Lillian Henley was at the post office when the FBI officers stopped her.
In the 1950s, she and her family lived just outside the beltway, in the Washington, DC suburb of Garrett Park, Maryland. Her husband was a physicist with known leftist sympathies. She was the American style editor for Soviet Life magazine (this magazine’s predecessor, published and distributed in the U.S. as part of an official exchange, i.e. sanctioned by the U.S. government).
As her son Mike recently told The Gazette, a Maryland newspaper, two agents stopped his mother,
and asked about her job with Soviet Life, where she mostly edited articles submitted in rough English into readable form.
‘When she told them to go to hell, they said, well, this could have an impact on David and Michael and Elizabeth,’ Mike Henley said. ‘So they were letting her know they knew our names.’
This tidbit was forwarded to me just moments after I had finished reading another story, this one taking place several thousand miles away, in present day Arkhangelsk.
According to Interfax and the human rights group Memorial, “A criminal case has been initiated against Professor Mikhail Suprun, head of a department at Pomorsky State University, and Colonel Alexander Dudarev, head of the information centre of the Directorate of Internal Affairs for Arkhangelsk Region.
“Suprun is being prosecuted for collecting information for a database about Poles and Germans who were deported to a special settlement in Arkhangelsk Region in the 1940s. Colonel Dudarev is being prosecuted for providing Suprun with this opportunity.”
“In other words,” Memorial concluded, “[Suprun] is being prosecuted for doing his job and [Dudarev] for performing his duties.”
According to Memorial, the information Suprun was collecting is non-secret, public domain information, which “is no different from the information available in the majority of the Books of Memory for victims of political repressions that have been published in Russia… the Books of Memory for those who died during the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) and the database of the Defense Ministry, which is in the public domain, contain many more names—about 10 million—and the information about the people in them includes not just the date of birth and death but many other details, such as their residence address before they were called up, family details, etc.”
Meanwhile, in September, Alexander Podrabinek, a journalist, human-rights activist and one-time Soviet political prisoner, received death threats after publishing a pointed editorial in Yezhenedelnaya Gazeta, in which he said it is time to stop tolerating war veterans who get insulted by the notion of anti-Sovietism, that in fact such people should be prosecuted, because the Soviet regime was itself criminal. In short, he expressed an opinion which made many uncomfortable. As a result, the main veterans’ group (headed by a former Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee) and the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi exerted pressure on the newspaper, picked Podrabinek’s home, and allegedly threatened his family.
All three stories remind of nothing so much as petty schoolyard bullying. Someone gets pushed around because those with more power don’t like the way she looks, the things she believes in, or the color of her skin.
When law-abiding citizens are persecuted, hounded or arrested for engaging in normal civil acts, when stereotypes, jingoistic nationalism and xenophobia lead to petty bullying, it is the duty of the schoolyard to shout down the thugs, to expose them as naked tyrants.
Human rights abuses should never be ignored because they are far away (Arkhangelsk to us is Atlanta to someone else) or because “that sort of thing just happens in a transitional state.” Abuse thrives in darkness, in silence. Tell others about it. Vote with your feet. Sign petitions. If all you can do is raise your voice, that is enough… even if you are alone.
Visit the links from this issue on our website for online petitions.
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