinki groups in four non- Russian republics and their joint work with Moscow human rights ac tivists demonstrated the positive prospects for the resolution of the sensitive problem of mutual relations between Russian and non-Rus- sian nationalities on a legal basis The alliance with Protestant religious movements convinced those in the lower social strata Baptists Ad- ventists Pentecostalists almost all blue-collar workers of the feasi- bility of the human rights position The authorities reacted immediately to the creation of the Moscow Helsinki Group Three days after the formation of the group was an- nounced leader Yury Orlov was warned that if it became active he and those associated with him would feel the full force of the law 57 But there were no arrests until February 1977 The government doubt- The Human Rights Movement During Detente 343 lessly understood that to persecute such a group would be a gross vio- lation of the Helsinki accords in which they placed a great deal of hope The risk of open retaliation against the Helsinki groups was great On January 8 1977 an explosion rocked the Moscow subway Several persons were killed Of cial Soviet informational sources usually ob serve a strict silence when natural disasters or plane accidents occur but the subway explosion was reported by the government to foreign correspondents An immediate search for the terrorists was begun among the Moscow human rights activists At meetings held in insti- tutions and industries as well as through intermediaries in the West it was reported that the explosion was the work of dissidents The Moscow Helsinki Group called a press conference and dis- tributed an announcement to foreign correspondents On the EX- plosion in the Moscow Subway In the Soviet Union the word dissident has become rmly associated with participation in the human rights movement Dissidents hold a variety of political religious and philosophic views they are united by their efforts to realize fundamental human rights they absolutely reject violence or calls for violence as a means to their goals Dissidents are repulsed and disgusted by terrorist methods 58 This statement was signed by the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups the Working Commission on the Christian Com- mittee the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR the Georgian Initiative Group and Jewish movement activists In a letter Sakharov listed instances of the criminal activities known to him cannot rid myself of the notion that the Moscow sub- way explosion and the tragic loss of life it caused are the latest and most dangerous in a series of provocations perpetrated in recent years by the organs of repression He speculated that whoever committed this crime did so in order to create a pretext for massive persecutions of dissidents and to in uence the political climate in the country 59 On January 25 the deputy general procurator of the USSR S I Gusev o cially warned Sakharov that his statement on the subway explosion was considered slanderous and any repetition of this nature would lead to his arrest On anuary 27 the US State Department reacted with an expression of admiration for and full con dence in Sakharov 60 which was greeted with joy by the Helsinki groups Was this not the rst step toward the long awaited mediation by Western governments President Carter almost immediately said that the State Department had acted without conferring with him Nonetheless it was clear that this step made an impression on the Soviet government they stopped 344 Movement for Human Rights referring to the subway explosion as having been instigated by human rights activists Open support by the West did not however stop repression against the Helsinki groups During February 1977 the leaders of the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki groups Yury Orlov and Mykola Rudenko were arrested as well as members Aleksandr Cinzburg and Oleksa and in March Anatoly Shcharansky 61 In Moscow many explained these arrests as a consequence of a lack of rmness on the part of President Carter In the West certain peeple began to say that open sympathy for human rights activists created dangers for them Presi- dent Carter compensated in January with a personal letter to Sakharov it was delivered on February 14 soon after the arrest of Orlov and the others 62 In April Carter made a no less sensational gesture when he received the hero of the human rights movement Vladimir Bukovsky In no 44 March 1977 the Chronicle reported that a special group in the APN publishing house the Soviet news agency was at work on a brochure entitled The Exile of Sakharov to be published primarily in foreign languages The rst proofs were ready It was also reported that in a February-March 1977 meeting of newspaper and journal edi- tors in the agitation and propaganda section of the Central Committee an unnamed speaker not from the Central Committee said that in order to show our strength without regard for the West it has been decided that fty of the most active dissidents are to be jailed and all hangers on to be dealt with This plan waited until 1980 when Sakharov was in fact exiled and when mass arrests of dissidents had replaced earlier selective arrests In 1977 repression was still concentrated on the Helsinki groups whose members were arrested one after the other from 1977 until 1979 On October 4 1977 the Belgrade conference on veri cation of the Helsinki accords to which the Helsinki groups most often addressed their appeals opened The democratic countries did not take a strong position the European countries could not agree to support the Amer- ican delegation which accused the Soviet Union of violating the hu manitarian articles and so weakened its efforts Nonetheless this was the rst international meeting on a governmental level in which the Soviet Union was accused of human rights violations The form in which this question was raised was also unprecedented materials from independent social action associations such as the Helsinki groups containing complaints by Soviet citizens about their govern ment were used It was a great victory for human rights activists and the rst step by Western democratic governments toward meeting halfway the forces for liberalization within the Soviet Union It appeared that the goal of the Helsinki groups had been reached The Human Rights Movement During Detente 345 the free world learned about demands that Soviet citizens had made of their government and openly supported those demands but the anticipated result a lessening of repression within the not forthcoming The arrests and harsh sentences of members of the Hel- sinki groups during and after the Belgrade Conference con rmed this bitter lesson Even before the Belgrade Conference the dilemma facing the Soviet government had become quite obvious either it lost prestige in the West or lost control over its own citizens The government preferred to sacri ce its prestige It would have been possible to attribute the continuing repression to weakness of opposition in the USSR and to insuf cient support from the West but the Polish experiment in 1980 81 despite a uni ed national movement and more decisive sup- port from the West had the same outcome The Helsinki groups have not at least until the present achieved the goal of moderating the repressiveness of government power with the help of Western mediation For his miscalculation Yury Orlov re- ceived a sentence of seven years in a strict-regimen camp with ve years of internal exile His fate was shared by the majority of his com rades in the Helsinki group 65 But there was another result no one had anticipated uni cation of the human rights movement with religious and national movements working toward the goal of the Moscow Helsinki Group civic liberties enumerated in the humanitarian articles of the Final Act The na tional and religious movements that seemed to be based on a common ground while not united among themselves were united in many respects in the human rights movement A kind of coalition was formed under the ag of Helsinki Beginning in 1977 the arrests of Moscow Helsinki Group members gave rise to protests comparable in size to the petition campaign of 1968 66 But in 1968 70 percent of the petition signers were Muscovites and the overwhelming majority were liberal intellectuals for whom signing a protest was their rst expression of independent civic- mindedness Unambiguous threats to deprive them of their livelihood had been suf cient to put an end to their civic activities Only a small number of pioneers refused to retreat in 1968 In 1977 78 on the other hand only 27 percent of those who signed protests against the Moscow Helsinki Group arrests were Muscovites most were hu- man rights activists with a long record of service who were inured to adversities resulting from publicly advocating human rights There were more than a few newcomers taking their rst public stand but with rare exceptions they were aware of the risks The Muscovites who joined the human rights activists themselves became activisits and 346 Movement for Human Rights from then on their signatures regularly appeared under human rights documents But the majority of the signers 73 percent were from outside Mos- cow where it is much more dangerous to make public statements 87 Most of these had long been activists in the human rights national or religious movements the repression against the Moscow Helsinki Group did not diminish their support Most likely the signers from outside Moscow were people who directly put others in touch with Moscow activists But those who sympathized with or even helped the Moscow Helsinki Group were not limited to protest signers During 1976 78 the organizational structure of opposition forces that had appeared earlier assumed its nal form Open civic associa- tions became the backbone of the human rights movement and of the national and religious movements working in cooperation with it This general scheme continued to function until 1980 82 when almost all of the participants of Open social-action associations and many of their supporters had been arrested From 1977 until 1978 arrests in the Helsinki groups were three from the Moscow Group Shcharansky s arrest in March and the earlier ar- rests of Orlov and Ginzburg six from the Ukrainian Helsinki Group one from the Lithuanian Helsinki Group three from the Georgian Hel- sinki Group and two from the Armenian Group two Moscow Group members forced into emigration One other Lithuanian Helsinki Group member left the USSR The loss was signi cant even though it did not paralyze the movement The Georgian Group was the only one effectively liquidated after the arrest of its leading participants others found fresh members and continued to function In 1976 Vladimir Slepak joined the Moscow Helsinki Group taking the place of Vitaly Rubin who had received permission to emigrate in 1977 Naum Meyman Yury Mnyukh Sofya Kallistratova Tatyana Osipova and Viktor Nekipelov joined in 1978 Leonard Temovsky Feliks Serebrov and Yury Yarym-Agayev in 1979 Ivan Kovalyov The Moscow Helsinki Group prepared 26 documents for the Bel- grade conference for the Madrid conference in November 1980 138 documents Were prepared 53 These documents can be divided by theme corresponding to the provisions of the humanitarian articles of the Final Act 1 Equal rights and the rights of ethnic groups to determine their own destinies 2 Freedom to choose one s place of residence 3 Freedom to leave and reenter one s country 4 Freedom of conscience i2 j I - The Human Rights Movement During Detente 347 5 The right to know one s rights and to act in accordance with them 6 Inadmissibility of cruelty and degradation of the human dignity of political prisoners 7 Freedom of information and contacts between people 8 The right to a just trial 9 Socioeconomic rights af rmed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by internal pacts on civic and political rights 10 The proposal of the Moscow Helsinki Group to the Belgrade and Madrid conferences on improving controls over compliance with the humanitarian articles In addition to the Moscow Helsinki Group also active and effective from 1977 to 1980 were the Christian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Religious Believers and the Working Commission to Investi- gate the Use of for Political Purposes the latter founded by Vyacheslav Bakhmin Irina Kaplun Feliks Serebrov and Dzhemma Kvachevskaya Pyotr Grigorenko from the Moscow Helsinki Group joined also The lawyer Sofya Kallistratova acted as legal consultant a of the Moscow region public hospital system Aleksandr Voloshanovich whose name was not revealed until later served as psy- chiatric consultant The Working Commission operated for four years until February 1981 when its last participant was arrested Before that time this tiny group prepared twenty-four voluminous informational bulletins issued at least once every two months 69 Even from a cursory glance at these bulletins it is hard to understand how so few people managed to carry out such an enormous task while carrying on their everyday jobs With no access to of cial sources they compiled an index of political prisoners detained in hospitals collected information on dozens of previously unknown victims of repression and collected detailed data on those already known to have been so detained Its basic thesis was this we do not assert that aH who are con ned to hospitals for political reasons are healthy there are some mentally unsound minds among them yet it is also necessary to observe the law in the treatment of those who are mentally ill They kept tabs on all cases of prisoners and reported in their bulletin who was ill and what the nature of the illness was who needed what who was transferred where and so forth The Working Commission assisted in providing material aid to individuals and needy families They compiled a list of heads of special hospitals and wards in regular hospitals where there were political prisoners They wrote hundreds of letters to doc- tors and administrators in an attempt to abolish harmful methods of 348 Movement for Human Rights cure and cruel treatment On numerous occasions members applied to appropriate Soviet institutions demanding the release of healthy per sons and appealed to Western public Opinion in hopes that people in the West would work toward the same end Members often spent their short vacations traveling to remote areas to visit those most in need of help On more than one occasion participants in the Working Commission experienced a pleasure rare enough in the human rights movement the chance to embrace those they had snatched from incarceration The creation of the Working Commission was a direct response to an increase in the use of repression at the end of 1976 Several former inmates had been re-hospitalized simul- taneously Vladimir Borisov in Leningrad Pyotr Starchik in Moscow Eduard Fedotov and Aleksandr Argentov in the greater Moscow re gion The newly formed Working Commission worked on those cases and within a short period of time obtained the release of all They also freed Mikhail Kopysov from a hospital in the small town of Bobrov Voronezh region when the commission publicized the information they received on Kopysov he thereupon obtained his freedom 71 For the release of Yury Belov who had spent seven years in a hospital they fought for two years 72 The unusual success of the Working Commission on can be explained above all by the fact that its activities were the continua tion of efforts made by many people over a period of twenty years it began with loners like Sergey Pisarev but later it grew to include the entire human rights movement The self-sacri ce and accomplishment of Vladimir Bukovsky who had smuggled out the histories of six dissidents con ned in hospitals was not in vain Even though the International Congress of meeting in Mexico refused to examine these documents others in the West did and were convinced that was indeed used for political purposes in the USSR SeVeral dissidents who had been con ned to hospitals emigrated to the West where they were examined by specialists and found to be mentally sound In this way the West had learned of the abuse of in the USSR by 1977 when the commission began its work and when a few organi- zations were trying to stop the practice The International Congress of meeting in Honolulu in 1977 examined the evidence sent by the Working Commission with full con dence in its veracity and passed a resolution condemning the USSR 74 The continued and active support of Western public opinion was instrumental in the suc cess of the Working Commission on In May 1978 Aleksandr Podrabinek was arrested and tried for writ- The Human Rights Movement During Detente 349 ing a book Punitive Medicine on abuses in Soviet prac- tice 75 Shortly after his arrest Leonard Ternovsky and Irina Grivnina joined the commission 76 In August 1978 the name of con sultant Aleksandr Voloshanovich was revealed at a press conference for foreign correspondents Voloshanovich stated that he had con- ducted twenty-seven examinations of pe0ple who had been placed in hospitals for political reasons and had not found a single case for which there was any medical basis for hospitalization and treatment 77 In an obvious attempt to avoid an international scandal in October 1978 the plenum of the All-Union Society of Neurologists and atrists created a commission to investigate the cases Voloshanovich presented A few of the patients were released but Voloshanovich him- self began to be persecuted and was forced to emigrate 78 He settled in London Where he practices After Voloshanovich s emigration in February 1980 Anatoly Koryagin took his place as consultant to the commission In February 1980 V Bakhmin was arrested and in April L in September I Grivnina and in January 1981 F Serehrov 79 All of them were tried for slander under article 190-1 of the criminal code except for Serebrov who was tried under article 70 80 In February 1981 Koryagin was arrested after examining Aleksey Nikitin who fought for workers rights in the Donbass nding him to be of sound mind and then re- porting his ndings to foreign correspondents Koryagin was sentenced to seven years in a strict regimen camp and ve years of internal exile 81 He had been the last member of the Working Commission at liberty Independent Social-Action Associations 1978 1979 During 1978 79 a few other independent associations appeared in Moscow Unlike the Moscow Helsinki Group which was concerned with the entire complex of human rights their aim was to defend the rights of speci c groups or individuals In this they resembled the Christian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Religious Be- lievers and the Working Commission against abuses There was also the Initiative Group for the Defense of the Rights of Invalids in the USSR announced in March 1978 the Free Trade Union Feb ruary 1978 and after the almost instantaneous destruction of this group the Free Interprofessional Association of Workers SMOT In mid-1979 a group called the Right to Emigrate was formed After some reshufliing of staff the following people all refusenjks began to work within this group Lyudmila Agapova Ivan Lupachev Mark Novikov