Public Murder Day

ON TRIAL translated and edited by Max Hayward. 183 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

The world will be an infinitely safer place when the self-conscious Soviets grow up enough to accept genuine criticism. That they have not done so is amply documented in this transcript of the trial last February of two Russian "underground" writers accused of slandering the Soviet system (TIME, Feb. 18). Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, both 40 and both widely read, had been smuggling pseudonymous manuscripts to the West since 1956 under the names Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak. When the KGB arrested them last fall, the world expected a quick, quiet, Stalinesque show trial, in which the pair would meekly plead guilty, then be whisked off to Siberia, never to be heard from again. Not quite.

Among the 70-odd writers and critics present in the yellow brick Moscow Oblast Court must have been one adept at shorthand, because this account of the two-day trial is detailed and chillingly convincing. How it reached the West, British Editor-Translator Max Hayward does not say, but it must have followed a secret route like the one that brought him Sinyavsky-Tertz's The Trial Begins in 1960. That grotesque account of a woman who procures an abortion during the black days of the Stalinist "Doctor's Plot" of 1952 was a key element in the prosecution's assault on Sinyavsky.

Defiant Throughout. As for Daniel Arzhak, the major stain on his blotter was his macabre novel This Is Moscow Speaking, which imagined a "Public Murder Day," on which Soviet citizens could kill almost anyone they chose. Excerpts from the trial:

Prosecutor: Your story says that, "As usual, the paper [Izvestia] printed an editorial calling for observance of Public Murder Day." Isn't that slander on the entire Soviet press?

Daniel: It's a gibe at the style of newspaper articles . . . You keep forgetting that the starting point for all this is an imaginary situation, not something that actually happened. [Laughter in courtroom] . . .

Prosecutor: You're slandering again, Sinyavsky.

Daniel: [half bowing] My name is Daniel.

Though the prosecutor ultimately forced Daniel to admit the impropriety of smuggling manuscripts, both defendants stayed tough throughout the trial. Sinyavsky, cool, red-bearded, and looking, as Hayward reports, "rather like a good-natured goblin," was the harder of the two. He was charged with besmirching the image of Lenin by imagining a room whose walls were papered with currency bearing Lenin's portrait. He had further smeared Soviet womanhood by writing: "You see women walking about the streets, looking like Eunuchs --waddling like pregnant dachshunds, or as scrawny as ostriches, with swollen bodies, varicose veins, wadded breasts or tight stays hidden under their clothes." The magistrates were greatly offended by Sinyavsky's suggestion that the government might transform human fetuses into fish to provide food for the people. The judges, lacking a sense of humor or satire, could not see the parallel to Swift.

A Kind oi Shroud. In his final plea, Sinyavsky said: "It is always the same hair-raising quotations from the indictment, repeated dozens of times and mounting up to create a monstrous atmosphere that no longer bears any relation to reality. It creates a kind of shroud, a peculiar kind of electrified atmosphere in which the boundary between the real and the grotesque becomes blurred, rather as in the works of Arzhak and Tertz. In general, a real 'Public Murder Day'--but only with two actors: Daniel and myself."

Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years' hard labor, Daniel to five. Both are now reported to be in ill health. Neither writer has been demonstrably anti-Russian or even clearly critical of any Soviet regime since Stalin. By defining literature as propaganda and, for the first time in Soviet history, actually trying writers for "political crimes" on the basis of what they had written, the judges outdid Stalin. As Sinyavsky aptly says in his essay On Socialist Realism: "So that prisons should vanish forever, we built new prisons."

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