Victor Krasin

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Victor Aleksandrovich Krasin
Виктор Александрович Красин
dissident movement in the Soviet Union

Victor Aleksandrovich Krasin (also spelled Viktor Krasin,

US citizen
.

Biography

In 1947 Krasin entered the

Moscow University
's Psychology Department of the Philosophical Faculty.

In January 1949, Krasin and some friends were arrested by the

Tayshet railway. In September 1949, Krasin escaped with four others from the Taishet transit camp.[2] They disarmed two of the guards when working in the sand carrier in the forest. They were re-captured on the third day and sentenced to 10 years for counter-revolutionary sabotage.[3]
Krasin spent the first winter working in the logging camp.

In 1950 Krasin was transferred to the

uranium mines and this skill saved his life. Many miners became deadly sick in one year because of silicosis, but Krasin was registered as a turner
and worked the rest of his term in the mechanical shops. After Stalin's death, in October 1954, Krasin and the others who were arrested in 1949 were brought back to Moscow, released and rehabilitated.

In 1963 Krasin graduated from the Economic Faculty of Moscow State University. He worked as a truck and taxi driver.[5]: 109–120  Krasin completed postgraduate studies in 1966 in the Department of Statistics. He was unable to defend his thesis because it did not correspond to Marxist standards. From 1966 to 1968 Krasin worked as a researcher at the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute (CEMI).

At this time Krasin started self-publishing: he took photographs and gave friends uncensored books to read. Krasin also began collecting information about human rights violations. He established relations with American correspondents

New York Times, Frank Starr from Chicago Tribune and Tony Collins from Associated Press
and passed them materials on human rights violations in the USSR which were then published in the US press. In May 1969 Peter Yakir and Krasin organized the Initiative Group for Defence of Human Rights in the USSR – the first legal organization to oppose political repression in the USSR.

In the autumn of 1968 Krasin was fired from CEMI, because he refused to stop his human rights activities. He did not work for a year but meanwhile began contributing to

internal exile on a charge of parasitism, under the "anti-parasite law"[7] initiated by Nikita Khrushchev. Krasin was serving his term in the Krasnoyarsk area. While he was in exile he was informed that in June 1971 his friend and participating rights activist Nadezhda Pavlovna Yemel'kin was arrested for demonstrating alone on Pushkin Square holding up a banner "Freedom to Political Prisoners in the USSR." After the RSFSR Supreme Court overturned Krasin's verdict in autumn 1971 he went to the town of Yeniseisk where she was in exile and married her. This was his second marriage. In the first marriage, he fathered three sons who emigrated with their mother to Israel in 1972.[8]

In September 1972 he was again arrested by the KGB on the charge of anti-soviet propaganda (Article 70).[9] He was subjected to intense KGB interrogation and agreed to cooperate. Based on his testimony, many Soviet dissidents were convicted.[10] Then he was placed on trial with Yakir.[11] They were initially sentenced to three years of exile, but then freed.[10] Krasin subsequently wrote a book detailing the interrogation and the trial.[5]

On September 12, 1973, two weeks after Krasin's trial, the

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin had "demonstrated enormous courage and intellectual honesty in advocating and defending the importance of fundamental civil and political liberty."[12] On September 18, 1973, a similar resolution was adopted by the United States House of Representatives, and stated that the public humiliation of Yakir and Krasin was an outrage that "served to illuminate the plight of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens."[13]

In February 1975, Krasin and his wife emigrated to the United States. They became US citizens in 1981.

Radio Liberty. In the summer of 1991 Krasin and his wife returned to Moscow. In 2003 they returned to the United States. He since contributed articles to The Daily Journal [ru] (Russian: Ежедневный журнал).[14]

Victor Krasin died on September 3, 2017, of unknown causes. He was 88.

References

  1. ^ "В Израиле умер экономист и правозащитник Виктор Красин". Радио Свобода. 4 September 2017.
  2. ^ Красин Виктор Александрович (р.1929) экономист, правозащитник in Russian
  3. ^ Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, The, No. 37, Vol.25, October 10, 1973, page(s): 5-6
  4. ^ Exile in Siberia – Lake Baikal – BaikalNature
  5. ^ a b Красин, Виктор (1983). "Суд" [The Trial] (in Russian). New York: Chalidze Publications.
  6. ^ Yakobson, Anatoly; Yakir, Pyotr; Khodorovich, Tatyana; Podyapolskiy, Gregory; Maltsev, Yuri; et al. (21 August 1969). "An Appeal to The UN Committee for Human Rights". The New York Review of Books.
  7. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2011-07-27. Retrieved 2011-02-10.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  8. ^ a b c Krasin, Victor (18 March 1984). "How I was broken by the K.G.B". The New York Times Magazine: 77.
  9. JSTOR 20038087
    .
  10. ^ a b An ugly story by Alexander Podrabinek
  11. ^ Mark Hopkins. Russia's Underground Press: The Chronicle of Current Events. 1981.
  12. ^ 1973 Congressional Record, Senate Resolution 168, Page 29429.
  13. ^ 1973 Congressional Record, House Resolution, Page 30196.
  14. ^ "Ежедневный Журнал".

External links