Soviet Justice: Bureaucratic Terror

To a degree, Soviet political trials are more like perverse morality plays than a democracy's courtroom proceedings. As Political Scientist Robert C. Tucker puts it, these trials are in the realm of "psychological politics"--their ultimate purpose is not the punishment of crime but the administration of bureaucratic terror.

Naked fear through the apparent rule of law was invented by Joseph Stalin.

He inaugurated Russia's notorious "show trials"--the public excoriation of high-level Communist figures, brainwashed and tortured into "free confession" of heinous and improbable crimes against the state (a process memorably described in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon).

Such trials reached a peak in the infamous Moscow tribunals of 1936 to 1938, which "uncovered" countless heretical conspiracies, and not so incidentally cleared Stalin's path of old Bolsheviks whom he paranoiacally viewed as potential threats to his leadership. Among the most prominent victims of Stalin's ritual jurisprudence: onetime Soviet Premier Alexei Rykov, Secret Police Chief Genrikh Yagoda and Politburo Member Nikolai Bukharin, whom Lenin had once

called "the favorite of the whole [Communist] party."

Nikita Khrushchev, in his famous 1956 speech to the Soviet Communist Party's 20th congress, disclosed that the trials were based on "fabricated" evidence, the closest Soviet Communism has ever come to admit that one of its leaders had tied.

Khrushchev promised new norms of "socialist legality" to protect Soviet citizens from arbitrary persecution.

Under Stalin's heirs the show trial did, in fact, disappear.

But in the middle '60s, as a reaction to the growing dissident movement, political trials again began. Unlike the show trials, these were mainly closed to the public. Like them, the guilt of the accused was preconceived by their judges. Among the victims of the new "socialist legality":

> In 1966, Andrei Sinyavsky, 40, and Yuli Daniel, 40, were tried for disseminating "slanderous inventions defamatory of the Soviet political and social system." Both are outspoken writers whose satires of Soviet life had circulated in the West--Sinyavsky's under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, Daniel's under the nom de plume Nikolai Arzhak. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years at hard labor; Daniel to five.

> In 1967, Vyacheslav Chomovil, 30, a Ukrainian radio and television journalist, was charged in Kiev with "slandering the Soviet system." He had smuggled out to the West an account of the arrests and secret trials of 15 Ukrainian writers, teachers and scientists. Chornovil was sentenced to three years in prison, a term later reduced under a general amnesty to 18 months.

> In 1968, Alexander Ginzburg, 31, Yuri Galanskov, 29, Aleksei Dobrovolsky, 29, and Vera Lashkova, 21, were charged with anti-Soviet agitation. The trial of the four dissidents touched off extraordinary public protest in the Soviet Union, as crowds scuffled with court security guards. Their sentences ranged from one to seven years at hard labor.

> In 1970, Mark Dymshits, 38, Eduard Kuznetsov, 30, and nine others, all but two of them Jewish, were tried in Leningrad for planning to hijack a Soviet airliner to Sweden. Although the group never set foot on the plane, Dymshits and Kuznetsov drew death sentences, commuted to 15 years' imprisonment. The others received sentences ranging front one to ten years.

> In 1973, Historian Pyotr Yakir, 49, was charged with passing information to the West about dissent in the U.S.S.R. Yakir, who had spent 17 years in Stalin's forced-labor camps, admitted his guilt both on the stand and later at an extraordinary public news conference, thereby escaping a prison sentence. Before his trial, however, Yakir had told a British reporter: "If they beat me, I will say anything. I know that from my former experience in the camps."

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