Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [329]
These were the methods Andropov had advocated while head of the KGB, from 1979 on, and these were the methods he continued to pursue during his short reign as the Soviet Union’s leader. Thanks to Andropov, the first half of the 1980s are remembered as the most repressive era in post-Stalinist Soviet history. It was as if the pressure within the system had to reach a boiling point, just before the system itself broke down altogether.
Certainly, from the late 1970s, Andropov’s KGB had made large numbers of arrests and re-arrests: under his direction, recalcitrant activists often received new sentences right at the end of their old ones, as had happened in Stalin’s time. Membership of one of the Helsinki monitoring groups—dissident organizations which tried to monitor the Soviet Union’s observation of the Helsinki Treaty—became a surefire route to prison. Twenty-three members of the Moscow group were arrested between 1977 and 1979, and seven were expelled abroad. Yuri Orlov, leader of the Moscow Helsinki group, remained in prison throughout the first half of the 1980s.3
Nor was arrest Andropov’s only weapon. Because his aim was to frighten people away from joining dissident movements in the first place, the scope of repression became much wider. Those even suspected of sympathizing with the human rights, religious, or nationalist movements stood to lose everything. Suspects and their spouses could be deprived not only of their jobs, but also of their professional status and qualifications. Their children could be denied the right to attend university. Their telephones could be cut off, their residence permits revoked, their travel restricted.4
By the end of the 1970s, Andropov’s multilayered “disciplinary measures” had succeeded in dividing both the dissident movement and its foreign supporters into small, hardened, and sometimes mutually suspicious interest groups. There were human rights activists, whose fate was closely monitored by groups like Amnesty International. There were Baptist dissidents, whose cause was supported by the international Baptist Church. There were nationalist dissidents—Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Georgians—who were supported by their compatriots in exile. There were Meskhetians and Crimean Tartars, deported in Stalin’s time, who wanted the right to return home.
In the West, probably the most prominent group of dissidents were the refuseniks, Soviet Jews who had been refused the right to emigrate to Israel. Raised to prominence by Congress’s 1975 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which had linked U.S.-Soviet trade to the emigration issue, the refuseniks remained a central concern for Washington right up to the end of the Soviet Union. In the autumn of 1986, at his meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, President Reagan personally presented the Soviet leader with a list of 1,200 Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate.5
Now kept firmly apart from the criminals, all of these groups were well-represented within Soviet camps and prisons, where they organized themselves, like the politicals of eras past, according to their common causes.6 By this time, it might even be said that the camps served as a sort of networking facility, almost a school of dissent, where political prisoners could meet others with similar ideas. At times, they celebrated one another’s national holidays, Lithuanian and Latvian, Georgian and Armenian, and argued lightly over whose country would be the first to free itself from the Soviet Union.7 Contacts were cross-generational too: Balts and Ukrainians had the opportunity to meet a previous generation of nationalists, the anti-Soviet partisans who had been given twenty-five-year sentences and never released. Of the latter,