The Press: Samizdat West

Anatoly Marchenko, a well-known dissident Soviet author, was sentenced in Kaluga last week to four years of banishment, probably to Siberia. The story of that case has not yet appeared in the West, but it will break this week in the latest issue of A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, a bimonthly magazine published in Manhattan. Since its founding two years ago last month, the little Chronicle, which is edited by Valery Chalidze and Pavel Litvinov, a pair of liberal Soviet exiles now living in the U.S., has become one of the most carefully read and respected Russian journals anywhere.

The publication is a cousin to the Moscow Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat (publish it yourself) typewritten journal put out irregularly since April 1968 inside Russia and circulated hand to hand among Soviet dissidents. The New York Chronicle's 600 English-language and 300 Russian-language copies reach some of those dissidents as well as Soviet exiles in the West. There are also some impressive above-ground names on the subscription list: the CIA, the KGB, officials in Peking, Britain's Parliament and Western universities and libraries.

Latest News. Between its plain blue covers, the New York Chronicle packs as many as 128 pages with the latest on arrests, imprisonments and other official Soviet harassment, the texts of government decrees squeezing civil liberties in the U.S.S.R., copies of correspondence between Soviet dissidents and their supporters in the West, as well as manifestoes, open letters and appeals for amnesty from persecuted Soviet dissenters.

Considered highly reliable, the Chronicle recently printed a list of all the items lifted by the KGB in a search of Physicist Andrei Tverdokhlebov's Moscow apartment (including a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and three issues of the Chronicle). In addition to news of Marchenko's fate, the Chronicle has a chilling, 70-page report written in Solzhenitsynian detail on the conditions endured by Russia's current political prisoners. Says Chalidze: "We don't use something unless we're absolutely sure it is real."

Much of the Chronicle's raw information reaches Chalidze's Manhattan apartment in envelopes without return addresses mailed from the U.S.S.R. Fast-breaking news sometimes gets through by long-distance telephone. Last week Litvinov succeeded in reaching Anatoly Marchenko's wife Larissa on the phone after Soviet operators had earlier cut them off in mid-conversation. "Larissa told me that Tolya [short for Anatoly] was brought before the judge in heavy handcuffs," Litvinov reports. "He looked weak and sick, almost fainted twice during the sentencing. He has been on a hunger strike for 35 days, and will continue until he is completely free. His life is in great danger."