Protest on Trial

On Aug. 25, only four days after Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia, a small group of Russian dissenters in Moscow's Red Square unfurled banners that said HANDS OFF CZECHOSLOVAKIA! and SHAME ON THE INVADERS! Beaten, cursed and arrested by KGB (secret police) agents, they were charged with making a public disturbance and slandering the Soviet Union. After a three-day trial, a Moscow court two weeks ago imposed terms of exile or imprisonment on the five defendants. By banning foreign newsmen from the trial and by packing the small courtroom with a specially selected hostile audience, the Soviet authorities sought to curb information about the proceedings. They failed. Last week Western newsmen in Moscow received surreptitious copies* of the final remarks of two of those on trial: Mrs. Larisa Daniel, wife of the imprisoned writer Yuri Daniel, and Pavel Litvinov, the 31-year-old physicist grandson of Stalin's prewar Foreign Minister. The reasoned, quiet pleas of the two dissenters are an eloquent echo of all those, from Socrates to Zola, who risked their own freedom in order to defend the right of men to speak freely.

MRS. DANIEL: I do not think that a critical attitude to ward any specific action of the government and the Communist Party should mean a slandering of the system.

JUDGE: Do not speak of your motives. That has nothing to do with the court.

MRS. DANIEL: I have to speak of my motives, since this question was asked of me. I did not act on impulse. I thought about what I was doing, and fully knew what the consequences might be. I do not consider myself a public person, still less a political one.

I thought some public personages might speak out publicly, but they did not. I was faced with the choice of acting on my own or keeping silent. For me to have kept silent would have meant joining those who support the action with which I did not agree. That would have been like lying. If I had not done this, I would have had to consider myself responsible for the error of our government. Feeling as I do about those who kept silent in a former period [the Stalin era], I consider myself responsible.

PROSECUTOR: The defendant has no right to speak of things that have nothing to do with the accusation and no right to speak of the actions of the Soviet government and people. I demand that Defendant Bogoraz [Mrs. Daniel's maiden name] be denied the right to continue.

JUDGE TO MRS. DANIEL: This is my third reprimand to you. You are trying to speak of your motives.

MRS. DANIEL: So far, I have not touched on my motives in the Czechoslovak question. I do not admit guilt, but have I any regrets? To some extent, I do. I regret very deeply the fact that with me on this bench is a young man whose personality is still unformed. I am speaking of [Vadim] Delone [a 21-year-old student and poet sentenced to 34 months at hard labor], whose character may be crippled by being sent to a prison camp. I regret, too, that the gifted, honest scholar [Konstantin] Babitsky [a 32-year-old Moscow philologist, who was banished for three years] will be torn away from his work.

VOICE FROM COURTROOM: Speak about yourself.

MRS. DANIEL (to the judge): The prosecutor ended his summation by suggesting that the verdict will be supported by public opinion. I, too, have something to say about public opinion. I do not doubt that public opinion will support this verdict as it would approve any other verdict. The defendants will be depicted as social parasites and outcasts and people of different ideologies.

Those who will not approve of the verdict, if they state their disapproval, will follow me here to this dock. I know the law, but I also know it in practice. And therefore today, in my final plea, I ask nothing of this court.

LITVINOV: Our innocence of the charges is self-evident, and I do not consider myself guilty. At the same time, that the verdict against me will be "guilty" is just as evident to me. I knew this beforehand, when I made up my mind to go to Red Square. Nothing has shaken these convictions, because I was positive that the employees of the KGB would stage a provocation against me. I know that what happened to me is the result of provocation.

I knew that from the person who followed me. I read my verdict in his eyes when he followed me to the subway. I knew my verdict as I signed the protocol at the police station, in which it was stated that I had committed a crime under Article 190. "You fool," said the policeman, "if you had kept your mouth shut, you could have lived peacefully." He had no doubt that I was doomed to lose my liberty. Well, perhaps he is right and I am a fool.

The pretrial investigator, too, acted as though everything was a foregone conclusion. He collected only those facts that he considered necessary. As for the trial itself, the official procedures were violated. Our friends were not allowed in. My wife was admitted only with great difficulty. There are people here who surely have less right to be here than our friends.

The prosecutor reversed the sense of Article 125 of the Constitution [which guarantees freedom of speech and assembly and other civil rights so long as they serve the interests of the working people]. He said that liberties are to be enjoyed only if they work in the interests of the state. But it is in the interests of socialism and of the workers that people are given these rights.

Prosecutor interrupts to complain that this argument is not relevant.

LITVINOV: This is relevant. Who is to judge what is in the interest of socialism and what is not? Is it perhaps the prosecutor, who spoke with admiration, almost with tenderness, of those who beat us up and insulted us? This is what I find ominous. Evidently it is such people who are supposed to know what is socialism and what is counterrevolution. This is what I find terrible, and that is why I went to Red Square. That is what I have fought against and what I shall continue by all lawful methods known to me to fight against for the rest of my life.

* The hazard of accepting such documents was illustrated last week when the New York Times's Moscow Correspondent, Raymond H. Anderson, was expelled from the Soviet Union for having received and filed to the Times a letter from one of the participants in the Red Square demonstration. The letter described how the protesters were mercilessly manhandled by the police during their arrest.

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