[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 141 (Thursday, October 31, 2002)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1971-E1973]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO TATYANA VELIKANOVA
______
HON. BOB SCHAFFER
of colorado
in the house of representatives
Thursday, October 31, 2002
Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, there are certain times in our lives when
we do well to pause, reflect upon, and honor those outstanding persons
who have fought, at great personal sacrifice, to make a real difference
in the never-ending struggle around the world for basic human rights.
Now is one of those special times for sure.
On September 21 of this year one of the greatest heroines in the long
fight against the horrible human terrors of the Soviet Union died in
Moscow after a battle with cancer at age seventy. Tatyana Velikanova
was a leading champion of the Soviet-era dissident movement. She was
described by Andrei Sakharov, the 1975 Noble Peace Prize winner, as an
``embodiment of the . . . purity and strength of the Soviet human
rights movement.''
Andrei Sakharov lauded Ms. Velikanova in a statement written during
his own banishment from Moscow for her dedication to the cause of the
oppressed, regardless of whether she agreed with their views. ``Her
only consideration was whether someone had suffered injustice,'' he
wrote.
``She was a symbol of the human rights movement,'' said Sergei
Kovalyov in an Associated Press story about her death. Kovalyov, a
prominent dissident who worked alongside Ms. Velikanova, described her
as ``absolutely reliable, a crystally honest person.'' Kovalyov regards
Andrei Sakharov and Tatyana Velikanova as the brightest representatives
of the Soviet human rights movement.
Mr. Speaker, I stand today to honor the amazing life of Tatyana
Velikanova. Freedom-loving people everywhere join us in honoring her
life, her commitment, her courage, her dedication and her long struggle
to tell the world the truth about the unbelievable human rights abuses
perpetrated throughout the Soviet Union for so many long years
including those in the country of my heritage, Ukraine.
Marjorie Farquharson, a writer on human rights issues, wrote in a
recent article published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. ``The
death on 21 September this year of Tatyana Velikanova, the editor of
`Khronika tekushchykh sobytii' (`A Chronicle of Current Events'), draws
a line under the most remarkable publishing venture of the Soviet
era.''
Tatyana Velikanova was arrested in 1979 on charges of ``anti-Soviet
propaganda,'' and received a nine-year sentence, serving four years in
prison camp before being exiled to a desolate part of Kazakhstan.
Mr. Speaker, according to Mr. E. Morgan William, a personal friend of
mine and an expert on Eastern European affairs, ``all those around the
world today who love and support the cause of human rights and basic
human freedom owe a debt to Tatyana Velikanova. Her life and the cause
she fought for must not be forgotten.'' Mr Williams' personal
appreciation of Velikanova has motivated him to articulate the
magnitude of her legacy on a mass scale. In fact, these very remarks
are inspired by his passion for liberty and his devotion to
Velikanova's cause for human dignity.
Williams is right to suggest the conflict is ongoing and the
champions of freedom continue where Velikanova's efforts have ended.
``The fight for basic human rights still goes on today,'' Williams told
me. ``We must step up the long struggle against those who crush the
human spirit and deny people their basic human rights.''
Mr. Speaker, I ask the House to join me now in offering the prayers
and supplications of a thankful nation to the Almighty God of our
country for life and works of His servant, Tatyana Velikanova. May her
soul and all souls of the faithfully departed, through the Mercy of
God, rest in eternal peace.
Finally, Mr. Speaker, I hereby submit for the Record, three published
accounts of Tatyana Velikanova's life. This submission is particularly
important because of the constrained
[[Page E1972]]
press that still exist throughout the former Soviet Union. Even today,
those whose freedom was advanced by the sacrafice of Velikanova are
least likely to be exposed to stories like these that document her
courage.
[lsqb]From the New York Times, Oct. 17, 2002[rsqb]
Tatyana Velikanova, Soviet Human Rights Activist, Dies at Age 70
(By Sophia Kishkovksy)
Moscow, Oct. 14.--Tatyana M. Velikanova, a Soviet human
rights activist who was a leading editor of the most
important samizdat journal of human rights abuses and spent
nearly nine years in prison camp and exile, died of cancer on
Sept. 19. She was 70 and lived in Moscow.
Ms. Velikanova, a mathematician by profession, became a
dissident in 1968, when she went to Red Square with her
husband, Konstantin Babitsky, who was one of only seven
people to demonstrate openly against the Soviet-led invasion
of Czechoslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring reforms.
Mr. Babitsky was arrested and banished for several years to
the far north of Russia. The next year, Ms. Velikanova helped
found the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in
the U.S.S.R., and became the backbone of the Chronicle of
Current Events, a samizdat news bulletin, after the arrest of
its founder, Natalya Gorbanevskaya. The chronicle was the
main uncensored source of information about the dissident
movement around the Soviet Union during the rule of Leonid I.
Brezhnev.
At a time when photocopying machines were rare and kept
literally under lock and key in Soviet offices, the compilers
of the chronicle gathered information and then produced
multiple copies by typing through layers of carbon paper.
The chronicle was written in a dry, telegraphic style, and
defended all repressed groups, from Pentecostal believers to
Jewish refuseniks, Russian Orthodox priests, Georgian
nationalists, deported Crimean Tatars, and intellectuals and
religious believers in the Baltic republics.
Ms. Velikanova herself was an observant Orthodox Christian.
She was arrested in 1979 on charges of ``anti-Soviet
propaganda,'' and a report in the Chronicle around that time
detailed official questioning of her sister about her ties to
the West, as well as the interrogator's relaying his
prisoner's request for a Bible and photographs of her
grandchildren.
Ms. Velikanova received a nine-year sentence, serving four
years in prison camp and then being exiled to a desolate part
of Kazakhstan.
In a statement written during his own banishment from
Moscow to the city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), Andrei D.
Sakharov lauded Ms. Velikanova for her dedication to the
cause of the oppressed, regardless of whether she agreed with
their views. ``Her only consideration was whether someone had
suffered injustice,'' he wrote.
During the reforms of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Ms. Velikanova
was allowed to return to Moscow before her nine-year term was
fully served. In her final years, she lived out of the public
eye, teaching math and Russian language and literature at a
Moscow school until just months before her death.
She is survived by three children, Natalie Babitsky of
France, Fyodor Babitsky of Moscow and Yulia Keidan of Italy;
13 grandchildren; two brothers, Andrew Velihan of Northport,
N.Y., and Kirill Velikanov of Moscow; and two sisters,
Yekaterina Velikanova of Moscow and Mary Velihan Grigorenko
of New York City.
____
[lsqb]From the Boston Globe, Oct. 18, 2002[rsqb]
Tatyana Velikanova, Leading Soviet-Era Dissident, Dies at Age 70
Moscow.--Tatyana Velikanova, a leading member of the
Soviet-era dissident movement who was arrested and jailed for
chronicling human rights abuses by the authorities, has died
in Moscow of cancer. She was 70.
``She was a symbol of the human rights movement,'' Sergei
Kovalyov, a prominent dissident also persecuted by the
authorities, said yesterday. Ms. Velikanova, a mathematician,
first defied the authorities in 1968, when she appeared in
Red Square with her husband and six other people to protest
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After her husband,
Konstantin Babitsky, was arrested, Ms. Velikanova became an
active participant in the dissident movement.
In 1969, Ms. Velikanova helped found the Initiative Group
for the Defense of Human Rights and later played a leading
role in publishing the Chronicle of Current Events, a
samizdat, or self-published bulletin reporting human rights
abuses by the authorities and news about the dissident
movement. The Chronicle was the cornerstone of the dissident
movement for many years.
``She was absolutely reliable, a crystally honest person,''
said Kovalyov, who worked on the Chronicle alongside Ms.
Velikanova until his arrest in 1974. ``For me,
[lsqb]Andrei[rsqb] Sakharov and Velikanova were the brightest
representatives of the Soviet human rights movement.''
Sakharov, who won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his human
rights activities, once hailed Ms. Velikanova as an
``embodiment of the . . . purity and strength of the Soviet
Union's human rights movement.''
Following years of harassment by the authorities, Ms.
Velikanova was arrested in 1979 and sentenced to four years
in a prison camp and five years of exile in the steppes of
western Kazakhstan. She was pardoned by the government in
1987 as part of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms,
but she refused to return to Moscow for another half-year.
For the past decade, Ms. Velikanova taught in Moscow.
____
[lsqb]From Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Oct. 16, 2002[rsqb]
Honoring a Samizdat Pioneer--The Amazing Life of Tatyana Velikanova
(By Marjorie Farquharson)
The death on 21 September this year of Tatyana Velikanova,
the editor of ``Khronika tekushchykh sobytii'' (``A Chronicle
of Current Events''), draws a line under the most remarkable
publishing venture of the Soviet era.
Although it concentrated on reporting the here-and-now,
``Khronika'' actually reached far into the future. Some of
the issues it highlighted have not been resolved even today.
``Khronika'' gave an uncensored account of what was going
on in the Soviet Union, and thus prefigured the events of the
late 1980s that so surprised the world in a way that
``Izvestiya'' never could. Before then-Communist Party
General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev launched his policy of
``glasnost'' in the late 1980s, you could scour the official
press in vain for indications of nationalism in Georgia or
Ukraine. By contrast, the pages of ``Khronika'' traced the
lives of some individuals who later became the first to head
their republics as independent states, and others who became
Nobel laureates or members of the new Russian government.
``Khronika'' was the only samizdat journal devoted to human
rights issues (Article 19 of the UN civil rights covenant was
its masthead) throughout the Soviet Union and it ran for 14
years--longer than almost any other. It began as a brief
record of what happened to the seven people who demonstrated
in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968,
among them Velikanova's husband Konstantin Babitskii. By the
time the authorities finally suppressed the publication in
1983, it had regular rubrics on emigration, religion,
nationalities, psychiatry, prisoners, and the media.
Compared with the websites available now, the legal
fragments in ``Khronika'' look like shards of ancient
pottery. In the chronicle's day through, Soviet readers had
no right to see the laws that governed them, and what was not
expressly permitted was wisest assumed forbidden.
``Khronika'' published whatever secret decrees came its way,
some with enormous implications for human rights--such as
instructions of forcible psychiatric confinement from 1972,
residency restrictions on ex-offenders, and rules on prison
punishments. It was not until the USSR had collapsed that the
new 1991 Russian Constitution included the idea that laws
must be accessible to the public if they are to be legal.
Journalists in democracies have a duty to impart
information, not merely the right to do so, according to
international standards accepted by Russia in 1998 and by
those other ex-Soviet republics that have been accepted into
the Council of Europe. ``Khronika'' chose to write in that
same spirit 34 years ago, but under the constraints of Soviet
censorship. An early issue advises: ``Our journal is by no
means illegal, but the peculiar notion of freedom of
information that has been bred over many years in Soviet
institutions prevents us from putting a return address on the
back page. If you want the public to know what is going on in
the country, give you information to the person who gave you
`Khronika,' and they will pass it on to the person who gave
it to them. Only don't try to follow the trail to the end or
people will take you for an informer.''
In 1979 that trail led to Velikanova and her arrest, but by
then it had evidently become a long and intricate one. (Soon
afterward a Pentecostalist living 11 time zones away in the
Pacific town of Nakhodka was questioned about Velikanova's
case.) Well-versed in political trials, Velikanova took no
part in the investigation of here own case, refused a defense
lawyer, and did not appeal against her nine-year sentence in
1980 for ``anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda''--her only
response to the verdict being ``The farce is over.'' She
served four years in a Mordovian labor camp, then was exiled
to a camel station in Kazakhstan where she worked as a
bookkeeper. The first information about women political
prisoners and their conditions emerged when she was in
Mordovia.
``Khronika'' did not anticipate the explosion in
information technology that has ripped through the world
since 1990, carrying the Russian Federation with it. The
chroniclers were caught in an era when Soviet typewriters
were identifiable by their registration numbers, photocopiers
did not exist, and no one had dreamt of a fax or electronic
mail. Velikanova took enormous risks as editor of
``Khronika.'' Apart from the constant danger of arrest, there
were the problems of protecting sources, distributing
material to trusted people and guarding against fake
information supplied by the KGB to discredit the journal.
Contributors too took risks. How did they know the journal
would represent them fairly? And protect their identity when
needed?
The continual growth in the chronicle's depth and scope is
a counterpoint to Velikanova's own integrity and skill. From
[[Page E1973]]
the first issue to the last, the same neutral and unassuming
voice speaks through its pages--a voice that must have been
very close to her own.
``Khronika'' foreshadowed many changes, but two causes it
espoused have not been resolved. The Meskhetians and the
Crimean Tartars, who were expelled from their homes by Stalin
during World War II still struggle for full civil rights. The
Tartars feature in the chronicle's earliest issues. Their
leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, was a member of the Initiative
Group for the Defense of Human Rights set up by Velikanova
and her fellow ``Khronika'' founder Sergei Kovalev and
Tatyana Khodorovich in 1969.
Until she was sacked from the Academy of Sciences in 1977
and began work as a cleaner in a children's hospital,
Velikanova engaged in mathematical research. After her
release in 1987, she united her two great loves and became a
mathematics teacher in a Moscow school, where she still
worked at the time of her death at 71. She was shy in public,
and in the 1990s never became known as a magnet for the
foreign media and financiers. A complete set of her edited
works survives her, however. ``A Chronicle of Current
Events'' is available in Russian on the website of the human
rights group Memorial (http://www.memo.ru) and in English
from Amnesty International.