The World - News from May 1, 1989
Leaders of underground Soviet political groups who defied a government warning and sold copies of their illegal magazines on a crowded pedestrian mall were seized by police in Moscow. Hauled away and detained after ignoring police calls to disperse were leaders of the Democratic Union, Express-Chronicle, Free Migration, Debate and Trust groups. In their publications and in telephone calls to Western reporters, the groups declared it self-publishing day and called for the gathering on Arbat Street. The most sensational of the publications looked like the Communist Party daily Pravda but had pasted to it cartoons lampooning Soviet founder V. I. Lenin.
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