Colin Shindler

The rejection by the Ukrainian Appeal Court in Kiev on December 27 of Alexander Feldman’s appeal against his sentence to three and a half years in a forced labour camp for “hooliganism” does not provide much encouragement for a change of attitude by the Soviet authorities in 1974. The KGB’s offensive against the Jewish exodus … Read more

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

It’s almost ten years since Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in Novy Mir, the Soviet cultural periodical. This was the first time that the Soviet reader was officially given the facts, even if in fictional form, about the spiritless, monotonous brutality of a labour camp in the USSR. Today Solzhenitsyn’s … Read more

On 3 August the Council of Ministers of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR passed a resolution to levy a ‘diploma tax’ on all Jews who wished to go to Israel. This meant basically that all qualified Jews have to pay back the cost of their education to the Soviet government before emigrating. The tax … Read more

One of the oddest cases of Jews trying to settle in Israel is that of Naum Alshansky of Minsk. together with his wife, Clara, Naum recently wrote to Meir Vilner, the leader of Israel’s Moscow-oriented Communist party, Rakah. They firmly declared themselves to be Marxist-Leninists and requested membership of Rakah so that they could continue … Read more

In July 1969, six young Jews, Shimon Grillius, Yuri and Valery Vudka, Oleg frolov, Shimon Zaslavskyand Yevgeny Martimonov were arrested in Riazan in the Lithuanian soviet socialist Republic and charged under Articles 70 and 72 of the Soviet Criminal Code which deals with anti-soviet propaganda. The trial began on February 10 1970 behind closed doors. … Read more