What punishment is in store for a person who gets the idea of proposing a ban on war toys, East and West? Or a Soviet-American program to teach peace in the schools? How many years in labor camp will someone have to serve for calling on the USSR and the USA to exchange — not mutual recriminations, but their children for the school holidays?
These questions may seem crazy to any sane person. But the KGB has already asked them, ever since the day last October when Oleg Radzinsky, an independent peace activist, was arrested in Moscow. And in fact, the KGB has already decided the answer: up to seven years of prison camp, plus five years of internal exile — the exact sentence will be determined at Oleg’s trial, still to take place.
We could ask the same kind of odd question about the years of slave labor you could get for collecting signatures to an appeal to the citizens of the USSR and the USA to enter into and extend the politicians’ dialogue in both countries. The answer is just as odd. In April of this year, in Siberia, two Moscow independent peace group activists, Alexander Shatravka and Vladimir Mishchenko, were tried for this very activity, and sentenced to three years and one year of labor camp, respectively.
For a year and a half, people around the world have been watching incredulously as hundreds of KGB agents have methodically stifled a small group of Soviet citizens. This group not only did not criticize the Soviet government, it actually tried, with stubborn persistence, to put into practice what the Soviet government talks about incessantly: the group spoke out for disarmament and overcoming distrust between the peoples of the West and East.
Many people, particularly anti-nuclear activists in the West, have been curious to hear what the Soviet authorities would finally say about the independent Trust Group, as the independent committee is known, and about its activities for peace. Up until now, the Soviet government’s reaction to the Group has been unintelligible — fists and barbed wire. But finally, on April 26, 1983, in the Tyumen Region of Siberia, the soviet authorities made a response that everyone could understand. The Soviet political experts finally had their say at the trial of independent peace activists Alexander Shatravka and Vladimir Mishchenko.
But the authorities certainly didn’t want this official response to be publicized. Soviet officials permitted the statement to be read aloud at a closed trial in a far-off Siberian village. They chose this strange setting in complete confidence that not a single idealist in the West would ever hear them.
It became clear why the authorities tried to hide their pronouncements five months after the trial. Thanks to the curiosity of Western peace activists, three documents from the official legal examination of the case finally made their way to the West. In these documents, “representatives of Soviet political science,” as they called themselves, gave their official evaluation of the “crimes against the State” that Shatravka and Mishchenko has committed.
An “Experts’ Commission” had convened which included Prof. G. B. Ignatenko, Ph.D. in jurisprudence and department chairman at the R.D. Redenko Institute; Prof. K. N. Lyubushin, Ph.D. and history and philosophy department chairman at Ural State University; Prof. G. P. Orlov, Ph.D., chairman of the faculty of historical materialism at Ural State. They introduced as evidence to the court their legal evaluation of the Moscow independent peace group’s founding “appeal to the Governments and Peoples of the USSR and the USA.” Shatravka and Mishchenko were accused of collecting signatures to this document.
Prof. G. F. Kutsev, rector of Tyumen State University, and V. A. Danilov, assistant professor at Tyumen State University and dean of the history department introduced to the court a record of their examination of the “appeal,” and their review of the document.
The accusations leveled by these political experts against the Soviet independent peace activists reflect the ugly truth about the difference between what Soviet officials say, and what they really think.
The official Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace asks people to believe that it is impassively objective, and independent from the Soviet state apparatus, the Communist Party, and the Soviet government. But this propaganda, on which no money is spared, is unwittingly exposed in the Experts’ Commission’s very first point. The Commission takes the view on principle that the very idea of a citizens’ struggle for peace, independent of the government, is a crime, punishable under the penal code. “In our society,” they write, “such an idea would mean forming groups that were independent of the struggle to save humankind, which is now being led by the Party and the Government.” “Any appeal to the Soviet people — going over the heads of the Party and the Government, who consider the struggle for peace to be the essence of their foreign policy — thus discredits the Government.”
This statement unwittingly answers the question why Oleg Radzinsky, Vladimir Mishcheko, Alexander Shatravka, and Vladimir Kornev are eating prison gruel today for their peace activity, while Yury Zhukov, head of the Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace has access to special “Kremlin rations” for his “peace activities.”
Thus a Soviet court, based on the conclusions of an Experts’ Commission, confirmed that peace activism independent from the government is punishable by imprisonment — three years in the case of Alexander Shatravka, and one year for Vladimir Mishchenko. Now the official Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace is left with only one way of proving its independence: its officials must go to prison along with the independent group’s activists. The official Soviet view — for internal use only — leaves them with no other option if they are to prove that what they’ve been saying all along is true.
In a succession of articles and statements, Soviet officials, from Yury Zhukov to Georgy Arbatov, have reproached the West for “unscrupulous politicians” who claim that disarmament issues are incomprehensible to the general public because military technology is so complex. However, in the official evaluation of the Moscow independent peace group’s “Appeal,” this business of “unscrupulous politicians” is left hanging. The experts declared to the court that “modern weapons systems are so complex, that it is virtually impossible, and even unwise, to involve the uninitiated in discussions of these problems.”
In another accusation, the “representatives of Soviet political science” found room for an evaluation of the Western peace movement. This comes up when the Commission states unequivocally that the purpose of the Moscow independent peace group is to “damage the authority of the Soviet State and its government in the eyes of those international forces which are viewed by us, and really can be used as (emphasis added) an effective reserve in the anti-imperialist anti-militarist struggle . . . ” The Western peace movement is not likely to fancy itself in a role that Soviet experts have assigned to it.
Elsewhere in the evaluation, the Commission backs up one of its accusations with a phrase from the “Appeal” which says that politicians in both countries are not capable, in the near future, of finding a common agreement on the limitation and reduction of arms. In the experts’ opinion, in this phrase, the authors of the “Appeal” “defame the actual policy of the USSR, the government of the USSR, and the leaders of the Communist Party of the USSR.” But this sounds ridiculous. Ever since the “appeal” was publicized in June 1982, no agreement between the USSR and the USA has ever been in sight. But it is hard to laugh at this when an honest person, Alexander Shatravka, is sentenced to three years of prison camp for having this same opinion. Prison conditions are so bad, that he went on a hunger strike on August 19 which may cost him his life.
In another place in the evaluation, the experts say that the Moscow independent peace group’s call to unite the citizens of the West and East in a joint effort for disarmament is a harmful, “cosmopolitan” idea. And the group’s proposal to inform both the Soviet and American publics about disarmament issues is, in the opinion of the experts, “tantamount to intending to reveal Soviet defense capabilities to a potential aggressor.”
Other accusations hinge on the experts’ deliberate distortion of the test of the “Appeal.” For example, the “Appeal” says that independent peace activists do not believe the propagandistic myths that either side’s political circles are interested in deliberately unleashing a nuclear conflict, and they call on politicians in both countries to cease their mutual accusations of aggression. But the Soviet Experts’ Commission claims just the opposite, that the “Appeal” contains a phrase saying that there are “political circles” in the USSR that are “interested in unleashing a nuclear conflict.” This distortion is used to break up the claim of “defamation” of the State.
The showy peace rhetoric which the Soviet authorities hand the Western public has yet to mitigate the plight of a single independent peace group in the USSR. And these hum-drum views of Soviet political experts — for internal use only — have already legitimized the sentencing of Alexander Shatravka. The Soviet court took the Commission’s conclusions seriously, and handed down the maximum sentence under the criminal code article for “defaming the State.” The Supreme Court of the RSFSR then reviewed the appeal and the Experts’ opinion, and once again legitimized the sentencing of an independent peace activist.
Oleg Radzinsiy and Alexander Shatravka did not blockade a military base. They did not lay down on rail-road tracks to block trains carrying radioactive materials. They did not go out in boats to try to stop the progress of nuclear submarines. They did not put up tents on air strips to stop strategic bombers. They did not do what any Western anti-nuclear activist would take for granted. These actions are unknown to independent peace activists in the Soviet Union, because they consider on principle that it is impossible to take any actions that would break the law.
The peace activism of Shatravka, Radzinsky, and the other independent peace workers in the USSR is guided by a principle of civil disobedience which is a far cry from the idea of civil disobedience as it is known in the West. If Oleg Radzinsky or Alexander Shatravka or anyone else for that matter were to appear with an anti-war poster in front of the gates of a Soviet military compound, they would immediately be shot down on the spot in cold blood, in full compliance with the law. In the USSR, a train carrying nuclear materials would simply run over any demonstrator who happened to get in its way. The civil disobedience of the imprisoned Soviet peace activists in the USSR is the very fact of their independence. They have encroached on the de facto monopoly of the State apparatus on any initiative in the USSR. They didn’t want to play a game where posters scream that “the struggle for peace is everyone’s business,” but where in reality, people only have the choice of saying yes — if they are asked — to state officials from the Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace, when they explain the official peace rhetoric to the Western public, or pass themselves off as a mass, “public” peace movement in the USSR, to uninformed Western idealists.
A dialogue between the West and East can never be, viable and fruitful until it becomes four-sided — until the citizens in both countries can enter into the dialogue of the politicians, independently, and with equal rights.
And Oleg Radzinsky and Alexander Shatravka — they are the fourth side of the dialogue, which the Soviet authorities are trying to silence today behind the barbed wire of prison camps.