A Chronicle of Current Events
A Chronicle of Current Events No 11,
31 December 1968 (front cover) |
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| Editor |
List of editors
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|---|---|
| Categories | human rights movement in the Soviet Union, political repression in the Soviet Union, political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, samizdat |
| Frequency | Bimonthly / quarterly |
| Publisher | Soviet human rights movement |
| Year founded | 1968 |
| Final issue | August 1983 |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Based in | Moscow |
| Language | (translated since 1971) |
| Website | A Chronicle of Current Events |
A Chronicle of Current Events (Russian: Хро́ника теку́щих собы́тий) was one of the longest-running samizdat periodicals of the post-Stalin USSR. The unofficial publication reported violations of civil rights and judicial procedure by the Soviet government and responses to those violations by citizens across the Soviet Union. Appearing first in the summer of 1968, it soon became the main voice of the Soviet human rights movement, inside the country and abroad.
During the 15 years of its existence the Chronicle covered 424 political trials, in which 753 people were convicted. Not one of the accused was acquitted. In addition, 164 people were declared insane and sent for indefinite periods of compulsory treatment in psychiatric hospitals.
Despite constant harassment by the Soviet authorities more than sixty issues of the Chronicle were compiled and published (circulated) between summer 1968 and August 1983—the actual date of "publication" was always several weeks, if not months, after the formal date which represented the latest information received and verified in that issue.
One issue (No 59, November 1980) was confiscated by the KGB. The last issue to appear (No 64, June 1982) was not put into circulation until the very end of August the following year. Material was gathered and checked up to 31 December 1982 but issue No 65 never went into circulation.
Today the Chronicle offers a unique historical overview of political repression in the Soviet Union, both in nature and extent. No other samizdat publication covered the entire country for so long, recording every aspect of human rights violation committed by the post-Stalin Soviet authorities at national and local level.
The periodical modelled itself on earlier more narrowly-focused underground publications and in the early 1970s its example was followed in Ukraine (Ukrainsky visnyk, Ukraine Herald, 1970-1975) and Lithuania (Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, 1972-1989). The Chronicle's precursors were produced by confessional and ethnic minority groups, the persecuted Baptists and Crimean Tatars.A Chronicle of Current Events was created by dissenting members of Moscow's literary and scientific intelligentsia. Its editors and contributors were particularly affected by the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to which the third issue of the periodical and many subsequent reports and "Samizdat update" entries were devoted.
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