EAST BLOC: Your Cause Is Also Our Cause

As new crackdowns proceed, dissidents try to link arms

Following a 15-month pause, the Soviets have resumed a crackdown on critics of the regime. In three centers of human rights agitation, Moscow, Kiev and Vilnius, KGB operatives over the past two weeks have arrested four prominent dissidents and searched the homes of several others. The moves mean a further thinning of Soviet dissident ranks already greatly diminished by the deportation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Amalrik in the mid-1970s and the trials and imprisonment of Yuri Orlov and Anatoli Shcharansky, among others, in 1978. The movement's sole internationally known survivor is...