Human Rights on Trial (Contd.)

Moscow convicts another dissident, harasses a diplomat

Undaunted by the world outcry against the trials and convictions of Anatoli Shcharansky and two other Soviet dissidents, Moscow last week moved to silence another human rights activist. Attorney Lev Lukyanenko, 50, went on trial in the small Ukrainian town of Gorodnya near Kiev on charges of "anti-Soviet agitation." The pattern of the proceedings was much the same as in the previous trials. Like Shcharansky, Alexander Ginzburg and Viktoras Petkus, Lukyanenko refused to make a public confession, despite seven months of pretrial interrogation. Instead, he went on a hunger strike when the summary four-day trial began, refused to accept a court-appointed attorney, and conducted his own defense. Paying heavily for his defiance, he was sentenced to the maximum under the law: ten years of hard labor in a concentration camp and five years of Siberian exile. Shcharansky had received 13 years, without a term of exile, on the graver charge of treason.

Lukyanenko had been a founding member of an unofficial Helsinki Watch Committee, set up to monitor Soviet compliance with the 1975 declaration of human rights signed in Helsinki. Of the eleven original members of Lukyanenko's group, which is based in the Ukraine, only five remain free; their leader, Mykola Rudenko, and three others were sentenced to long terms in labor camps after trials in 1977 and 1978. The singularly harsh sentence meted out to Lukyanenko may have been intended as an object lesson to the U.S.S.R.'s largest and most troublesome minority, its 41 million Ukrainians.

Proud of their nation's cultural heritage, the Ukrainians have long chafed under Russian-imposed restraints on their language, their literature and their independent spirit.

That spirit was exemplified by Lukyanenko, who boldly helped found the unofficial Ukrainian Workers and Peasants Union in 1959. Its platform: secession from the U.S.S.R.--a right that is theoretically guaranteed by the 1936 Soviet constitution--and the establishment of an independent socialist Ukraine. In 1961 Lukyanenko was tried for treason and condemned to death by shooting. His sentence was later commuted to 15 years. After his release, he joined forces with other human rights activists, brought together by the Helsinki Committees' commitment to a variety of causes, including Jewish emigration and religious freedom.

Meanwhile, the Soviets have also stepped up their harassment of U.S. residents in Moscow, which has already resulted in the arrest of one businessman and the conviction of two newsmen on charges of libel (see LAW). Last week, as Second Secretary Raymond F. Smith walked across the grounds of the U.S. embassy, two Soviet policemen grabbed him roughly from behind, wrestled him and tore his jacket. Though the policemen had no right to enter the embassy grounds, it was later claimed that they had mistaken the American for a Soviet citizen Smith was the Foreign Service officer who had been assigned by the U.S. to observe and report on Shcharansky's trial.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.