Imprisoned Armenian leader sends open letter to Gorbachev

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On Jan. 9, Raphael Khazaryan, a renowned scientist and leader of the Karabakh Committee in Armenia, was arrested in the capital city of Yerevan together with other Armenian nationalists. A week later he was moved to Moscow, where he is currently detained at the Boutirki Prison.

The Karabakh Committee is the recognized leadership of the mass movement for Armenian national rights. It has been fighting to have Nagorno-Karabakh, an oppressed Armenian enclave in Azerbaidjan, returned to the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. [See February Socialist Action for more on the Karabakh Committee.J On Jan. 17-18, elections for candidates to the Supreme Soviet were held at the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Yerevan. The participants rejected the official candidate nominated by the director of the institute and instead proposed Khazaryan, the prisoner. Whether he will be listed on the final ballot is unlikely.

On Dec. 10, 1988, following the arrest of five other Karabakh Committee members, (continued from page had orginally nominated 31,500 candidates. But as it turned out, their work was for naught.

The selection of an even 100 candidates, moreover, doesn't leave much work for the voters. So much for the much-heralded campaign against unanimity.

The pyramid structure of the process, glaringly revealed in the Communist Party's reduction of 31,500 nominations to 100, insures top-heavy control.

Democracy from above

At most, a few official organizations managed only slight modification of this caricature.

The Communist Party youth organization, Komsomol, nominated 102 candidates for its 75 seats. But even here, one of the nominees conceded that there was little real involvement or interest on the part of 36 million rank-and-file members. (New York Times, Jan. 21, 1989)

In another case, the top board of the Academy of Science refused to approve the nomination of a popular dissident candidate even though he was overwhelmingly recommended by nearly 60 research institutes.

Some of these episodes have become an embarrassment for the regime.

In fact, despite all the previous hoopla surrounding glasnost, there has been remarkably little coverage of the elections in the Soviet press. Reporter Len Karpinsky complained in Moscow News that he could not cover the election campaign in the official journalists' union "for the simple reason that the press was not admitted there."

Other alternatives Nominating sessions for the remaining two-thirds (or 1500) of the Congress deputies occurs in legislative districts spread throughout the country. These appear to be less contro led than meetings of the official groups.

Some people who were excluded or ignored by the official groups, for example, have been nominated at the district level. This prospect aroused significant interest.

Several meeting halls were reported to be filled to capacity. Moscow's at-large session drew 900 people with another 2500 pressing against the door.

While all unofficial organizations, and especially oppositionist political clubs, were prohibited from nominating candidates in their own name, dissidents often spoke and distributed their political platforms at the local district level.

One meeting ended with participants marching down the street with their political banners in the air. Mass enthusiasm for open political discussion is tangible despite the many roadblocks that stand in the way.

For example, unlike the candidates of the 12 SOCIALIST ACTION Khazaryan wrote an "Open Letter to Mikhail Gorbachev" expressing his views on Gorbachev's perestroika reforms. The following are brief excerpts from this letter.

"Bitterness, disillusionment, and the crumbling of our last hopes in the possibility of justice-such were the reactions of the Armenian people after the interview you gave the press before leaving Armenian territory. ... [Gorbachev had lambasted the Karabakh Committee as "unscrupulous demagogues" and "parasitical rumormongers."] "You say that we, the militants in the mass movements, are the obstacle to the development of perestroika. But do you really think you will achieve perestroika and democracy on the basis of your sole official organizations, who immediately began campaigning after their nomination, the nominees of the national and territorial districts must pass yet another hurdle.

Their candidacy must receive final approval at a small district meeting. This offers another opportunity for screening the final March 26 election ballot.

Of course, most Soviet citizens are intensely suspicious of this arrangement—and for good reason. "The attendance at these authority—by simply replacing the individual in the post of general secretary while at the same time preserving 90 percent of the old apparatus?

"There is no cure for the apparatus so long as the entire chain of candidates, raised in the party's incubators and impatient to rise up one more rung, is not shattered. You have legitimized this usurpation of political power by concentrating unlimited powers in your own hands. Now we must bury our hopes in democracy, for democracy is incompatible with absolutism.

"I won't hide from you the fact that l believed in you, as did many others. I hoped that I would spend the rest of my life in a society free from servitude. I rejoiced in your soviet democracy, workers and youth can expect no help from the current resident in the Kremlin. A closer look at today's elections in the Soviet Union makes it clear that the actual intent of the democratic reforms initiated by Gorbachev is more designed to keep the ruling bureaucracy in power, albeit with a cleaner image, than to establish democracy for the majority. It is a bitter thing to have to shed my illusions...

"Do you want to hear about the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the [Armenian] Republic, where we rejected the candidacies of the gangsters proposed by the Central Committee of the Republic?

"This rejection of the official candidates took place in spite of an entire operation mobilized from above, beginning with the party apparatus and the state security agencies all the way down to the criminal elements— in spite of the military occupation of the polling sites and the fraud (900 ballots were secretly slipped into the box). Yes, the people for the first time refused to take part in the old, humiliating comedy of 'choosing the best watermelon from a batch of one.' Despite all the intrigue, the official candidates were repudiated. ...

"Despite the slanders, the barbarous repression, and the arrests, the people know how to separate truth from falsehood. They understand the true reasons for the crusade by the corrupt ones to defend their powers and privileges."

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... Gorbachev's democracy