Flowers for Irina

The spectacle that unfolded last week on the steps of a courthouse on Mos cow's Chernyshevsky Street is by now a familiar one in Russia. A crowd of friends and supporters of the accused had come, laden with bouquets of red tu lips and yellow daffodils. Forbidden to attend the closed trial, they huddled in the freezing cold, waiting for a chance to express their sympathy with the lat est victim of the government's crack down on dissenters. This time the pris oner was a pretty 30-year-old blonde, Irina Belogorodskaya, whose crime consisted of having left her handbag, containing copies of a protest against the ar rest of a political dissident, in a taxi. The charge: "Preparing and distributing false fabrication defaming the Soviet state and social structure." It took the court only five hours to find her guilty and sen tence her to one year in a labor camp.

As she exited from the courtroom in a rain of spring flowers, the crowd shouted, "We're with you, Irina!" When one furious KGB guard stomped on a bou quet, a girl friend of Irina's grabbed it and struck the secret policeman on the head with the flowers. After a scuffle, Irina was spirited off to prison in a truck that looked like a bread-delivery wagon. Russian spectators recalled a sim ilar scene in the last chapter of Al exander Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, when the hero, Gleb Nerzhin, is carried off to a Stalinist concentration camp in a gay orange and blue van marked "Meat."

Irina's trial was only the latest reminder of the Stalin era. The many hundreds of arrests of dissident intellectuals during the past four years have coincided with an official campaign to rehabilitate Stalin's wartime image. As the experienced reader of the Soviet press knows, every favorable mention of Stalin heralds some return to Stalinist methods by the authorities, including intimidation, denunciations, arrests and political show trials.

The victims are most often young people like Irina Belogorodskaya, whose life story perfectly embodies the generational conflict between Stalinists and libertarians in Russia today. Irina was tried for possession of documents that quoted a political prisoner as saying that "present conditions in Soviet concentration camps are just as terrible as under Stalin." Among the few spectators allowed to attend her trial was a high-ranking officer of the organization that, among its other grim tasks, ran those camps for over 40 years. He was Colonel Mikhail Belogorodsky of the KGB, Irina's father.

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