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10 October: Representatives of Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the Transdniester Republic will meet in Tiraspol to discuss the conflict in Transdniester
The death on 21 September this year of Tatyana Velikanova, the editor of "Khronika tekushchykh sobytii" ("A Chronicle of Current Events"), draws a line under the most remarkable publishing venture of the Soviet era. Although it concentrated on reporting the here-and-now, "Khronika" actually reached far into the future. Some of the issues it highlighted have not been resolved even today.
"Khronika" gave an uncensored account of what was going on in the Soviet Union, and thus prefigured the events of the late 1980s that so surprised the world in a way that "Izvestiya" never could. Before then-CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev launched his policy of "Glasnost" in the late 1980s, you could scour the official press in vain for indications of nationalism in Georgia or Ukraine. By contrast, the pages of "Khronika" traced the lives of some individuals who later became the first to head their republics as independent states, and others who became Nobel laureates or members of the new Russian government.
"Khronika" was the only samizdat journal devoted to human-rights issues (Article 19 of the UN civil rights covenant was its masthead) throughout the Soviet Union and it ran for 14 years -- longer than almost any other. It began as a brief record of what happened to the seven people who demonstrated in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, among them Velikanova's husband Konstantin Babitskii. By the time the authorities finally suppressed the publication in 1983, it had regular rubrics on emigration, religion, nationalities, psychiatry, prisoners, and the media.
Compared with the websites available now, the legal fragments in "Khronika" look like shards of ancient pottery. In the chronicle's day though, Soviet readers had no right to see the laws that governed them, and what was not expressly permitted was wisest assumed forbidden. "Khronika" published whatever secret decrees came its way, some with enormous implications for human rights -- such as instructions on forcible psychiatric confinement from 1972, residency restrictions on ex-offenders, and rules on prison punishments. It was not until the USSR had collapsed that the new 1991 Russian Constitution included the idea that laws must be accessible to the public if they are to be legal.
Journalists in democracies have a duty to impart information, not merely the right to do so, according to international standards accepted by Russia in 1998 and by those other ex-Soviet republics that have been accepted into the Council of Europe. "Khronika" chose to write in that same spirit 34 years ago, but under the constraints of Soviet censorship. An early issue advises: "Our journal is by no means illegal, but the peculiar notion of freedom of information that has been bred over many years in Soviet institutions prevents us from putting a return address on the back page. If you want the public to know what is going on in the country, give your information to the person who gave you 'Khronika,' and they will pass it on to the person who gave it to them. Only don't try to follow the trail to the end or people will take you for an informer."
In 1979 that trail led to Velikanova and her arrest, but by then it had evidently become a long and intricate one. (Soon afterward a Pentecostalist living 11 time zones away in the Pacific town of Nakhodka was questioned about Velikanova's case.) Well-versed in political trials, Velikanova took no part in the investigation of her own case, refused a defense lawyer, and did not appeal against her nine-year sentence in 1980 for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" -- her only response to the verdict being "The farce is over." She served four years in a Mordovian labor camp, then was exiled to a camel station in Kazakhstan where she worked as a bookkeeper. The first information about women political prisoners and their conditions emerged when she was in Mordovia.
"Khronika" did not anticipate the explosion in information technology that has ripped through the world since 1990, carrying the Russian Federation with it. The chroniclers were caught in an era when Soviet typewriters were identifiable by their registration numbers, photocopiers did not exist, and no one had dreamt of a fax or electronic mail. Velikanova took enormous risks as editor of "Khronika." Apart from the constant danger of arrest, there were the problems of protecting sources, distributing material to trusted people and guarding against fake information supplied by the KGB to discredit the journal. Contributors too took risks. How did they know the journal would represent them fairly? And protect their identity when needed? The continual growth in the chronicle's depth and scope is a counterpoint to Velikanova's own integrity and skill. From the first issue to the last, the same neutral and unassuming voice speaks through its pages -- a voice that must have been very close to her own.
"Khronika" foreshadowed many changes, but two causes it espoused have not been resolved. The Meskhetians and the Crimean Tatars, who were expelled from their homes by Stalin during the Second World War still struggle for full civil rights. The Tatars feature in the chronicle's earliest issues. Their leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, was a member of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights set up by Velikanova and her fellow "Khronika" founders Sergei Kovalev and Tatyana Khodorovich in 1969.
Until she was sacked from the Academy of Sciences in 1977 and began work as a cleaner in a children's hospital, Velikanova engaged in mathematical research. After her release in 1987, she united her two great loves and became a mathematics teacher in a Moscow school, where she still worked at the time of her death at 71. She was shy in public, and in the1990s never became known as a magnet for the foreign media and financiers. A complete set of her edited works survives her, however. "A Chronicle of Current Events" is available in Russian on the website of the human rights group Memorial (http://www.memo.ru) and in English from Amnesty International.
...PRAISES NEW BILL ON RELIGIONS. During a meeting later the same day with Patriarch Volodymyr, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), Lukashenka suggested that he will sign the recently adopted controversial bill on religions in Belarus (see "RFE/RL Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine Report," 8 October 2002). "Some people here reacted to this bill ambiguously, but to be fair, I must say that it does not contain any infringements on the rights of other confessions," Belarusian Television quoted Lukashenka as saying. "It assigns an important role to our traditional confessions that have played and are playing an important role in the culture of our state. Therefore, I think that it is a well-balanced bill...and that it will most likely be signed by the president." JM
UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT FORMS TEAM TO HELP INVESTIGATE KOLCHUGA ALLEGATIONS. President Leonid Kuchma has set up a commission intended to assist international experts in Ukraine in investigating the allegations that Kyiv may have illegally sold Kolchuga radar systems to Baghdad, UNIAN reported on 9 October. The commission is headed by presidential administration chief Viktor Medvedchuk and includes presidential-administration officials responsible for military, security, and trade issues. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have decided not to place Ukraine under scrutiny of a UN Security Council committee pending a U.S. investigation into the Kolchuga allegations, an RFE/RL correspondent in Washington reported the same day. U.S. investigators are expected to arrive in Ukraine later this month. JM
FORMER UKRAINIAN LAWMAKER GETS U.S. ASYLUM. Former Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Yelyashkevych told Reuters on 9 October that he has obtained political asylum in the United States. Yelyashkevych was a deputy of the previous Verkhovna Rada and participated in the work of a special parliamentary commission investigating the death of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze. "I was granted political asylum because of a serious threat to my life that existed and still exists from Kuchma and his entourage," Yelyashkevych told Reuters. In February 2000, Yelyashkevych was attacked by unknown assailants and suffered a concussion. He later maintained that the attack was ordered by President Kuchma. Earlier this year, the "Ukrayinska pravda" website published a transcript of Mykola Melnychenko's secret audio recording on which voices similar to those of Kuchma and then-Security Service chief Leonid Derkach discuss the organization of an attack on Yelyashkevych. JM
WARSAW BACKS DOWN ON PROPOSAL OF UKRAINIAN 'ROUNDTABLE.' President Kwasniewski on 9 October said the conference in Warsaw on 15-16 October that is to be devoted to Ukraine's relations with NATO and the European Union cannot play the role of "roundtable" talks for the Ukrainian authorities and the opposition, PAP reported. Kwasniewski added that calling the conference a "roundtable" is a "misunderstanding." He noted that such talks on Ukrainian affairs "may take place in Kyiv or another place in Ukraine, but not abroad." Many news agencies reported that Polish Premier Leszek Miller during his visit to Lviv last week proposed that representatives of the Ukrainian government and the opposition meet in Warsaw to discuss the current political standoff in Ukraine. In response to this proposal, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma accused Warsaw of interfering in Ukrainian domestic affairs (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 9 October 2002). The same day, Foreign Minister Cimoszewicz also stressed that Miller did not propose to hold "roundtable" talks on the situation on Ukraine in Warsaw, and called the affair a "misunderstanding." JM
The death on 21 September this year of Tatyana Velikanova, the editor of "Khronika tekushchykh sobytii" ("A Chronicle of Current Events"), draws a line under the most remarkable publishing venture of the Soviet era. Although it concentrated on reporting the here-and-now, "Khronika" actually reached far into the future. Some of the issues it highlighted have not been resolved even today.
"Khronika" gave an uncensored account of what was going on in the Soviet Union, and thus prefigured the events of the late 1980s that so surprised the world in a way that "Izvestiya" never could. Before then-CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev launched his policy of "Glasnost" in the late 1980s, you could scour the official press in vain for indications of nationalism in Georgia or Ukraine. By contrast, the pages of "Khronika" traced the lives of some individuals who later became the first to head their republics as independent states, and others who became Nobel laureates or members of the new Russian government.
"Khronika" was the only samizdat journal devoted to human-rights issues (Article 19 of the UN civil rights covenant was its masthead) throughout the Soviet Union and it ran for 14 years -- longer than almost any other. It began as a brief record of what happened to the seven people who demonstrated in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, among them Velikanova's husband Konstantin Babitskii. By the time the authorities finally suppressed the publication in 1983, it had regular rubrics on emigration, religion, nationalities, psychiatry, prisoners, and the media.
Compared with the websites available now, the legal fragments in "Khronika" look like shards of ancient pottery. In the chronicle's day though, Soviet readers had no right to see the laws that governed them, and what was not expressly permitted was wisest assumed forbidden. "Khronika" published whatever secret decrees came its way, some with enormous implications for human rights -- such as instructions on forcible psychiatric confinement from 1972, residency restrictions on ex-offenders, and rules on prison punishments. It was not until the USSR had collapsed that the new 1991 Russian Constitution included the idea that laws must be accessible to the public if they are to be legal.
Journalists in democracies have a duty to impart information, not merely the right to do so, according to international standards accepted by Russia in 1998 and by those other ex-Soviet republics that have been accepted into the Council of Europe. "Khronika" chose to write in that same spirit 34 years ago, but under the constraints of Soviet censorship. An early issue advises: "Our journal is by no means illegal, but the peculiar notion of freedom of information that has been bred over many years in Soviet institutions prevents us from putting a return address on the back page. If you want the public to know what is going on in the country, give your information to the person who gave you 'Khronika,' and they will pass it on to the person who gave it to them. Only don't try to follow the trail to the end or people will take you for an informer."
In 1979 that trail led to Velikanova and her arrest, but by then it had evidently become a long and intricate one. (Soon afterward a Pentecostalist living 11 time zones away in the Pacific town of Nakhodka was questioned about Velikanova's case.) Well-versed in political trials, Velikanova took no part in the investigation of her own case, refused a defense lawyer, and did not appeal against her nine-year sentence in 1980 for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" -- her only response to the verdict being "The farce is over." She served four years in a Mordovian labor camp, then was exiled to a camel station in Kazakhstan where she worked as a bookkeeper. The first information about women political prisoners and their conditions emerged when she was in Mordovia.
"Khronika" did not anticipate the explosion in information technology that has ripped through the world since 1990, carrying the Russian Federation with it. The chroniclers were caught in an era when Soviet typewriters were identifiable by their registration numbers, photocopiers did not exist, and no one had dreamt of a fax or electronic mail. Velikanova took enormous risks as editor of "Khronika." Apart from the constant danger of arrest, there were the problems of protecting sources, distributing material to trusted people and guarding against fake information supplied by the KGB to discredit the journal. Contributors too took risks. How did they know the journal would represent them fairly? And protect their identity when needed? The continual growth in the chronicle's depth and scope is a counterpoint to Velikanova's own integrity and skill. From the first issue to the last, the same neutral and unassuming voice speaks through its pages -- a voice that must have been very close to her own.
"Khronika" foreshadowed many changes, but two causes it espoused have not been resolved. The Meskhetians and the Crimean Tatars, who were expelled from their homes by Stalin during World War II still struggle for full civil rights. The Tatars feature in the chronicle's earliest issues. Their leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, was a member of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights set up by Velikanova and her fellow "Khronika" founders Sergei Kovalev and Tatyana Khodorovich in 1969.
Until she was sacked from the Academy of Sciences in 1977 and began work as a cleaner in a children's hospital, Velikanova engaged in mathematical research. After her release in 1987, she united her two great loves and became a mathematics teacher in a Moscow school, where she still worked at the time of her death at 71. She was shy in public, and in the1990s never became known as a magnet for the foreign media and financiers. A complete set of her edited works survives her, however. "A Chronicle of Current Events" is available in Russian on the website of the human rights group Memorial (http://www.memo.ru) and in English from Amnesty International.