"These Miserable People"

The ten White Russians faced the bare pine tribunal in the People's Court at Sarajevo to hear judgment passed on them on charges of spying for their Russian homeland, which they had not seen in three decades (TIME, Dec. 12). The courtroom was packed. Men & women stood in the aisles of the courtroom, others crowded around the loudspeakers in the corridors outside. Groups of school children had been herded in to be educated by the proceedings. In a flat monotone, wavy-haired Judge Stevo Yokanovic slowly read out the sentences.

The stiffest term--20 years at hard labor--went to 55-year-old Arseny Bore-movich, who admitted that he was "slightly guilty": he had done a bit of spying for Moscow, and during the war had sentenced 24 Yugoslav partisans to death while serving as a judge in Yugoslavia's pro-fascist Ustashi courts. The Russian Orthodox priest, Alexei Kryshkov, got 11 1/2 years, plus the "loss of civil rights" for four years. He had confessed to writing reports for the Soviet embassy in Belgrade which were afterwards used in Radio Moscow's anti-Tito broadcasts. The only woman defendant, Ksenia Komad, got the lightest sentence--three years. The prosecution claimed that she had been Kryshkov's mistress, charged her with wartime collaboration with the Germans.

State Prosecutor Enver Krzic, who knew that he would win his case before the trial started, eagerly drove home the point which Tito wanted to make with the Sarajevo performance. "Soviet leaders," he said, "in the struggle to subdue Yugoslavia, were forced to use these notorious spies and enemies of progress . . . [They] exploited these miserable people without a fatherland . . . because, in all Yugoslavia, they could not find Yugoslavs to do their dirty work."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.