Communist Dissidents: The Memory Hole

By HP-Time-com

Communist Dissidents: The Memory Hole The readiness of many Westerners, from political leaders to street demonstrators, to denounce repression in Spain is rarely extended to the totalitarian Communist countries. Yet from their very beginnings, the Eastern European regimes made a practice of coldly liquidating their opponents on charges of "terrorism"--usually fabricated. Even today these regimes hold political executions on occasion (almost never anNOT nounced), while the most peaceful forms of ideological, religious and national dissent are still punished by long terms at hard labor. The most compelling example: the Ukrainian nationalists in the Soviet Union. Unlike the Basque separatists in Spain, they call for nothing more radical than the wider use of the Ukrainian language in schools and other forms of cultural autonomy for their 48.5 million countrymen. For this, hundreds of Ukrainians in the past decade have been sentenced to terms of up to 14 years in camps or committed to prison lunatic asylums. Still, the names of Valentyn Moroz, Leonid Plyushch, Ivan Svitlychny, Ihor and Iryna Kalynets and other Ukrainian political prisoners are scarcely known in the West. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, other obscure and often heroic dissidents have also disappeared with equal finality into what George Orwell called "the memory hole." Only one case in a Communist country has provoked Western out rage commensurate with the reaction to the Spanish executions. That was when the death penalty was imposed on two out of eleven would-be hijackers in Leningrad in 1970. Western leaders chorused appeals for clemency. The Soviet supreme court ultimately commuted the sentences to 15 years at hard labor. Ironically, the Soviet decision was prompted less by the worldwide protest than by Franco's decision to commute the death sentences of six Basque nationalists scheduled to die at the same time.

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