A Chronicle of Current Events (Russian: Хро́ника теку́щих собы́тий, romanized: Khronika tekushchikh sobytiy) was one of the longest running samizdat periodicals of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. This unofficial newsletter reported violations of civil rights and judicial procedure by the Soviet government and responses to those violations by citizens across the Soviet Union. Appearing first in April 1968, it soon became the main voice of the Soviet human rights movement, inside the country and abroad.
During the 15 years of its existence the Chronicle covered 424 political trials, in which 753 people were convicted. Not one of the accused was acquitted. In addition, 164 people were declared insane and sent for indefinite periods of compulsory treatment in psychiatric hospitals. In 1973 the novelist and literary critic Lydia Chukovskaya wrote:
... the persecution of samizdat, of A Chronicle of Current Events, of Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and hundreds of others cannot be called ideological struggle. It is an attempt once again to silence human voices through the use of prisons and camps.
Despite constant harassment by the Soviet authorities, more than sixty issues of the Chronicle were compiled and published (circulated) between April 1968 and August 1983. One issue (No 59, November 1980) was confiscated by the KGB. The last issue to appear (No 64, June 1982) was not put into circulation until the very end of August the following year. Material was gathered and checked up to 31 December 1982 but issue No. 65 never went into circulation.
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