MARK PERAKH
253
Zaslavskiy and others. The main activity of the group was discussing
the history of the October upheaval. Members of the circle jokingly
called it "a circle of lunatics at large." The credo of Pimenov was
formulated as follows: "The land-for kolkhosniks, the factories-for
workers, the culture-for intelligensia." Pimenov decoded these for–
mulations in the following way: "The land for kolkhosniks means that
the Kolkhoses are entitled to manage their jobs independently." The
program of Pimenov thus did not include cancelling the Kolkhos
system. "Factories-for workers" was to be understood in the frame–
work of the Yugoslavian version. "Culture-for intelligensia" was
interpreted as a relinquishing of the Party's strict control over evp.ry
manifestation of spiritual life. Generally, Pimenov and his colleagues
were socialists and did not try at all to destroy the existing social order.
The entire group was arrested and its members sentenced to long
imprisonment.
Pimenov's group was not the only one. In Leningrad at the same
time another group, that of the brothers Izhboldins and Fomichev, fell
victim to the KGB; the group members were accused of being U.S.
spies. The real reason for the persecution of the group was its dissent.
Specifically, Fomichev leaned to a religious world outlook. Another
example: in the beginning of 1958 in Alma-Ata, a small group that
included
K.
Frusin and the author of this paper was arrested. We stood
for a much more radical program than the Pimenov circle. At the end
of 1957, many handwritten leaflets were reproduced photographically
and circulated throughout the city; in these a call was made to vote
against the oHiciatcandidates in the coming elections to the Supreme
Soviet. The "powerful" KGB turned out to be powerless in finding the
authors and distributors of these leaflets. Our arrest had no connection
to them; it was the result of informers' reports to the KGB that Frusin
and I had "talked in an anti-Soviet spirit."
At this time, the activity of a large group of dissenters began. The
group consisted mainly of Moscow University teachers headed by
Krasnopevtsev. All the members of this group were Party and Komso–
mol activists who united under a banner of "socialist democracy"; they
oriented themselves toward the Yugoslav version of Communism. All
of them underwent cruel oppression and were sentenced
to
long prison
terms.
All of these above groups, in which thousands of young people
participated, constituted a sort of prehistory of contemporary dissent in
the USSR. An increase in Cheka persecutions at the end of the fifties
strangled these first sprouts of independent thinking; the members of
