Initiating Group for Defense of Civil Rights in the USSR
| Инициативная группа по защите прав человека в СССР | |
| Formation | May 19, 1969 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Pyotr Yakir, Victor Krasin,
15 dissidents
|
| Founded at | Moscow, Russia |
| Extinction | 1979 |
| Type | Association |
| Purpose | Human rights monitoring |
The Initiative or Action Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR (Russian: Инициати́вная гру́ппа по защи́те прав челове́ка в СССР) was the first civic organization of the Soviet human rights movement. Founded in 1969 by 15 dissidents, the unsanctioned group functioned for over six years as a public platform of Soviet dissidents concerned with violations of human rights in the Soviet Union.
The main work of the group consisted in documenting abuses and preparing appeals. The letters focused on persecution of people for their convictions in the USSR, with particular attention being given to the use of punitive psychiatry and to political prisoners. Unusually for the dissident movement at the time, the appeals were directed to international organizations such as the UN Commission on Human Rights. The documents of the Initiative Group were circulated in samizdat, and published by the western press, as well as broadcast by radio stations into the USSR.
Most of the members of the group suffered repressions. While all of the founding members were eventually imprisoned or exiled by 1979, the Initiative Group served as a precursor to dissident civic organizations such as Andrei Sakharov's Committee on Human Rights in the USSR and the Moscow Helsinki Group, which took over its functions.
In late 1968, Ivan Yakhimovich, a philologist and chairman of a collective farm in Latvia, wrote a letter to the Communist Party expressing his concern for the fate of arrested samizdat authors Yuri Galanskov and Alexander Ginzburg. After the letter by Yakhimovich was widely publicized, he was expelled from the Communist Party, arrested and later committed to a psychiatric hospital without trial.
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