April 30, 1968
The first issue of the Chronicle of Current Events, an underground bulletin that spent 15 years reporting on the fate of political prisoners in the USSR, was published.
The idea to publish the Chronicle arose after the Soviet government supported human rights movements in African and Asian colonies. The Kremlin was so eager to accuse the capitalist West of racism that it even agreed to a UN initiative to hold 1968 as a year of fighting for human rights. It also promised to publish a series of articles in newspapers about the difficult fates of their comrades abroad.
In response to this, Soviet dissidents decided to remind the authorities about human rights in their own country.
The editor of the first issue was a poetess and translator Natalia GorbanevskayaShe wanted to publish a simple samizdat collection about human rights violations in 1968, without a sequel. However, the amount of material turned out to be so overwhelming that "The Chronicle" began appearing bimonthly.
Prudent silence can turn into madness – the restoration of Stalinism. Natalia Gorbanevskaya
Each episode began with reports on searches, interrogations, arrests, and prison sentences. Over 15 years, "Chronicle" covered 800 political trials involving more than 2 defendants.
The bulletin was typewritten: the editor created a "first bookmark" from several copies. These were then distributed to others, who also retyped them, multiplying them exponentially across the country.
The network of correspondents also grew: within a year, the bulletin was reporting on events in 34 locations across the country, and within 10 years, in 233.
The complete breakthrough in muteness proved irreversible. Despite the authorities' efforts to stem the leakage of information from prisons, it continued to flow in an ever-increasing stream. Lyudmila Alekseeva, human rights activist
Despite the editorial staff's anonymous operation, the KGB arrested its employees approximately every two years. For example, Gorbanevskaya was placed in a psychiatric hospital for three years.
Other editors who replaced her received prison sentences ranging from 3 to 7 years or were forced to leave the country.
