From about 1982, following the proclamation of martial law in Poland, the Soviet Union adopted a harder line with non-aligned groups, apparently because their failure to prevent the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles. In December 1982, the Soviet Peace Committee President, Yuri Zhukov, returning to the rhetoric of the mid-1950s, wrote to several hundred non-communist peace groups in Western Europe accusing the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation of "fueling the cold war by claiming that both NATO and the Warsaw Pact bear equal responsibility for the arms race and international tension. Zhukov denounced the West Berlin Working Group for a Nuclear-Free Europe, organizers of a May 1983 European disarmament conference in Berlin, for allegedly siding with NATO, attempting to split the peace movement, and distracting the peaceloving public from the main source of the deadly threat posed against the peoples of Europe-the plans for stationing a new generation of nuclear missiles in Europe in 1983." In 1983, the British peace campaigner E. P. Thompson, a leader of European Nuclear Disarmament, attended the World Peace Council's World Assembly for Peace and Life Against Nuclear War in Prague at the suggestion of the Czech dissident group Charter 77 and raised the issue of democracy and civil liberties in the Communist states, only for Assembly to respond by loudly applauding a delegate who said that "the so-called dissident issue was not a matter for the international peace movement, but something that had been injected into it artificially by anti-communists." The Hungarian student peace group, Dialogue, also tried to attend the 1983 Assembly but were met with tear gas, arrests, and deportation to Hungary; the following year the authorities banned it.