Word: yakir
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...move in "Case No. 24," as the campaign against the Chronicle is called by the KGB, was the arrest of Historian Pyotr Yakir, 49 (TIME, July 3), for protesting Soviet violations of civil rights. The son of a Red Army general who was executed during the military purges in 1937, Yakir spent his childhood and much of his adult life in prison. Before his rearrest last June, he told friends that he felt he no longer had the strength to resist torture. He is reportedly under brutal KGB pressure to denounce his associates, some of whom are suspected of being...
...freedom in Russia-was being subjected to increasingly ominous pressure. Physicist Valery Chalidze, a leader of the unauthorized "Human Rights Committee," has twice been summoned by the KGB and threatened with "repression"-secret-police jargon for imprisonment. This action, in the wake of the arrest of Dissident Pyotr Yakir (TIME, July 3), suggested that the next target would be the leading member of the committee, the world-famous nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov...
...Yakir practically grew up in Stalinist concentration camps. At the age of 14, he was swept up in the mass arrests of 1937, the year his father, Major General lona Yakir, was executed during Joseph Stalin's purge of the Red Army. Pyotr Yakir was released after 17 years and rehabilitated as part of Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign in 1956. It is rare-and therefore especially ominous-for the Soviet authorities to rearrest a former inmate of a Stalinist labor camp...
...muffling Yakir, the KGB has probably succeeded in further demoralizing the apparently shrinking circle of scientists, writers and scholars active in the Soviet Union's self-styled "civil rights movement." A number of prominent dissidents, mostly Jews like Yakir, have recently been pressured into emigrating (TIME, June 19). However, a hard core of activists is obviously determined to keep the movement alive. Physicist Andrei Sakharov, father of the Russian hydrogen bomb and a leading critic of the current regime, last week released a letter he had written to Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, protesting the increase of "persecution for political...
...very day that Yakir was arrested, the 25th issue of the Chronicle of Current Events, the Soviet equivalent of an underground press, began circulating through Moscow's samizdat (self-publishing) network. It was the fourth issue to appear since the Central Committee of the Communist Party ordered the Chronicle stopped last December...