The Shcharansky Trial

There can be no doubt that behind all the actions of this court of justice, that is to say in my case, behind my arrest and today's interrogation, there is a great organization at work.

--Franz Kafka, The Trial

He was, until 18 months ago, virtually unknown--an unemployed Jewish computer programmer on the fringes of the Soviet Union's human rights movement in Moscow. Then the Kremlin leaders decided to crush, once and for all, the flickering life signs of dissidence in the U.S.S.R. That is how last week, Anatoli Shcharansky became the symbol of deteriorating U.S.-Soviet relations, the object of confrontation politics between the Kremlin and the White House, and the personification of the struggle for human rights being waged by the Soviet Union's dogged dissidents. Put on trial for treason in Moscow, he was speedily convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison and a hard-labor camp. The accusation: spying for a foreign intelligence service that was obviously, though it was not explicitly stated, the CIA. Although President Carter had categorically denied the charge, Washington--for humanitarian reason--was exploring the possibility of exchanging two Russian spies arrested in New Jersey for Shcharansky.

Although Shcharansky, 30, had been spared the death penalty, his trial and conviction raised questions around the world about the benefits of Carter's zealous espousal of the human rights cause in the Soviet Union. But at the end of the trial, Shcharansky's mother, Ida Milgrom, 70, indicated that Russia's dissidents are thankful for Carter's support. Although shaken by the predictable verdict, the diminutive white-haired woman stood outside the Moscow courtroom in a light summer rain and read a message to Carter before Western correspondents: ''During the painful days of the trial I have not left the iron fence around the courthouse. I faced a thick wall of KGB and militia officials in the hope of catching sight of my child from afar. All these days I could hear your sincere authoritative voice in support of an innocent man. Accept, Mr. President, our deep and sincere gratitude."

Throughout the Western world, there was a storm of protest directed against the Shcharansky trial and the court cases conducted simultaneously against two other human rights activists: Alexander Ginzburg and Viktoras Pektus. They also were found guilty last week and sentenced respectively to eight and ten years. In Britain, Prime Minister James Callaghan charged that these cases "bear some of the hallmarks of the trials we knew in Stalin's day" (see box). In Israel, where attacks on Soviet Jews are perceived as a family tragedy, Premier Menachem Begin said that Shcharansky's "only sin was that he wanted to join his people in Israel." In Italy, a statement issued by Italian Communist Party Chief Enrico Berlinguer proclaimed: "Convictions for crimes of opinion cannot be tolerated."

France's Communist Party, which is somewhat more Moscow-oriented than Italy's, dispatched a message to the Soviet embassy asking for the release of Shcharansky and Ginzburg and an end to all "repressive acts" against them. The next day the French capital was treated to the surprising spectacle of a mass demonstration on the dissidents' behalf that brought together French Communist officials and Jewish groups, such as the Youths for Zionism. Arms linked, they marched through the street to the rhythmic chant UPI of "KGB equals Gestapo" and "Socialism, yes--Gulag, no."

The ordeal of Shcharansky, who had repeatedly been denied permission to emigrate to Israel, was compelling evidence of Soviet efforts to put down Jewish dissidence and of the persistence of traditional antiSemitism. Together, though, the three trials revealed the Kremlin's increasing alarm over the growth of libertarian movements among the Soviet Union's other ethnic minorities and religious groups. It was hardly a coincidence that all three men tried last week were members of unofficial Helsinki Watch Committees that had been formed to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki agreements. Such groups, which have sprung up in the Baltic states, the Ukraine and Georgia, as well as in Moscow, have served as umbrella organizations, sheltering disparate dissident groups under the aegis of human rights. Shcharansky was simultaneously an advocate of the Jewish struggle for free emigration and of various ethnic groups that seek to reform Soviet society from the inside. (Jews are the only national group that has been allowed to emigrate abroad in substantial numbers, on the ground that their homeland is Israel.) Ginzburg was not only an active Helsinki committee member but also a champion of the Soviet Union's estimated 10,000 political prisoners. Pektus, a longtime Roman Catholic activist in his native Lithuania, represented both the religious and national aspirations of Russian-dominated minorities inside the U.S.S.R.

The setting was more reminiscent of Franz Kafka than of Karl Marx. Shcharansky's trial took place in an unprepossessing three-story courthouse on Moscow's Serebrennicheski Pereulok, a quiet back street about a mile from the Kremlin. Although the trial was billed as "open" by Soviet authorities, gray-uniformed militiamen and civilian volunteer policemen stood behind iron barriers, blocking entry to the courtroom to all but a specially selected few. Pleading vainly to be let through was Shcharansky's mother, who may never see her son again. She wept openly, saying, "Not to be allowed into the courtroom is a mockery of a mother; it is sadistic torture."

Among those at the barricades were a number of Western journalists and diplomats, including Second Secretary Raymond F. Smith, who was sent by the U.S. embassy as an observer but was refused admission. Also gathered outside were about 50 activists and other supporters of Shcharansky. One was an old friend, Irina Orlov, wife of Physicist Yuri Orlov, who was sentenced to twelve years last May for having founded the first Helsinki Watch Committee. Two of the Soviet Union's best-known "refuseniks," who have been denied visas to Israel, came to show their sympathy for Shcharansky. They were Alexander Lerner, the former head of a cybernetics institute, and Veniamin Levich, one of the world's leading physical chemists. Both men were fired from their posts for seeking to emigrate to Israel. Near by stood Yelena Bonner Sakharov, one of the few members of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Committee who have not been arrested or deported, and her husband Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel-prizewinning physicist and human rights advocate.

A guilty verdict has been a foregone conclusion since March 1977, when the government newspaper Izvestiya--just before Shcharansky's arrest--accused him of spying for the CIA. According to Shcharansky's brother Leonid, who was admitted to the courtroom, the defendant's first action was to dismiss the lawyer who had been assigned to him by the KGB in place of the attorney he had requested and been denied. Conducting his own defense, Shcharansky made a one-hour opening statement to the presiding judge and two lay assessors who constituted a jury. During the five-day trial, his brother later reported, Shcharansky was frequently interrupted by the judge, prohibited from calling defense witnesses and forbidden to question government witnesses.

The Soviets clearly attached considerable importance to the trial; twice a day a court official held unprecedented press conferences for Western correspondents. According to the briefings, Shcharansky was charged with turning over to the West "classified data on the location, staffing and role of a large number of defense-industry installations." Specifically, he was accused of providing scientific secrets to a Western military-service agent masquerading as a journalist.

The alleged agent was Robert Toth, 49, the Los Angeles Times's bureau chief in Moscow between 1974 and 1977 and now a member of the newspaper's Washington bureau. Like many other American correspondents in the Soviet Union,

Toth, whose knowledge of Russian is limited, had several times used Shcharansky to contact Jewish refuseniks--many of whom have been barred from emigration because they are scientists. Shcharansky, whose English is excellent, acted as an unofficial public relations man for his fellow Jewish activists, as well as for members of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Committee, which he had helped found.

At the time Shcharansky seemed an improbable candidate for the his toric role he was destined to play.

His father was a Communist Party member in the Ukraine who worked for a time on a party newspaper. A chess enthusiast, Anatoli had a talent for mathematics that led him to study computer programming at the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute. When he applied for a visa to go to Israel, he was refused on the ground that he had been privy to state secrets while working for an oil and gas company that promptly fired him. His fiancee Natalya Stiglitz, who had applied to leave with him, received her visa. They decided to marry before she left for Israel to wait for him. Natalya, who has since adopted a Hebrew name, Avital, is still waiting.

Shcharansky's widespread contacts with foreign journalists proved to be his downfall. Anxious to cut off the dissidents' opportunities of gaining publicity for their cause in the West, the Soviets arrested Toth on a Moscow street last June as a Soviet scientist handed him a paper on a seemingly harmless topic, parapsychology. During four menacing interrogations, Toth was repeatedly asked about his meetings with Shcharansky; he strongly denied receiving any sensitive scientific material from Shcharansky. Before his release from prison, Toth was obliged to sign a protocol, or transcript of his interrogation, whose accuracy he could not verify because it was written in Russian. Last week the protocol was produced in court as evidence that Shcharansky had passed defense secrets to Toth.

One of the prosecution witnesses was Dr. Sanya Lipavsky, a KGB agent provocateur who had apparently worked a classic frame-up on Shcharansky. First, Lipavsky had volunteered his services to CIA agents at the American embassy in Moscow. U.S. intelligence sources have conceded that Lipavsky worked for the agency for nine months, providing information about dissidents. After he was dropped by the Americans, who belatedly suspected his KGB connection, Lipavsky shared a flat with Shcharansky for a short time. He thus provided the link the KGB sought to establish between the hapless Shcharansky and the CIA.

Soviet authorities clearly tried to make an example of Shcharansky, hoping that his fate would serve as a warning to other dissidents who might seek to air their hopes and grievances to foreigners. Despite the KGB'S best efforts, Shcharansky refused to cooperate in his own humiliation. The secret police failed to get a confession from him during 16 months of pretrial imprisonment. He was held incommunicado and presumably was unaware that his case had provoked world wide protest. Even knowing that he risked the death sentence by not yielding to his interrogators, Shcharansky pleaded not guilty on the first day of his trial.

The KGB also failed to break the spirit of the two other dissidents tried last week. Viktoras Pektus, who has served 16 years in prisons and camps for his religious convictions, was arrested after helping to organize a Lithuanian Helsinki Watch Committee last year. He was put on trial in the Lithuanian capital of Vilna on charges of anti-Soviet agitation, homosexuality, corruption of minors and drunkenness. Outraged by the accusations, Pektus lay down in the witness box, closed his eyes and refused to take part in the proceedings. The verdict: ten years' imprisonment and five years of Siberian exile.

The other victim of Soviet justice was Alexander Ginzburg, 41, a veteran hu man rights activist who has already spent seven years in the Gulag. He pleaded not guilty to charges of anti-Soviet propaganda in a courtroom in Kaluga, 100 miles southwest of Moscow. When the judge asked the routine question, "What is your nationality?" Ginzburg gave the insolent reply, "Zeka" (prisoner). Like Shcharansky, he had also resisted pressure to confess, but 17 months of pretrial isolation and interrogation had taken a fearful toll.

His wife Irina, who was admitted to the courtroom, was appalled to see that his dark hair had turned completely gray and he looked 60. Many of his friends believe he is unlikely to survive the eight-year term of hard labor imposed last week, following the terms of two and five years he has already served for producing an un official poetry magazine and an under ground book on the 1966 trial of Dissident Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.

The principal charge against Ginzburg this time was that he had administered a fund set up by the exiled Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn to help political prisoners and their families. Since 1974 Ginzburg has distributed a sum equivalent to $360,000, of which $76,000 was contributed by individuals inside Russia.

Last week, Ginzburg, who is known to be a retiring, compassionate and pious man,* was charged with using the Solzhenitsyn fund to pay for "sex orgies," finance his drinking and purchase "stolen icons." He was also accused of using the fund to finance "the hostile activities of criminal elements." His calm answer in his final statement to the court: "I do not consider myself guilty and I am not asking for leniency." Before being taken away, he declared: "I am seizing this last opportunity to express my feeling of solidarity and my regard for my friend Anatoli Shcharansky."

When Ginzburg's sentence was announced, a crowd of Russians who were hostile to the dissidents shouted, "Not long enough!" and "Shoot them all!" But when the van carrying him to prison departed from the courthouse, his supporters pelted the vehicle with flowers, crying, "Alec! Alec!"

Upon hearing the verdict, Sakharov commented, "It has nothing to do with justice. We consider the sentence very cruel--a threat to his life." At a hastily organized press conference for Western journalists in his tiny Moscow apartment, the revered father figure of the human rights movement declared that the harsh sentence meted out to Ginzburg was an "act of vengeance" for his connection with Solzhenitsyn. The Shcharansky trial, he said, had been an attempt to stir up anti-Semitic feelings within the country. "The Soviet authorities are trying to break up the movement for Jewish emigration," he warned. "They are threatening the Jews."

Thus in a single week Soviet authorities had managed to dispose of three more notable dissidents. Of 38 founding members of the Helsinki Watch Committees, 17 are now in prison, while seven have emigrated or been exiled. Yet another trial is expected soon. The defendant will be Alexander Podrabinek, 24, who has devoted himself exclusively to one aspect of the human rights movement: the plight of dissenters who have been imprisoned in KGB-run mental institutions where beatings and the injection of painful and dangerous drugs are commonplace.

The author of an underground book on psychiatric abuse called Punitive Medicine, Podrabinek was arrested last May on a charge of "distributing false fabrications defaming the Soviet state and social structure." Last week a Podrabinek defense committee met in London to hold a "defense hearing" with ten witnesses who will not be allowed to testify at his trial.

They included two British psychiatrists and Vladimir Bukovsky, the Russian dissident whom the Soviets exchanged in 1976 for Chilean Communist Party Chief Luis Corvalan.

Last week the trial of a non-dissident was timed by the Soviet authorities to coincide with the court cases against Shcharansky and the other human rights activists. The defendant was an office worker named Anatoli Filatov, who was charged with high treason. Tried by a military court, he was sentenced to death by firing squad. An official statement about the trial attempted to connect Filatov, who may have been a real spy, with the dissidents. It said, "The intelligence services of the imperialist states are persistently trying to use some members of Soviet society for intelligence and other subversive aims."

Who are the dissidents? In the mid-1960s, groups of intellectuals banded together to protest the large-scale arrests of nationalists in the Ukraine and the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel. They were mostly writers, scientists, teachers and scholars. At first they began calling merely for greater intellectual and artistic freedom; later, such figures as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn began asking for fundamental changes in Soviet society.

Samizdat, or underground literature, began to flourish, enriched by such banned works as Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle. But even at the height of the movement, active dissenters have never numbered more than a few thousand people. Still, the influence of their ideas is incalculable in a country where muted discontent over material and intellectual deprivation is widespread.

Will the Kremlin leaders succeed in terrorizing dissidents into silence with show trials like Shcharansky's? The consensus among both dissidents and Sovietologists abroad appears to be that they will live to fight another day. "The publicity given the trials is very encouraging," said Computer Scientist Valentin Turchin, 47, who was a prominent human rights activist before he emigrated to New York City last year. Although the Soviet press has hardly mentioned the protests in Western Europe and the U.S., news of them was beamed to millions in the Soviet Union by Radio Liberty and other Western short-wave stations. "The awful thing about the Stalin era was that people just disappeared, and nobody knew where they had gone, nobody mentioned them," said Turchin. "Now there is public reaction, and people understand what is happening. The struggle is worth the effort."

Attorney Dina Kaminskaya was chosen by Shcharansky and Ginzburg to represent them. She was then disbarred for her previous, vigorous defense of several other dissenters and forced into exile ten months ago. In Washington last week she argued that "the dissident movement will not be defeated in spite of all these persecutions. There will always be people who surface to fight, even when the persecutions become more cruel."

Said one of Shcharansky's close friends, Vitali Rubin, 54, who now teaches Chinese philosophy in Israel: "People have grown tired of being afraid. I had no doubt that Shcharansky would stand up to pressure. He knew that a Jew who is brought to trial has much more responsibility because he represents the entire Jewish community. What is being done to one Jew in a courtroom is really being done to all Jews. This is a fact of anti-Semitism.''

British Sovietologist Peter Reddaway, a longtime observer of the dissident scene, believes that the human rights movement's links with religious minorities and ethnic groups like the Ukrainians give it a potential mass base. "An unpleasant period is ahead for the dissident groups, but I'm sure they will respond as they have in the past, by toughing it out. A pattern has been established over the years: when dissident leaders disappear, others come forward to take their place." There was no more compelling proof of the dissidents' will to resist than the closing statement delivered by Shcharansky at his trial, just before sentence was pronounced:

"In March and April, during my interrogation, those conducting the case warned me that the position I had taken during the investigation made possible a sentence of 15 years to death. But if I agreed to cooperate with them, I would be freed soon and would be quickly reunited with my wife. Five years ago, I applied to emigrate to Israel. Now, as never before, I am far from my dreams.

"One would think I would be sorry, but I am not. I am happy because I have lived at peace with my conscience and I have never betrayed my conscience even when threatened with death. I am happy that I helped people, and I am proud to have met and worked with such honest and courageous people as Sakharov, Orlov and Ginzburg. I am happy to have witnessed the process of liberating Soviet Jewry.

"Those close to me know that I wanted to exchange the life of an activist in the Jewish emigration movement here for a reunion with Avital in Israel. For more than 2,000 years, my people have been dispersed. Wherever Jews were, they would repeat every year: 'Next year in Jerusalem.' At present I am as far as ever from my people, from Avital, and many hard years of exile are in store for me.

"To my wife and my people, I can only say, 'Next year in Jerusalem.' To this court, which decided my fate in advance, I say nothing."

*Ginzburg, whose mother is Jewish, is a fervent con vert to the Russian Orthodox Church.

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