Hopkins, Vol. 6 "The Network"

"To use the term 'editors' is necessary but imprecise shorthand for discussing those who produce the underground publication. PErsons once involved in final stages of Chronicle issues repeatedly have said in interviews that there really have been no Chronicle "editors" in the larger sense of person who plan and direct Chronicle coverage. "Compiler" seems the more accurate description of Chronicle editors' actual functions, for they usually have had little to say about what information reached them and most frequently have been responsible for assembling what information they did receive into readable, coherent form." (H,119)

"Outside of the small group in Moscow that has provided continuity for overall production responsibility, there has been a larger corps of correspondents, informants, messengers, writers, typists, couriers and distributors without the Chronicle would have remained the narrowly focused brief bulletin it was in 1968. Now a periodical of 100 pages and more per issue, the Chronicle probable ranks in the numbers of people producing it with a large newspaper." -second round

"What would be called the 'news flow' in an American periodical has developed in the Chronicle case with remarkable efficiency. It has improved over the years as the network spread, connecting not only the sources of news but readers and user of Chronicle information both inside the Soviet Union and abroad. The KGB seems to have been unable to halt the Chronicle news flow, and indeed may have decided that the most difficult task in attempts to silence the publication. For Chronicle information moves through successive hands to typed pages in a private world of special and close peripheral relationships. It may be remembered that in the first months of the infant Chronicle, Natalia Gorbanevskaya..."-how to get them info (H,120)

"This system has functioned for years with impressive reliability and accuracy, while also protecting the Chronicle. Even persons who lived in Moscow and knew active dissidents and who themselves were involved in the democratic movement usually did not know who compiled the Chronicle." (H, 120)

"To discuss the organization of the Chronicle is virtually a contradiction in terms. Those who have worked on the Chronicle describe an amorphous, undisciplined process in which participants pass slips of paper with handwritten notes brought from Siberia or carry a few sheets of type-written paper across Moscow to another apartment. Trust in one another and deep commitment to promoting the practice of civil rights nurtured voluntary and self-discipline work on the Chronicle. It has been a system devoid of directives and commands, as well editorial assignments." (H, 121

"News from labor camps also flowed naturally to the Chronicle, as wives and friends of dissidents returned from remote Siberian prisons to pass on information. The Soviet labor camps eventually became something of a seive for information." (H, 121)

Ginzburg interview:

"The basic thing is that there are lots of political prisoners. Each one is sentenced to a certain period of time, so no month passes when someone is not release. NAturally, e can carry a good deal of information from the camps. When you leave the camp you feel like a "stuffed duck," we'd say. For three months before you are scheduled for release,, people are giveing you information to pass on. After I got out, I'd remember things in my sleep and I'd wake up and write them down.

Then you would write down things in the camps and smuggle those out. It's hard, but not impossible. I managed to get a copy of the labor camp rules smuggled out. In 1969, we made a tape recording inside a camp and smuggled that out and Voice of America broadcast it. We thought about smuggling for 24 hours a day." (H 121-122)

Bukobsky interview

"The information comes by devious routes. Some is carried when a fellow is released from the camps. THere would be a contact somewhere along the line after he left. Or you could bribe prison guards so that when you met with relatives, you could pass written information or verbal information. Then the relatives might stop in Moscow and pass on what you said." (H, 122)

"Trials of dissidents are an obvious source of news for the Chronicle. Although ostensible public, the trials usually have been held in courtrooms packed with KGB crowds. But when friends of dissident could argue their way info the courts, they would make careful notes of procedures.  It was risky business, for the notetaker was automatically identified to the KGB and he or she invited arrest of questioning. In later years, friend of dissidents smuggled small tape recorders into courtrooms. From these recordings came the unusual transcripts of trials published by the Chronicle." (H, 123)

123: by mid '70s full proceedings

"Time and again, as Soviet authorities attempted to stage political trials in the form of authentic proceedings, the Chronicle published embarrassing verbatim texts showing judges refusing to hear dissidents' evidence, or prosecutors and investigators distorting facts and of judges handing down sentences against all rational consideration of original charges." (H, 123-124)

127: estimate 20-40 people involved in final stages of an issue
early years just NG

129: flaws

"One can find similar imbalances in the early years of the Chronicle regarding religious affairs, pr the vast Soviet rural population, or workers' grievances, or women's rights. The Chronicle was the child of Moscow intellectuals concerned with rights of speech and press. Successive issues of the Chronicle attracted readers with like attitudes, ready to contribute like information. Grigorenko's special interest in the Crimean Tartars, Alexeyeva's contacts with the Ukranians, and Kovalev's connections with Lithuanians likewise accounted for some earlier editorial themes." (H, 129)

"THe surrogate Chronicles in London, New York, and Munich have become important in their own right as outlets for Soviet internal news. Their circumstances allowed editors leeway in shaping publications, although the Kline-Chalidze Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR or Lyubarsky USSR News Brief found themselves limited, too, by the available channels of information from the Soviet Union. (H,130)

THe Chronicle of Current Events that is translated and printed by Amnesty International has become an unequaled source of photographs of Soviet human rights activists. Smuggled from the Soviet Union and reproduced beginning in the volume containing Chronicle nos. 28-31... (H,130)

News reports that have reached New York and Munich from Moscow have come through many channels. Recall that the Kline-Chalidze Chronicle was started in the spring of 1973, after it seemed that the Moscow Chronicle had been silenced. With that Moscow outlet closed information flowed to New York." (H,130)

Reddaway interview: "We were amazed at the volume of material forwarded to use; it was really enormous, so much so that it was never able to fit all the available material in one issue. THe sources are many: for instance, we have recieved a great deal from the so-called democratic circles, the humanists, as it were, of the Soviet movement for human rights. We have received, and still receiving, a lot of material from labor camps, psychiatric institutions, and from the activists of the Jewish Exodus movement. " (H,130-131)

"This underground stream of documents from the Soviet Union to to Western Europe and the United States began as a trickle in the mid-1960s. THe volume had become so great by 1972 that the Munich-based Radio Liberty assembled enough samizdat to produce four volumes averaging more than 600 pages each. These formed the basis of a samizdat archive, directed initially by Albert Boiter, that grew to tens of thousands of pages of material. In 1973 and 1074, when the New York Chronicle was getting underway, the Radio Liberty Arkhiv Samizdata averaged more than 3500 pages of documents from the Soviet Union each year."(H,131)

"This material was being smuggled or simply carried out of the Soviet Union by Western correspondents, by tourists and diplomats. Some was being sent in diplomatic pouches. The early issues of the Chronicle itself were slipped into the sealed diplomatic mail of the Moscow embassies of Italy, the United STates, France and Canada, although not necessarily with the ambassador's knowledge. Letters sent to Vienna and Helsinki from Moscow successfully carried samizdat. Addressed to these "neutral" capitals, they seemed to pass Soviet surveillance of international mail more readily than letters going else where in Western Europe. " (H, 131)

"There was little risk in these enterprises, and so the samizdat flow surged by the year. At worst, a foreigner carrying samizdat out of the Soviet Union would be searched and the material confiscation...But for every piece of samizdat the KGB found, hundreds of other documents streamed out of the Soviet Union." (H, 131)

"The surrogate Chronicles have been directed to two large audiences. One iabroad, largely in the United States and WEstern Europe, and composed of journalists, government officials, human rights advocates attached to various civic organizations, and scholars. The other audience is the Soviet population itself. Some 2,000 copies of the Russian translation of each issue of the Chronicle of Human Rights in the Soviet Union are printed and most of those are intended for the Soviet Union. In addition, Khronka Press has reprinted Russian copies of the Moscow Chronicle as issues have been recieved in New York. The pressrun has gotten up to as many as 1200 and these too are meant to be smuggled into the Soviet Union." (H, 133)

Hopkins Vol. 1 "Resistance"

Hopkins, Mark. Russia’s Underground Press: The Chronicle of Current Events.” New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983.


"They were all acutely aware that information five to Western correspondents in Moscow about arrests and trials about ominous reports of hunger strikes in labor camps, and of life there among political prisoners could be transmitted in foreign broadcasts. Sometimes it was just a matter of hours after a document was given to an American news agency in Moscow that a foreign radio report about the event could be heard in shortwave programs in Moscow. The British Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Livbery, Duetsche Welle and Voice of America Russian-language broadcasts circumvented the Soviet censorship administration for the press, radio, television, literature and general publishing. These reports in turn attracted new sources of information, nurturing a grapevine of civil rights news. Khushchev had halted blanket jamming of foreign radio broadcasts in Russian in 1963, with the exception of the officially despised Radio Liberty, whose special focus on internal Soviet political events made it a category unto itself. People could listen to all the foreign news they wanted in the mid-1960s in the Soviet Union. The tacit foreign radio stations was creating a vast information network reporting to the mass Soviet audience independently of the Glavit organization.

"The information network among the dissidents themselves operated on the basis of personal knowledge and trust and sometimes out of sheer chance. It happened like this: Larisa Bogoraz, wife of Yuly Daniel, was on the train traveling to see her imprisoned husband. She met the wife of Valery Ronkin, who also, it turned out, was on a trip to visit her husband in the same Siberian labor camp. Ronkin was an unfamiliar name to Moscow dissidents. A Leningrader, Ronkin had been arrested in 1965 for antistate activities after the KGB broke up a clandestine and preached a truly workers' state. It was called the Union of Communards and preached a truly workers' state. In the conspiratorial fashion of earlier illegal Russian Marxist circles, the group met in secret. It published a samizdat journal called The Bell on a clandestine printing press...Even after the KGB penetrated the Union of communards and imprisoned Ronkin, not many in the Soviet Union, let alone the outside world, knew about him or his group, such was the compartmental quality of of Soviet life, especially concerning dissident political and police matters. The Moscow dissidents thus learned of the Ronkin case only when two wives met to share common information about their imprisoned husbands. (H, 8-9)" 

"What was happening, then, as trials picked up in the Soviet Union of the late 1960s and as dissidents met and talked was a growing awareness of a pattern of events. That some of this information was obtained by Western correspondents and that some of it was broadcast back to the Soviet Union in Russian served to document and enlarge the dissidents' picture of their society. For they suffered from a sense of isolation and ignorance of daily events in the Soviet Union, where authorities ensure that the mass media present a narrow and particular portrait of the country. In the late 1960s, Soviet dissidents only graduating assembled facts to convince them that the post-Khrushchev leadership was undertaking a deliberate policy of repression. (H,9) 


10-11: Dologprudny meeting


"There were a series of get-togethers among the increasingly active dissidents in the late winter and early spring of 1968. There was no organization, no specific leaders, no agendas, no records-none of the paraphenalia that goes on with planned, orderly action. Natalia Gorbanevskaya remembers talking with Ilya Gabai, among others, before the first issue of "The Chronicle" appeared and deciding that a bulletin of some kind must be issued to publicize the mounting information they had on hand... (H, 10)"


-it was an informal decision 10-11

"The Dolgoprudny meeting ended with an understanding that Natalia Gorbanevskaya would produce some sort of "bulletin" reporting information from friends of the group and anyone else about the persectutions underway. It still had no name. It would be typed because that was how virtually all samizdat was produced in the Soviet Union. The general Soviet public, then or now, did not nor does not have access top printing presses or even mimeograph machines, let alone electonic copiers. Anything produced on Soviet state presses, in any case, is censored by Glavit. This is to say that the talk in 1968 of putting out a private, unofficial "bulletin" readily translated in the minds of those involved into a few typed carbon copies of the samizdat that would be circulated among friends, one of the copies being reserved for a contact in the Western press corps in Moscow. (H,12)


Paradox: "Its main intent was to publicize violations of human rights in the Soviet Union, especially the lesser known incidents, and thereby draw what dissidents thought would be curative world opinion to the Soviet malady. The group set out to be neither clandestine on public activities and confined itself scrupulously within the limits of written Soviet law. (H,12)  


12: didn't think it would survive


"The Chronicle group shunned conscious, planned secrecy. They regarded that tactic as too similar to the Bolsheviks, to the Leninst concept of a political movement" (H,13)


"The Chronicle group believed more in public action, in holding a mirror to the the Soviet social syste built by Stalin. They wanted little more than the civil liberties ensured in the 1936 "Stalin constitution."  (H,13)


"Yet, as Gorbanevskaya began preparing the first issue of the Chronicle, the work was per force and by habit and practice more of a clandestine operation than a public petition. It was the opposite of how the dissidents, in their more idealistic moments, hoped to function." (H, 13)


"Two specific phrases proved important to the Chronicle-in article 70, the words "slanderous fabrication that discredit," and in article 190-1, "deliberately false statement derogatory" to the Soviet state. The KGB and Soviet courts were to use these time and time again to argue that the Chronicle was an illegal publication." 


"In compiling a bulletin bout protests and objections to the Soviet government and about  reprisals against individuals who challenged authorities, Gorbanevskaya had to conduct herself carefully. She could not use the telepone to obtain information, for everyone knew that the KGB tapped private phones. She could not, without some risk, carry notes with information on her person. It was risky for her, and it was risky for those who supplied her. KGB experts could trace people by their handwriting. Traveling around spread-out Moscow in crowded buses or the metro took hours our of a day if one wanted personally to talk with friends. Gorbanevskaya had to keep a file of information in her apartment. The KGB could search apartments whenever they chose. She had no readily available  reference books on Soviet law to check criminal proceedings. She had no archive, no file of newspaper or magazine clippings against which to check names, dates, places and events. It was like putting together a bulletin out of a shoebox, relying on one's own memory or the memory and exactness of others." (H, 15) 


"The KGB could connect documents and typewriters. Each machine, like fingerprints, has its own its own typeface characteristics. One had to be careful in writing samizdat that it could not be traced through other items typed on the same machine." (H, 16)


17: Human Rights Year


17: she gave birth, came back and finished it up

Uncensored Russia Vol. 2- S & D

"Two important points emerge. First, the Chronicle's aim is openness, non-secretiveness, freedom of information and expression. All these notions are subsumed in the one Russian word glasnost. (R, 26)"

"The Chronicle regards itself as lefal because it merely compiles an accurate recrod of events and there is truth there can--legally speaking--be no 'libel'. 'anti-Soviet' or otherwise( R, 26)."

"Anonymity, let us recall, has seemed to the Chronicle's editors a regretabble necessity, forced on them by the authorities regard for legality. (R, 29)"

That confidence has grown still more when the maximum cross-checking against the Soviet press, reports from Western documents has confirmed the Chronicle's accuracy and revealed no serious errors at all (R, 29)."

R. is GLOWING

"As for the correspondents' own sources, these vary widely. In the compiling of trial accounts, for example, many people--including defendants witnesses and lawyers-- who have been present either at the original trial or at the appeal hearing, can help. In addition leaks of information and even of documents (176-183) sometimes provide material from official institutions...(R, 30)"

30: Correspondent's network-look how impressive
reaches the west 2 weeks to 2 months

32: audience

33: KGB

54 (1)": We are not illegal, how to send them info

55 (2): discussion of their tone
"Samizdat had a dual right to figure in the Chronicle: first, in so far as a part of expressly devoted to te question of human rights; secondly, the whole of samizdat is an example of freedom of speech and the press of creative freedom and freedom of conscience, put into practice.

58 (7): please be careful about submitting information-avoid inacurracies

61-64: letter re: S & D

66: White book and subsequent protests