Pëtr Iakir

Kiev, 1923-Moscow, 1982

Pëtr Iakir with his daughter Irina in the 1980s. Source: https://v-strane-i-mire.livejournal.com/230606.html.

Born in 1923 in Kiev, Pëtr Iakir experienced first hand the years of the Great Terror (1936-38), when not even CPSU leaders such Iakir’s  father Iona Iakir, a leading figure in the Soviet government who was executed in 1937, were safe from the Stalinist repressions implemented by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Pëtr Iakir’s extremely important account of what for him was a personal tragedy was published in 1972 in tamizdat by the MacMillan publishing house in London under the title Childhood in Prison. Recollections of Pëtr Iakir, a translation of the original Russian Detstvo v tiur’me. Memuary Pëtra Iakira.  The work is both a denunciation of the abuses perpetuated by the Soviet power machine and an historical testimony.
Iakir’s memoirs begin on the 30th of May 1937, when his father received a phone call from K. E. Voroshilov, the USSR’s Minister of Defence, ordering him to go to Moscow by the first train. The following day, several NKVD men were waiting for him at the station. Pëtr Iakir describes his father’s deep anxiety and restlessness at the news of the many arrests made by the NKVD in the preceding weeks, the most striking being that of General M. Tukhachevskii.
From that moment on, their house was under constant surveillance and was searched continuously over several days, by up to twenty agents at a time looking for any evidence that could serve as a pretext to incriminate Iakir’s father. On the 8th of June, his mother, Sarra Iakir, was contacted by the NVKD and told to leave Kiev with the whole family. They moved to Astrakhan’, a city in the south of European Russia which, since the beginning of the 1930s, had been a place of confinement for those related to enemies of the people (vragi naroda). On 11th June they left Kiev and that same evening learned from a newspaper that Iona Iakir had been found guilty and sentenced to death by firing squad. Arriving in Moscow the next morning, they read that the sentence had been carried out. Waiting for them at the station were two NVKD officers who interrogated Sarra Iakir for almost two hours.
Despite the fact that her husband’s execution had already taken place, the officers tried to extract testimony from her to prove her spouse’s guilt.  Sarra refused to incriminate her late husband, but nevertheless, the next day, a false admission of her his alleged crimes was published in the “Izvestiia”.
On 14th September 1937, after yet another search, Pëtr Iakir and his mother were arrested because NKVD agents had found a German book with a swastika on the cover: Sarra Iakir was deprived of her passport and sentenced to 5 years imprisonment on the charge of being a ‘member of the family of a traitor of the people’ (chlena sem’i izmenika rodiny), a charge that was always brought against the families of victims of political persecution, while little Pëtr Iakir was imprisoned in a juvenile prison, where he spent 17 years. It was in prison that he met Valentina Savenkova (1924-1982), his future wife, with whom he had a daughter, Irina [1] (1948-1999).
In 1969 Iakir was involved in founding the “Initiative Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR” (Initsiativnaia gruppa po zashchite prav cheloveka v SSSR) and campaigned until 1972, when he was arrested. On 20th May of that year, he gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he suggested that during the last meeting between Nixon and Brezhnev, the repeated violations of human rights in the USSR had not been discussed: “[…] let them stop arresting people or locking them up in psychiatric hospitals for their opinions. It’s time to put an end to the Middle Ages” (Clementi 2007: 177). A little over a month later, on the 21st June 1972, Iakir was arrested in Moscow on charges of violating Article 70 (anti-Soviet activity) and Article 210 (inciting a minor to commit a crime) of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.
On the 12th of September of the same year, Viktor Krasin was also arrested. Together with Iakir, he testified against about 200 of his colleagues, dealing a huge blow to the Soviet movement for the defence of human rights (pravozashchitnoe dvizhenie). As a consequence of their betrayal, Iakir’s daughter and son-in-law, the famous bard, songwriter and pravozashchitnik Iulii Kim, were also arrested.
His daughter Irina only gave evidence against herself, admitting that she had edited issues 12-27 of the almanac Khronika tekushchikh sobytii, i.e. from 1970, the year in which the first editor of the samizdat bulletin, Nataliia Gorbanevskaia, was arrested. Under pressure from the KGB, in a letter from prison, Iakir begged Sakharov to stop his ‘anti-Soviet’ activity; similarly, Krasin wrote a Letter to Friends Outside in which he addressed all the members of the democratic movement who had become, in his opinion, dangerous to the government and urged them to cease all activities (cf. Clementi 2007: 177).
In August 1973, Iakir dealt a final blow to the movement, writing a statement in which he accused the Khronika of lacking objectivity and of producing and disseminating false information, adding that the publication of any further issues of the bulletin would negatively affect the length of his sentence (cf. ibid.).
As if that were not enough, Iakir also blamed his old comrades for his stay in prison. The trial of Pëtr Iakir and Viktor Krasin began on the 27th of  August 1973, and on the 1st of September they were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and three years’ internment. After their sentencing, they held a press conference on the 5th of September at the Moscow House of Journalists (Dom zhurnalistov), to which both Soviet and foreign journalists were admitted. In order that their public reprimand reached a wide audience, the press conference was broadcast on Soviet television, with the aim of discrediting Soviet dissidents once and for all. Iakir, stating that he was aware that he had broken the law by distributing clandestine literature, acknowledged that he had written papers in the past on the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR, but now retracted his statements, stating that the ideas circulated by the “Initiative Group for the Defence of Human Rights” were unfounded. In order to dispel any speculation that they were making their confessions under pressure from the political police or the party, both men stated that they had changed their opinions after a long period of reflection and that they had not been subjected to any threats or pressure of any kind.  The men’s repentant tone can be compared to the defiant words of Iakir just three years earlier (1970) when he spoke to the American broadcaster CBS: “Obviously they arrest us because the authorities are not happy with people who criticise them. But the fact is that there is no turning back. When we are gone, there will be others. There are already many. There are many young people, all the intellectuals of the Soviet Union. They will not go back. They will beat, they will kill, but still, people will think differently” (Sovetskie dissidenty v CBS Evening News, 1970).
The “Initiative Group” responded by specifying that all the information published in their bulletins was documented and verified, and that the Group’s aim was not to overthrow the constitutional order of the country, but to oppose the illegal actions of Soviet institutions and, in particular, the abuse of psychiatry for repressive purposes. They pointed out that Andrei Snezhnevskii, one of the directors of the infamous Serbskii Institute in Moscow and the main theorist and advocate of the diagnosis of ‘slow-onset schizophrenia’, had also attended the conference. They raised doubts about the reliability of what Iakir and Krasin had said, denouncing the probable threats and abuses the two men had been subjected to, and the way in which the investigation and the hearing had been conducted.  The men, they pointed out, had been held for a long time in isolation without direct or indirect talks with their families and had been denied the right to choose their own lawyers, who were appointed by the state. Such circumstances, the group wrote in a communiqué, are designed to “break the personality of the individual and force them to deny their own actions, those of their comrades and themselves” (Clementi 2007: 178).
Iakir and Krasin’s confession represented an enormous symbolic victory for the Soviet regime, which had managed to humiliate two of the most representative dissidents of the time. Andropov, then head of the KGB, was delighted that Radio Svoboda itself considered the trial of Iakir and Krasin to be the ‘final blow’ for the movement of dissent, and the following year (1974) he issued a statement in which he claimed that Iakir and Krasin’s repentance had “significantly enabled the localisation of anti-social activities […] as well as the unmasking of hostile actions by ideological centres of the enemy and foreign anti-Soviet organisations” (Clementi 2007: 178).
The declarations made at the Moscow House of Journalists led to Iakir and Krasin’s a initial sentence of three years in prison and three years in exile being immediately commuted to three years in prison. But already in 1974, by concession of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Iakir was allowed to return to Moscow, given the distance he had kept from political life. Iakir’s activities as a dissident and human rights activist came to a painful and tragic end. Tired of a life of struggle that began at an early age, he announced his intention to retire as a pravozashchitnik at a press conference in Moscow in 1973.
Details of his later life are scant. We know that he spent his last years suffering from alcoholism, which irreparably damaged his liver: his son-in-law, Iulii Kim, claimed that Iakir’s death was caused by cirrhosis of the liver (cf. Loshak 2013). His death in Moscow in 1982, a year after the death of his wife Valentina, met with general indifference.

Notes:

[1] Irina Petrovna Iakir inherited her political fervour from her parents; she was at the forefront of the human rights movement (pravozashchitnoe dvizhenie). She took part in the 1969 Miting Glasnosti; signed a declaration on the anniversary of the invasion of the then Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and was one of the editors of the Chronicle of Current Events (cf. POLIT.RU 2008).

Ilario Miele
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Marta Capossela

This article was produced as a result of the seminar “Civil Rights Movement in the USSR”, held by Ilaria Sicari (Course of Russian Literature, Master’s Degree in Euro-American Languages and Literatures, University of Florence, a.y. 2019-2020).

Bibliography

• Clementi M., Storia del dissenso sovietico (1953-1991), Odradek, Roma 2007.
• Conquest R., Il Grande Terrore, Rizzoli, Milano 2016.
• Iakir P., Detstvo v tiurme. Memuary Pëtra Iakira (1972), Ėlektronnaia biblioteka Aleksandra Belousenko, 2003, http://belousenko.com/books/gulag/yakir_detstvo.pdf , online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Loshak A., Anatomiia prozessa, 2013, “Dozhd’”, 2013, https://tvrain.ru/teleshow/dokumentalnye_filmy_andreja_loshaka/anatomija_protsessa_film_andreja_loshaka-351318/ , online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Liudi avgusta 1968, “Polit.ru”, https://polit.ru/article/2008/09/02/people68/ , online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Sovetskie dissidenty v CBS Evenening News, 1970,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV6TAjhhanw online, (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• N. Werth, Nemici del popolo. Autopsia di un assassinio di massa. Urss, 1937-38, Il Mulino, Bologna 2011.