Meet Comrade Punkovsky

There was no applause from the crowd that jammed a tennis court in southwest Moscow's Luzhniki sports grounds. In the biggest trial of its kind ever held in the Soviet capital, 2,000 Muscovites met at the stadium as a people's court to pass judgment on three "young healthy fellows" who were accused of having "wasted their youth" on drunken sprees, gambling, and black market dealings with foreigners. After the citizens voted unanimously to banish the wastrels from Moscow, all three were sentenced to five years' hard labor in what the authorities delicately called "a remote part of the country."

The trial, which was front-page news in Pravda, was staged as part of a new Soviet campaign to make life harder for Western spies and duller for Communist partygoers. Since last month's trial and execution of Oleg Penkovsky, the scientific official who was convicted of slipping secret information to British and U.S. agents, the Soviet press has been urging comrades to "break the criminal chain of espionage" by showing "revolutionary vigilance and being ideologically well-steeled."

Russians were particularly warned against Moscow's diplomatic cocktail circuit, where, said Pravda darkly, Western spymasters recruit new talent. Warned Pravda: "That was how they got hold of Penkovsky, and the same thing may happen to anyone who, in his blindness, nibbles at the bait the imperialists so lavishly toss out." Izvestia chimed in with an acid-etched portrait of the kind of comrade the imperialists are looking for. Dubbing him "Punkovsky"--for punk--Izvestia reported that this unsavory type cherishes a never-ending stream of gold-embossed invitations to diplomatic receptions, where he can be spotted by his "empty phrases and full glass." He is the sort of man who, when Benny Goodman visits Moscow, carries his clarinet case. Those old pants he wears so proudly were bestowed on him by a British traveling salesman. "Give me a tie and some socks," Punkovsky tells a Western cultural attache, "and I'll introduce you to some of Moscow's angry young men."

"The Soviet people are not inclined to see a spy in every foreigner," officials insisted. Nonetheless, they warned, if foreign diplomats and newsmen continue to invite Punkovskys and Penkovskys to their parties, "real, honest Soviet people" might boycott them altogether. To show that its diatribes were not just cocktail talk, the government last week stripped Artillery Chief Marshal Sergei Varenstov of his rank for having befriended Penkovsky, disciplined some of "the scientist's other friends and boozing companions." "Of course," added Pravda, "we are against spy mania."

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