The other hunger strikes
Bohdan Nahaylo
At the end of October at least 300 dissenters imprisoned in Soviet labour camps went on hunger strike or refused to do forced labour as part of their longstanding campaign for better conditions and political status. True to form, the Soviet press, ever ready to publicise and support protests of this kind when they take place outside the Soviet bloc, failed to report this development. Instead, it was left to Yelena Bonner, the spirited wife of the Nobel prizewinner Dr Andrei Sakharov, to organise a press conference for Western correspondents in her Moscow flat just as her husband used to do before he was forcibly exiled by the authorities to the city of Gorky. 'Repression of human rights activists has got steadily worse in recent years,' she told the reporters, 'and the position of political prisoners in the camps is deteriorating all the time'. For this reason a large number of those regarding themselves as political prisoners have declared token hunger strikes or work stoppages.
How different it was earlier this year when the Soviet media were more than eager to report on the hunger strikes by Irish republican prisoners in the Maze prison. For several months, Soviet commentators made maximum use of these protests to condemn London's 'repressive colonial policy' towards Northern Ireland and the 'atrocities of the British authorities' in that region. The fact that the IRA hunger strikers had been convicted of offences involving the use of violence was played down and did not deter the Soviet media from accusing the British Government of carrying out 'political murders' by refusing to give in to the protesters' demands. The hunger strikers, Aleksander Chakovsky, editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, told Radio Moscow on 3 September, were simply 'demanding elementary rights for themselves and for the people of the same creed as themselves'. The problem as seen from Moscow was, however, that 'the present British rulers who follow the Washington Administration on all major political issues automatically equate champions for independence and civil rights with "terrorists" '.
Soviet double standards and hypocrisy on this issue are amply illustrated by the cases of two men, an Irishman, Bobby Sands and an Estonian, Yuri Kukk, both of whom recently died on hunger strikes and have become martyrs to their causes. In Soviet eyes, Sands was a 'fighter for civil rights' and the 'symbol of the struggle for a different future'. From the age of 18, Moscow Radio's home service told listeners on 5 May, Sands 'was already involved against colonial .repression and injustice towards the Catholic minority' in Northern Ireland and as a result of this was 'arrested and thrown into prison a number of times'. The reasons for his detention on these occasions were not spelled out. On the following day Moscow Radio added that the last time Sands was arrested 'he was with three friends; the four of them had one pistol, but that was enough to sentence young Bobby Sands to 14 years in prison'. He and his colleague, Francis Hughes, gave up their lives, TASS explained on 13 May, 'in order to show that one cannot suppress the struggle of patriots in Northern Ireland, that it is better to die than suffer constant humiliation'.
If the death of Bobby Sands was reported loudly around the world, the tragic fate of Yuri Kukk attracted virtually no attention in the West and was completely ignored by the Soviet media. Kukk, an Estonian patriot, was an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Tartu. One of his professional colleagues, Graham Hills, the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde, wrote in a letter to The Times (28 May) that a 'milder, less offensive man would have been difficult to find'. Born in 1940, this unassuming scientist was for 12 years a Communist Party member. He began to question the Soviet system in 1977 upon returning to Estonia after a sabbatical year spent work ing in a laboratory outside Paris. After being threatened with forcible confinement in a psychiatric hospital, he was dismissed from his job. Denied permission to emigrate, he joined forces with Mart Niklus, a leading Estonian campaigner for human and national rights, and became an active dissenter. At the end of 1979, along with other Baltic activists, Kukk signed statements condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — comparing the fate of that country to that which had befallen the three small Baltic states after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. He also supported the boycott of the Moscow Olympics. At no time did Kukk or Niklus use or advocate violence. Nevertheless, after a period of harassment by the authorities, both men were arrested in the spring of 1980.
For six months the threat of confinement for an indefinite period in an asylum for the criminally insane hung over Kukk. At one stage he was taken for pyschiatric examination to the notorious Serbsky Institute in Moscow. In November, upon being returned to Estonia for trial, he began a hunger strike in protest against his detention. He was brought to trial in early January already in a weakened state. Kukk was charged with 'anti-Soviet slander', while his co-defendent, Mart Niklus, was accused of a more serious offence — 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda'. The latter, a second offender, was branded by the court as an 'especially dangerous recidivist' and given a 15-year sentence. Kukk was given a milder sentence of two years. The authorities then proceeded to violate Soviet law by transporting him to a labour camp hundreds of miles away in the cold north of Russia: a person convicted of 'anti-Soviet slander' cannot legally be sent to serve his sentence outside of the republic in which he lives. Kukk continued his hunger strike. On 27 March, his wife received a telegram informing her that he had died. When she attended the funeral in a remote district some 400 kilometers east of Leningrad, she was not even allowed to take photographs of her husband's grave which is marked only bY his prison number — 23718. As far as the Soviet authorities were concerned, Kukk could in no way be considered a non-violent campaigner for civil rights and for the rights of his nation. He was simply a convicted anti-Soviet 'common' criminal. After all, as Soviet spokesmen are at pains to point out, there are no 'political prisoners in the USSR.
Significantly, the present campaign for political status by imprisoned Soviet dissenters comes at a time when the multifarious Soviet human rights movement is at a low ebb, having been debilitated by a major assault against it. How ironic it would be if the favourable coverage of the Irish hunger strikers' cam paign in the Soviet press has provided fresh impetus for protests by the numerous Soviet citizens languishing in Soviet labour camps and prisons solely for peacefully expressing their dissent.
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