Crisis Press
A good deal is now known in the West about the suppression of protest and new ideas by the Soviet authorities. Less has been written in English about the political trials and repressions in the Ukraine in 1965-6, except for two books published in 1968: Ivan Dzyuba's Internationalism or Russification? which condemns the present Soviet nationalities policy as being contrary to Lenin's teaching and likely to produce a catastrophic reaction, and The Chornovil Papers, a devastating indictment of the numerous breaches of Soviet law committed during the 1966 trials by the Soviet authorities themselves.
The present volume documents, for the first time in English, the 'Jurists' Case' in 1961, in which seven people, three of them lawyers, were given savage sentences for peacefully advocating the secession of the Ukraine, the right to which is guaranteed by the Soviet constitution. The Soviet authorities have so far done everything in their power to pre¬vent any publicity about this flagrant miscarriage of justice.
A further section contains the recent writings of sev¬eral of those sentenced in 1966. These documents were written in camps and prisons, and throw a vivid but sinister light on earlier and previously unknown political trials in the Ukraine and on conditions in the concentration camps. They also reveal much of the thinking of Ukrainian intellectuals about social and political subjects and, in particular, about the circumstances of independent-minded and responsible individuals in what one of the authors called the 'Empire of Cogs.'
All the available published material stating the argu¬ments of the Soviet authorities in connection with the suppression of the cultural and political ferment in the Ukraine has also been included. All the docu¬ments are fully annotated, and the introduction places the events described in their historical per¬spective, a task not attempted before.
The Ukraine —a country with a great potential — lies near the heart of the Soviet empire. Developments there may vitally affect that empire's future—and the history of Europe—in the years to come.