Pyotr Yakir
Pyotr Ionavich Yakir | |
---|---|
Пётр Ионавич Якир | |
Born | (1923-01-20)20 January 1923 Moscow, Soviet Union |
Died | 14 November 1982(1982-11-14) (aged 59) |
Resting place | Vvedenskoye Cemetery |
Nationality | Russian |
Citizenship | Soviet |
Alma mater | Moscow Historic-Archival Institute |
Occupation(s) | Historian, civil rights activist |
Known for | His participation in Soviet dissident movement and struggle against political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union |
Movement | the dissident and human rights movements in the Soviet Union |
Pyotr Ionavich Yakir (Russian: Пётр Ионавич Якир) (20 January 1923 – 14 November 1982) was a Soviet historian who survived a childhood in the Gulag, and became well known as a critic of Stalinism, though ultimately he denounced dissident activity in the Soviet Union.
Career
Pyotr Yakir was born in Kiev, the son of the renowned Red Army commander, Iona Yakir, and Sarah Yakir, née Ortenberg. His father was arrested on 31 May 1937. On that day, agents of the NKVD searched the family home. On 7 June, Sarah Yakir was ordered to leave Kiev within 24 hours. On 12 June, he learnt from the newspapers that his father had been shot.[1] He, his mother and younger brother were exiled to Astrakhan, where her father joined them.
Political prisoner
Pyotr was arrested on 18 September 1937, 'as a socially dangerous element', held in Astrakhan prison and was sentenced to five years in a labour camp, when still only 14 years old. His mother was also arrested, and his brother was sent to a children's home. His repeated attempts to escape failed. He suffered from frostbite when held in a punishment cell for refusing to work. When his term of exile ended, in 1942, he was drafted into the Red Army, and took part in the war, but he was arrested again in 1944, and on 10 February 1945 was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag for 'counter-revolutionary propaganda'.[2] In the camps, he married a fellow prisoner, Valentina Savenkova, who was serving a ten sentence. Their daughter, Irina, was born in Siberia in March 1948, and from her teens was a lifelong campaigner for human rights, until her death in May 1999.[3] Yakir was released from the camps in 1953, after the death of Joseph Stalin, but remained in exile in Krasnoyarsk, where he worked in the timber industry. In all, he spent 17 years in prison, camps or exile, interrupted by his time in the army.
Civil rights campaigns
In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin's crimes, Yakir and other surviving family members were allowed to return to Moscow. In 1961, after Khrushchev had referred to Iona Yakir's execution during a speech to the 22nd party congress, Pyotr became one of 'Khrushchev's zeks'[4] (zek is Russian slang for a prisoner in the Gulag). He met the Soviet leader, and was allocated a good apartment in Moscow, and a post in the History Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. But after the fall of Khrushchev, he became disturbed by signs that the regime was reverting to practices associated with the Stalin years. He and his friend, Victor Krasin, an economist and former Gulag inmate, formed the Action Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR. He was also involved in producing the Samizdat publication A Chronicle of Current Events, which was the main contemporary source of information about political repression in the USSR, and he signed protests against the arrests of dissidents such as Andrei Amalrik, Vladimir Bukovsky and many more. In March 1971, he addressed an Open Letter to the 24th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union warning against "a dangerous trend towards the restoration of Stalinist methods of government ... and in art literature, historical works and memoirs - towards the rehabilitation of Stalin himself, one of the greatest criminals of the 20th century."[5] In October 1971, he was arrested on the morning of Khrushchev's funeral, to prevent him joining the mourners, but was released later in the day. He frequently passed information to foreign correspondents based in Moscow. Anticipating arrested, he told David Bonavia, of The Times, that any confession he made under arrest would not have come from the "real" Pyotr Yakir.[6] In October 1971, he was arrested on the morning of Khrushchev's funeral, to prevent joining the mourners, but released later that day.[7] His apartment was raided several times.
Repudiation of dissident activity
Yakir was arrested for the last time on 21 June 1972.[8] While he was in prison, his memoir, A Childhood in Prison was published in English, in London. On 4 November, his daughter, Irina was allowed to visit him in Lefortovo Prison. He told her that her that A Chronicle of Current Events had a "tendentious character" and was "objectively harmful."[9] As well as renouncing their own pasts, he and his friend Krasin, who was arrested in September 1972, gave the KGB a vast amount of information about other political dissidents. More than 200 people were interrogated about information given by the pair,[10] including Irina Yakir, who refused to follow her father's example and continued to campaign for civil rights.[11] After a week-long trial, in August–September 1973, during which Yakir begged the judges not to make him die in prison, he and Krasin were sentenced to three years in prison, followed by three years' exile. On 5 September, they gave a televised news conference, to which foreign correspondents were invited, in which both men confessed that their activity had aided the USSR's enemies abroad, and Yakir denounced reports of the Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union as 'libelous'. As a reward for co-operation, the two men's sentences were reduced to the time already spent in prison. Yakir was exiled to Ryazan. He was pardoned in September 1974, and lived in his daughter's flat for the rest of his life, but had to leave the room, or the flat, whenever she met fellow dissidents.[11] He started drinking heavily, and died of a ruptured artery after an accident while he was out walking.[11]
References
- ^ "Якир, Пётр Ионавич". Воспоминания о ГУЛАГе и их авторы. Sakharov Centre. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ "Якир, Пётр Ионавич". Музеи истории ГУЛАГа. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ Rapp, Irina. "In Memory of Irina Yakir". Human Rights in Ukraine. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ Adler, Nanci (February 2004). The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System. Transaction Publishers. p. 210. ISBN 9780765805850. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ A Chronicle of Current Events, A Journal of the Soviet Civil Rights Movement No. 19. Moscow: Amnesty International. 20 April 1971. p. 210.
- ^ Bonavia, David (23 June 1971). The Times.
{{cite journal}}
: Missing or empty|title=
(help) - ^ A Chronicle of Current Events no. 23. 5 January 1972. p. 97.
- ^ A Chronicle of Current Events no. 26. 31 December 1972. p. 226.
- ^ A Chronicle of Current Events no. 28. 5 January 1972. p. 14.
- ^ A Chronicle of Current Events no. 30. 31 December 1973. p. 85.
- ^ a b c van Voren, Robert (2009). On Dissidents and Madness: From the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the 'Soviet Union' of Vladimir Putin. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. pp. 54–55. ISBN 978-904-202584-4. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
- v
- t
- e
- Human rights movement in the Soviet Union: Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR
- Committee on Human Rights in the USSR
- Solzhenitsyn Aid Fund
- Moscow Helsinki Group
- Ukrainian Helsinki Group
- Lithuanian Helsinki Group
- Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes
- Helsinki-86
- Memorial
- Mikhail Agursky
- Vasily Aksyonov
- Lyudmila Alexeyeva
- Andrei Amalrik
- Chabua Amirejibi
- Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko
- Gunārs Astra
- Mykola Bakay
- Anna Barkova
- Vasile Bătrânac
- Arkadiy Belinkov
- Nikolai Berdyaev
- Yuri Bezmenov
- Larisa Bogoraz
- Alexander Bolonkin
- Yelena Bonner
- Leonid Borodin
- Vladimir Bougrine
- Joseph Brodsky
- Vladimir Bukovsky
- Valery Chalidze
- Lev Chernyi
- Boris Chichibabin
- Viacheslav Chornovil
- Lydia Chukovskaya
- Yuli Daniel
- Vadim Delaunay
- Andrey Derevyankin
- David Devdariani
- Ivan Drach
- Yuri Druzhnikov
- Mustafa Dzhemilev
- Ivan Dziuba
- Abulfaz Elchibey
- Alexander Esenin-Volpin
- Eliyahu Essas
- Efim Etkind
- Benjamin Fain
- Viktor Fainberg
- Moysey Fishbein
- Ilya Gabay
- Balys Gajauskas
- Yuri Galanskov
- Alexander Galich
- Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev
- Zviad Gamsakhurdia
- Vladimir Gershuni
- Alexander Ginzburg
- Yevgenia Ginzburg
- Anatoly Gladilin
- Semyon Gluzman
- Natalya Gorbanevskaya
- Pyotr Grigorenko
- Sergei Grigoryants
- Vasily Grossman
- Igor Guberman
- Tengiz Gudava
- Paruyr Hayrikyan
- Ivan Hel
- Oleksa Hirnyk
- Mykola Horbal
- Bohdan Horyn
- Mykhailo Horyn
- Grigory Isayev
- Boris Kagarlitsky
- Romas Kalanta
- Sofiya Kalistratova
- Ihor Kalynets
- Iryna Kalynets
- Vitaliy Kalynychenko
- Dina Kaminskaya
- Ivan Kandyba
- Ephraim Kholmyansky
- Yuliy Kim
- Nikolai Klyuev
- Lev Kopelev
- Boris Korczak
- Anatoly Koryagin
- Nahum Korzhavin
- Merab Kostava
- Lina Kostenko
- Sergei Kovalev
- Zoya Krakhmalnikova
- Victor Krasin
- Yuri Kublanovsky
- Jüri Kukk
- Anatoly Kuznetsov
- Eduard Kuznetsov
- Malva Landa
- Alexander Lavut
- Mikhail Leontovich
- Alexander Lerner
- Yaroslav Lesiv
- Eugene Levich
- Veniamin Levich
- Eduard Limonov
- Jüri Lina
- Pavel Litvinov
- Levko Lukyanenko
- Nikolay Lossky
- Kronid Lyubarsky
- Michail J. Makarenko
- Vasyl Makukh
- Guram Mamulia
- Nadezhda Mandelstam
- Anatoly Marchenko
- Valeriy Marchenko
- Myroslav Marynovych
- Grigorii Maksimov
- Roy Medvedev
- Zhores Medvedev
- Naum Meiman
- Mykhailo Melnyk
- Alexander Men
- Yosef Mendelevitch
- Vazif Meylanov
- Andrei Mironov
- Ion Moraru
- Viktor Nekipelov
- Viktor Nekrasov
- Alexander Nekrich
- Valeriya Novodvorskaya
- Vasile Odobescu
- Alexander Ogorodnikov
- Yuri Orlov
- Raisa Orlova
- Yulian Panich
- Lagle Parek
- Boris Pasternak
- Konstantin Paustovsky
- Gleb Pavlovsky
- Zianon Pazniak
- Yekaterina Peshkova
- Viktoras Petkus
- Alexander Piatigorsky
- Leonid Plyushch
- Alexandr Podrabinek
- Grigory Pomerants
- Vladimir Pribylovsky
- Dmitri Prigov
- Anatoly Pristavkin
- Boris Pustyntsev
- Irina Ratushinskaya
- Eliyahu Rips
- Arseny Roginsky
- Maria Rozanova
- Mykola Rudenko
- Yuly Rybakov
- Ain Saar
- Valery Sablin
- Andrei Sakharov
- Dmitri Savitski
- Shmuel Schneurson
- Iryna Senyk
- Victor Serge
- Efraim Sevela
- Igor Shafarevich
- Varlam Shalamov
- Avital Sharansky
- Natan Sharansky
- Alexander Shatravka
- Vladimir Shelkov
- Yurii Shukhevych
- Danylo Shumuk
- Andrei Sinyavsky
- Vladimir Slepak
- Victor Sokolov
- Sergei Soldatov
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Pitirim Sorokin
- Galina Starovoytova
- Vladimir Strelnikov
- Aleksandras Štromas
- Vasyl Stus
- Nadiya Svitlychna
- Ivan Svitlichny
- Vasyl Symonenko
- Les Tanyuk
- Alexander Tarasov
- Valery Tarsis
- Enn Tarto
- Lev Timofeev
- Valentin Turchin
- Andrei Tverdokhlebov
- Tatyana Velikanova
- Tomas Venclova
- Georgi Vins
- Georgi Vladimov
- Vladimir Voinovich
- Michael Voslenski
- Anatoly Yakobson
- Gleb Yakunin
- Venedikt Yerofeyev
- Yevgeny Zamyatin
- Alexander Zinoviev
- Yosyf Zisels