Abstract
Last August, the KGB continued its round-up of Soviet human rights campaigners by arresting Ivan Kovalev, one of the last active members of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group then still at liberty. A 27-year-old engineer, Kovalev had been working as a fireman after being ousted from his profession for his involvement in human rights activities. His father, biologist Sergei Kovalev, was arrested in 1974 and sentenced to seven years' labour camp and three in exile for his work on the sanizdat Chronicle of Current Events, while his wife, Tatiana Osipova, received a sentence of five years' labour camp and five exile last year as a member of the Helsinki watch group.
The following interview on the present situation and future prospects of the human rights movement in the USSR was made in the early part of 1981. (For earlier articles on the Soviet human rights movement in Index on Censorship 1/1975, Natalya Gorbanevskaya 1/1977 and Peter Reddeway 4/1980.)