Talk:Chronicle of Current Events

Quality and importance of this article

The samizdat periodical documented in this article has become a key alternative history to the official documents of the Soviet authorities which are now increasingly available in the West.

The compilers of the article on A Chronicle of Current Events (it is incorrect to use the definite article "The") have included a mass of detail, covering all aspects of this extraordinary achievement. It shows the determination of those behind the bimonthly's regular appearance that they continued and were succeeded by others while being constantly subject to harassment at work, incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, arrests and imprisonment; or else were given many incentives to emigrate when thousands of others wanted to quit the USSR but were not allowed to.John Crowfoot (talk) 17:13, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

John Crowfoot, I believe you know the subject of the article very well but it would be better if you cited sources and provided references to them as proofs for your statements added to the article. According to WP:RS, citing reliable sources is more important for Wikipedia than your knowledge. Psychiatrick (talk) 19:39, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. (Although to be fair, we did have a slight issue with overcitation in the lead paragraph per WP:LEADCITE, which is much better now.) Nkrita (talk) 20:07, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

John Crowfoot, thank you for your valuable additions, and also for your help on the grammar/style of this important article. I think we should not alter "official" translations of the Chronicle unless there is a very good reason to do so. I have reverted your last edit for now, so the excerpt from the Chronicle matches that of the translation given in Hopkins (admittedly the page number is missing – will try and correct as soon as I have time). Nkrita (talk) 20:07, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Nkrita The only official translation of the Chronicle that I know is that by Peter Reddaway in Uncensored Russia. There are inconsistencies there and sometimes only by going back to the original Russian does the meaning become clear.

Some standard formulations only came into being later. To take one example from the text I edited: "unlawful prosecutions" should read extra-judicial harassment and / or persecution. What was described in any item in this section of the Chronicle did not refer to legal prosecution but to problems at work, pressure on relations, and so on, i.e. to forms of punishment and intimidation that were not and could not sanctioned by law, but were widely used to deter individuals from participating in various protests and other forms of "undesirable" activity.

My one concern in reading the earlier translations of the Chronicle is that the deliberately dispassionate langauge was conveyed in English as clumsy and over-simple. Yet it was a poet who formulated such a style, so the equivalent in English should not read as if the person is UNABLE to write well, only that they choose to restrict the emotional palette of what they say, and how they say it. John Crowfoot (talk) 20:43, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

As for sources, I shall certainly add these tomorrow or the day after. To do it all at once would be asking rather a lot! — Preceding unsigned comment added by John Crowfoot (talk • contribs) 20:28, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

I understand your concern. I am taking my cues from WP:NONENG ("Translations published by reliable sources are preferred over translations by Wikipedians"). However, I might be overcautious in this case. (Also, what would reliable mean in this case.) Perhaps another option could be to include the Russian original (word or passage) with one's own translation or modification?Nkrita (talk) 15:44, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

Content and Style - not, please, "unlawful prosecution"

A bad "official" translation of some of the rubrics has been restored in the text of this article. Can't see who is doing it, but please don't.

The one official version of "A Chronicle of Current Events", translated in full, issue after issue, from No 16 onwards is that organised by Z.A.B. Zeman and published by Amnesty International. This means that the translators and overall editor of the translations thoroughly discussed what terminology should be used. They reached agreement that this section referred to "extra-judicial persecution".

If you look at the original Russian or at those official English translations (not at some summary in a secondary source) it is quite clear that these are not "prosecutions" but "persecution" - the word in Russian is identical, but it is quite clear from the context which is meant. Two, it is not so much an "unlawful" persecution as one that is extra-judicial, i.e. it takes place beyond the context of the courts and the legal system.

Extra-judicial here (as in extra-judicial killing elsewhere) means that some form of persecution or harassment was carried out with the approval of the Party or the KGB, but certainly not on the basic of any court decision. Some examples recorded under this rubric in each successive issue of CCE are dismissal at work, expulsion from the Party, harassment of family members, denial of education.John Crowfoot (talk) 19:41, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Sorry about that, the rubrics were caught up when I reverted your changes to the excerpt from Chronicle #8. Please don't misunderstand: I was only concerned with the boxed quote from Chronicle #8 there ("The Chronicle makes every effort to achieve...", this is also what I meant in our exchange above). Of course we should adjust the titles of the rubrics to the wording of the published editions, in this case Zeman/AI. Nkrita (talk) 19:53, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

No problem! John Crowfoot (talk) 20:21, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

How the Chronicle was produced - inclusion of Yakir and Krasin

Given their relatively marginal role in the Chronicle, as opposed to the Action Group on Human Rights and subsequent organisations of that kind, it seems odd to include Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin in this list. Especially considering their role in Case No 24 and the relatively light sentences they received compared to the most important compiling editors of CCE. John Crowfoot (talk) 20:20, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for separating Chronicle notes

Very helpful to separate all the hyperlinked notes to an issue or particular report in the Chronicle from the rest of the apparatus. Especially since I have no idea how it's done! (I did add a link to Issue 1 in reference to the Ginzburg-Galanskov trial).

I've done quite a bit of editing this morning. In particular I've added in a reference to the website and current work in progress in the bibliography and external links sections.John Crowfoot (talk) 06:48, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

You can see how it works here: WP:REFGROUP. It's good to finally have Chronicle translations in an accessible format rather than the hardcopy or AI scan formats. -- Nkrita (talk) 14:57, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Infobox link to A New Chronicle of Current Events

I have removed the link to the "A New Chronicle of Current Events" website from the infobox, since it is not the publication the infobox describes (A New Chronicle... is described & linked in the article's Post-Soviet Russia section). – Nkrita (talk) 19:15, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

explaining discrepancy between date of information contained and date of circulation

It confused me and, I'm sure, it confuses many other people that the date indicated on each issue of the Chronicle does NOT indicate when it was published (circulated).

It corresponds, instead, to the date of the latest verified information reported in that issue. The actual date of circulation or release might be weeks or, as concerns later issues, months later. This was not a problem in the 1960s and 1970s when the issues were relatively small in size. By the 1980s it led to significant lags between date of information and date of circulation.

This partially explains why English translations were yet further "delayed".John Crowfoot (talk) 19:50, 17 April 2017 (UTC)John Crowfoot (talk) 17:30, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

References may have got lost

@John Crowfoot: I've just fixed seven citation error messages by commented out unused references. The history of this article looks rather complicated, so I haven't tried to work out where each of these references came from and whether they are still relevant. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:37, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for checking. The history of the article is complex, but cannot match that of the Chronicle itself, a tale of surveillance, harassment, searches, trials, psychiatric hospitals and hunger strikes. There have been three principal editors of this page, two Russian, the other myself. I created the English-language website of translations from the Chronicle; Nkrita, one of the other editors, tidied up the links from the Wikipedia article to the new website.

Have not yet looked at the specific items you picked up on. Thanks for going cautiously! John Crowfoot (talk) 15:42, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

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