IN QUEST OF JUSTICE: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union Today

This is a comprehensive though not complete collection of the recent, surprisingly prolific literature of protest in the Soviet Union--trial statements, letters, petitions, appeals, and some essays, short stories and poems from underground journals. There are initial commentaries on the background of the dissent in private reactions against the repressive February 1966 trial of writers Daniel and Sinyavsky, the role of the intelligentsia, the challenge to the Soviet legal system, the grievances of the Ukrainians, Jews, and other minorities, and the issue of religious freedom. Though many of the same names pop up on different documents, there is also impressive evidence of a more widespread support from diverse groups and individuals. Typical documents are a petition by 95 mathematicians for release of a dissident colleague confined to a mental hospital; an open letter by the Evangelical Christians and Baptists in Kiev on religious oppression; a protest of 52 scholars and professionals against the conduct of demonstrators' trials; an ""Appeal from Representatives of the Crimean-Tatar People to the People of the World""; novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's demand for total abolition of literary censorship; and, in the appendix, a petition to the Committee_ on Human Rights of the UN of May 69 by 52 Soviet citizens under the banner of the ""Initiative Group for Defense of Civil Rights in the USSR"" which the editor hopes, is an indication that the struggle for civil liberties is taking on a more pronounced programmatic and organizational form. The fact that editor Brumberg is with the Press and Publications Service of the USIA need raise no qualms, for the documents speak eloquently for themselves.