It is clear that during the past few weeks there has been a definite tightening of the screw in repressions against the Jewish movement. Refusals of exit visas to would-be emigrants at the Moscow Emigration Office have multiplied. Specialists and professionals have been particularly prominent amongst the refusals. Leonid Byelpolsky is a medical doctor specialising … Read more
The blatant abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union already has a long history. Special psychiatric hospitals as prisons for “political criminals” were first established in the late 1930s by Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet Prosecutor-General and ringmaster of the Stalinist show trials as a way of dealing with some of the victims provided by Nikolai … Read more
Latest reports from Minsk indicate that the KGB investigation of Yefim Davidovich-Gedalya Kipnis case is moving to a close and that a big show-trial of Jews will take place shortly. On February 1, the KGB instigated a second series of searches of Jewish homes in Minsk, during which all books in Hebrew and Yiddish about … Read more
The trial of Lazar Liubarsky at Rostov-on-Don in February has received wide publicity in the free world. But it is only the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface lurk an unknown number of similar cases of Jews arrested on trumped-up charges, and perhaps brought to trial, with the aim of discouraging others from attempting … Read more
On December 1 1972, the KGB searched the house of Colonel Yefim Davidovich in Minsk. Notes on the Jewish question in the Soviet Union, works of anti-fascist writers, cuttings from the Soviet press and his personal diaries were taken and he was placed under arrest. Although he is an invalid due to a bad heart … Read more