"Your Cause Is Also Our Cause"

As new crackdowns proceed, dissidents try to link arms

Following a 15-month pause, the Soviets have resumed a crackdown on critics of the regime. In three centers of human rights agitation, Moscow, Kiev and Vilnius, KGB operatives over the past two weeks have arrested four prominent dissidents and searched the homes of several others. The moves mean a further thinning of Soviet dissident ranks already greatly diminished by the deportation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Amalrik in the mid-1970s and the trials and imprisonment of Yuri Orlov and Anatoli Shcharansky, among others, in 1978. The movement's sole internationally known survivor is Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, who last week condemned the new arrests as "a calculated blow by the organs of repression."

Western observers speculated that the arrests might mark an effort to silence the remaining dissident voices in the Soviet Union before the Olympic Games open in Moscow next July. Those seized represent several currents within the Soviet human rights movement.

> Father Gleb Yakunin, 45, arrested in Moscow, leads Russian Orthodox believers who chafe under state control of church affairs.

> Mathematician Tatiana Velikanova, 47, another Muscovite, is a longtime champion of the persecuted Seventh-day Adventists, Crimean Tartars and Jewish "refuseniks" who have been denied per mission to emigrate abroad.

> Music Teacher Mykola Gorbal, 38, jailed in Kiev, has been active on be half of Ukrainian political prisoners.

> Historian Antanas Terleckas, 51, seized in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is a Lithuanian nationalist and a Roman Catholic who had contributed to underground human rights journals.

Antidissident activity has also been heavy lately in other East bloc states, most notably Czechoslovakia. There, the particular target of Party Chief Gustav Husak's secret police is the movement that has grown over the past three years around Charter 77, a human rights manifesto signed by 1,000 people. Last month six Charter 77 organizers, among them Playwright Vaclav Havel, received sentences of up to five years for "subversion of the republic." Since then more than 25 Charter 77 signers have been hauled in for questioning on various trumped-up charges, including attempts to blow up a Prague bridge and to assassinate Husak.

The arrests and trials in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia have fostered a new spirit of unity among East bloc dissidents, who have launched a coordinated attempt to defend one another.

The groundwork was laid earlier this year at a Moscow meeting between Sakharov and a member of Poland's major human rights organization, the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR). After that, KOR publicly expressed solidarity with Soviet dissidents, and 15 Polish protesters staged a hunger strike on behalf of the Charter 77 organizers before their Prague trial.

Following the trial, Sakharov wrote an open letter to Charter 77 and KOR activists calling for the "unification of our struggle for human rights in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union."

Even more striking have been the protests emanating from Hungary. Because Hungary enjoys more freedom than most East bloc countries, its intellectuals had been reluctant to risk that status by defending dissidents in other Communist countries. Two weeks ago, however, 254 prominent Hungarian writers, film makers, philosophers, mathematicians and economists signed various letters protesting the Prague arrests and trials.

In one particularly telling missive addressed to the Charter 77 signatories, Philosophers Gyorgy Bence and Janos Kis, and Journalist Janos Kenedi said they felt a special sense of responsibility for the crackdown because their country "participated in the occupation of Czechoslovakia" in 1968. As a result of that, the Hungarians told the Czechoslovaks, "your cause is also our cause." It is a sentiment that is increasingly shared by Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and others throughout the East bloc who strive for greater freedom.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.