[108082] in Cypherpunks
CDR: INFO-RUSS: KPSS & KGB archives by Bukovsky on INFO-RUSS (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Choate)
Wed Feb 3 20:13:37 1999
From: Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>
To: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1999 18:50:53 -0600 (CST)
Cc: hell@einstein.ssz.com (The Club Inferno),
users@einstein.ssz.com (SSZ Users)
Reply-To: Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>
----- Forwarded message from Alexander Kaplan -----
From INFO-RUSS-request@smarty.ece.jhu.edu Wed Feb 3 17:54:54 1999
Return-Path: <INFO-RUSS-request@smarty.ece.jhu.edu>
Received: from smarty.ece.jhu.edu (smarty.ece.jhu.edu [128.220.14.60])
by einstein.ssz.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA03145
for <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>; Wed, 3 Feb 1999 17:54:53 -0600
Received: by smarty.ece.jhu.edu (5.61/1.18jrs)
id AA03206; Wed, 3 Feb 99 14:17:01 -0500
Message-Id: <9902031917.AA03206@smarty.ece.jhu.edu>
Errors-To: INFO-RUSS-request@smarty.ece.jhu.edu
Sender: INFO-RUSS-request@smarty.ece.jhu.edu
From: sasha@super.ece.jhu.edu (Alexander Kaplan)
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 99 14:04:57 EST
To: info-russ@smarty.ece.jhu.edu
Subject: INFO-RUSS: KPSS & KGB archives by Bukovsky on INFO-RUSS
---------------------------------------------------------------------
This is INFO-RUSS broadcast (1200+ subscribers). Home page, information,
and archives: http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/inforuss.html
To post, or to subscribe/unsubscribe, mail to info-russ@smarty.ece.jhu.edu
INFO-RUSS assumes no responsibility for the information/views of its users.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear info-russ folks,
This is a "coordinator corner".
This posting is to announce the first (and not just on Internet!)
publication of "Soviet Archives" by Vladimir Bukovsky.
It is a huge collection of documents directly copied from
archives of KPSS (former communist party of former Sov Union)
and KGB ("Komitet of Gosudarstevennoi Bezopasnosti")
Here is its URL:
http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/buk.html
or you can go to INFO-RUSS
http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS
and click at
"Bukovsky's "Soviet Archives" (KGB & KPSS) at INFO-RUSS"
A sampling of these documents and related political essay will
be published by V. Bukovsky in English in 1999 in a book "Judgement
Day" or "Reckoning with Moscow", political essay based on his
visit to Russia in 1992. During that visit he was invited by the
authorities to testify at the trial conducted by the Supreme
Court of Russia and intended to determine whether KPSS has been
a criminal institution, and the legality of the KPSS in new Russia.
To prepare for this testimony, Bukovsky requested and was granted
access to large number of documents prepared by the offices of
former Central Committee of KPSS and by KGB.
In a short time given him for browsing through the documents, he
managed to secretly scan a great deal of documents from that
collection, using a hand-held tiny scanner (one of those used for
the scanning of a single newspaper column).
After he brought back many-many floppy disks with files, each left
half-page file should have beed "stitched" with its right twin.
In this new publication on info-russ web-pages,
ALL these copies are published for the first time.
The tantalizing job of matching half-page pieces together, systematic
arrangement of all the copies and their catalogization, and uploading
the resulting files and directories from the personal computer to
INFO-RUSS server, is a collective work of three people - V. Bukovsky,
L. Chernikhov and Julia Zaks, and took them about two years. My own
little help was locating the space for the archive and providing
computer support (and daily moral encouragement, of course:-):-).
The initiative of starting this endeavor (of which she most likely
regretted many times:-) belonged to Julia Zaks, a "veteran" emigre,
whose dissident activity track in Moscow goes back 30+ years.
L. Chernikhov who joined the work at a later stage, did a great job
on re-organizing the documents according to the subject and
cross-referencing it. They did it out of belief "that these "black"
pages of Soviet history should be in the public domain"...
The e-mail addresses of both of them are found on the archive pages.
The full archive space as of right now comes close to 200 Mb.
For those of you who know little about Vladimir Bukovsky, here is his
brief bio-sketch (mostly due to KGB sources:-), see section 7.1,
Dissidents, documents #0053 and #0082-0086 in that archive).
June 1963 - ct.70-1, organizing "poetry" meetings next
to the Mayakovsky monument in Moscow;
sent to psychiatric ward (instead of prison), freed in February 1964
January 1965 - arrested for organizing a demonstration in defense of
Ginzburg, Glanskov and others ( 190-1, 3 years of imprisonment),
was freed in January 1970
January 1972 - arrested for contacts with foreign correspondents,
distribution of samizdat documents on psychiatric violations,
human rights, etc. (70-1, 7 years of imprisonment plus 5 years in exile)
December 1976, while in prison, Bukovsky was exchanged for Chilean
communist Lois Karvalan. (A little street joke at the time:
"obmenyali huligana na Luisa Karvalana":-)
Since 1976, he lives in Cambridge, England.
Bukovsky is the author of a few books:
"Soul of Man Under Socialism" 1979
"To Build a Castle-My Life As a Dissenter" 1979
"Soviet Hypocrisy and Western Gullibility" 1987
"Judgement Day" (Amer) or "Reckoning with Moscow" (England)
and political essay based on analyses of the
"Soviet Archives" (posted now on INFO-RUSS)
It was first published in Russian & French .
in 1996 as "Moscow Process" and will be available in 1999
in English as "Judgement Day" (US) or
"Reckoning with Moscow" (England)
The archive is intended for a very broad audience.
It is for you folks. Come in and look at the "pretty commy-face"
without mascara, of the system under which you've been living...
It is for former "dissies" (dissidents...); smell that stale
odor of the machinery that tried to mill you down...
It is for academia people: historians, sovetologists, etc.
Never too late to learn what was in reality behind the door
that used to be convincingly painted by your logical theories...
It is for Russia and the world to remember and to learn.
Everybody seems to be so sure this will never happened again;
will it not?
-- Alex Kaplan, INFO-RUSS owner/coordinator sasha@smarty.ece.jhu.edu
INFO-RUSS server: http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/inforuss.html
=========================================================================
A message from V. Bukovsky, Julia Zaks, and L. Chernikhov,
publishers of "Bukovsky's "Soviet Archives" at INFO-RUSS"
To all the users:
Feel free to use and copy the archive and/or any portion of it,
as long as you acknowledge the source ("Bukovsky's "Soviet Archives"
at INFO-RUSS").
Those of you, in particular academia & research people and libraries,
who instead of copying the archive from the Internet, would like to
have a CD with the full copy of it, may want to know that we
have donated the rights for distribution of the full CD copy of
the archive (about 200 Mb) to the "Gratitude Fund" (GF).
GF is intended to help ex-dissidents currently living in
Russia. Hundreds of former political prisoners and dissidents,
those who contributed greatly to the collapse of the communist
rule and promoted democracy in Russia. are unjustly forgotten.
Many of them are poverty-stricken in the economic chaos of the
post-communist Russia. GF was created to provide assistance to them.
So, if you would like to request a CD copy of "Soviet Archives"
please contact Yuri Fedorov, GF president (Yuri@eclipse.net).
Best regards,
V. Bukovsky Vladimir@vlakobuk.demon.co.uk
Julia Zaks YZaks@compuserve.com (web-master of the archive)
L. Chernikhov lchernik@aol.com
=========================================================================
----- End of forwarded message from Alexander Kaplan -----
