Walter Ruby - Special To The
Jewish Week
A number of renowned former dissidents and prisoners of
conscience from the former Soviet Union believe that President Bush
is betraying the cause of democracy by claiming Russian President
Vladimir Putin as an ally in the war against terrorism.
Vladimir Bukovsky, a human rights activist who spent more
than 10 years in prisons, camps and psychiatric hospitals during the
1960s and 1970s, told The Jewish Week, “Bush’s position of equating
the Russian war on Chechnya with America’s war on Islamic terrorism
disturbs me. The Chechens are not Islamic fundamentalists but rather
a people defending their motherland from invasion.”
Bukovsky’s comments came after he addressed a Nov. 4 dinner
at the headquarters of the American Jewish Committee in Manhattan to
honor former Soviet dissidents.
Yuri Yarin-Agaev, a leader
of the Moscow Helsinki Group until he was exiled from the Soviet
Union in 1980, said, “Putin does not deserve the support of George
W. Bush. It’s an illusion that Russia is a genuine partner. It is
impossible to have a democratic state that is controlled by people
from the KGB.”
Eduard Kuznetsov, who was sentenced to death
at the infamous Leningrad Trial of 1969 for plotting to hijack a
plane out of the Soviet Union, but later had his death sentence
commuted and immigrated to Israel, said that “Bush is guilty for
supporting Putin even though he is taking Russia back into
authoritarianism. When Bush first met Putin, he said he looked into
his honest eyes. That’s really laughable.”
Attendees at the
event organized on behalf of the Gratitude Fund, which raises money
to help former dissidents and prisoners of conscience who are sick
or living in poverty, also heard Tatyana Yankelevich, daughter of
Elena Bonner and the late dissident Andrei Sakharov, read a recent
article written by her mother from Moscow.
In the article,
Bonner asserted that under Putin, “The [Russian] Constitution was
demolished. The two-chamber parliament was destroyed … the elections
violated [and] independent courts are being liquidated … The war in
Chechnya, monstrous by its cruelty, goes on. And the Russian
authorities are deceiving the whole world by presenting this war as
a struggle against international terrorism.”
Yuri Federov, a
non-Jewish human rights activist who served 15 years in the gulag
for his part in the “airplane plot,” is the organizer of the
Gratitude Fund.
“Our main point is to provide financial
support to former prisoners of conscience who are still living in
Russia,” said Federov, who lives in upstate New York. “Many are old
and sick and the state does nothing to help them besides providing
tiny pensions that are not enough to live on. These fighters for
freedom who helped to bring down the Soviet Union receive no
recognition in a country that today glorifies the exploits of the
KGB.”
While the event had a sobering theme and a melancholy
flavor, as participants read the names of comrades in the human
rights struggle who have died in recent years, there were some
light-hearted moments. Former dissidents and prisoners of
conscience, who gathered from around the world for the occasion, ate
heartily, saluted each other with wine and vodka, and reminisced
over old times when the possibility that any of them would ever live
in freedom seemed remote.
“It is good that through all the
changes, the links forged decades ago between Russian dissidents and
the Jewish community remain strong,” said Yarin-Agaev. “The fact is
that no Jew can feel secure until there is democracy in Russia.”
Sam Kliger, a refusenik in Moscow during the 1980s and today
the coordinator of Russian Jewish Affairs at the AJCommittee, paid
tribute to legendary former prisoners of conscience in the room,
including physicist Yuri Orlov and philosopher Alexander
Esenin-Volpin, both of whom recently turned 80.
Kliger told
the assembled fighters for democracy in the Soviet Union during the
’60s and ’70s, “My generation mostly fought to exit the Soviet
Union, but you fought for a broader and nobler cause, namely how to
build an open society with a free press and democratic government.
You represent the best of the Russian intelligentsia. We learned
from you how not to be afraid.” n | 
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