Crime and Punishment?

By Richard Bernstein

COURTS OF TERROR: SOVIET CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND JEWISH EMIGRATION by TELFORD TAYLOR 187 pages. Knopf. $6.95. $1.95 paperback.

Alexander Feldman from Kiev was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in a Soviet labor camp. The charge: knocking a cake out of a woman's hands and addressing her obscenely. Pinkhas Pinkhasov, a carpenter from Derbent, received a term of five years. The charge: overcharging for his services. Isaac Shkolnik of Vinnitsa in the Ukraine was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp for "systematically" collecting "espionage material about the Soviet Union with a view to selling it to Israeli intelligence." In none of these cases was any witness or credible evidence produced to prove the charges.

The real offense of all three men, as of 16 other people whose trials are examined in Courts of Terror, was a desire to emigrate to Israel.

For Americans, who have been led to believe that crime (real or fancied) and punishment in the Soviet Union is largely a matter of the midnight knock on the door and a hasty trip to a labor camp, such cases at first glance will not seem very surprising. But in fact the U.S.S.R. has an elaborate and, on the surface, enlightened legal code that --since the days of Stalin--has customarily been followed. One of the fascinations of Courts of Terror is its depiction of a government in the tortuous process of subverting its own laws for reasons of propaganda and political expediency.

Soviet trials are decided not by jurors but by three court officials, a judge and two "people's assessors." In a case like that of Isaac Shkolnik, the Soviet authorities confronted an awkward problem. Wanting to emigrate to Israel is not, according to Soviet law, a crime, though it is disturbing to Soviet authorities since one emigre tends to encourage others to try to leave the supposed Socialist paradise. But if law is to have any general viability, its forms must be maintained. Hence charges of real, but uncommitted crimes had to be fabricated for would-be emigres. What the West would regard as a peccadillo (knocking that cake from a woman's hands) was exaggerated into "hooliganism," which is a felony in the Soviet Union. The possession of Zionist literature became evidence of treasonous intent. Even so, convictions had to be obtained by means of crudely rigged trials presided over by compliant or, in some cases, intimidated court officers.

Courts of Terror is the result of a human rights project that failed. Led by Telford Taylor, who was U.S. prosecutor at the Nurnberg War Crimes Trials of 1946, a group of distinguished American lawyers gained power of attorney for the relatives in Israel of 19 Jews serving sentences at various labor camps within the Soviet Union. The hope was that the Soviets would respect their own laws enough for cogent arguments by foreign colleagues to induce them to reconsider the harsh sentences meted out to the 19 Jewish prisoners. The U.S. lawyers first studied Soviet law. For months they prepared defense briefs, excerpts of which form an appendix to the book, detailing how, in each of the cases, convictions had been obtained in flagrant violation of the Soviets' own statutes. The lawyers even journeyed to Moscow and presented their briefs to the Soviet procurator-general--one Roman Rudenko, who had been, coincidentally, Taylor's Soviet counterpart at Nuernberg.

Belated Clemency. There were among Taylor's clients, as he puts it, "no poets, or ballet dancers or famous scientists--no Solzhenitsyns, Panovs, or Sakharovs"--i.e., personalities with the kind of repute that might ensure an international outcry and possibly have an effect on the Kremlin. Taylor only went public with this unique, and hitherto discreetly quiet, legal-aid effort after it became clear that the only response obtainable from Soviet legal authorities was either embarrassed obfuscation or pure stony silence. Still Taylor has some faint hope. Months after the project ended in 1975, one of the 19 defendants,

Pinkhasov, was suddenly given a reduced sentence -- and even received permission to emigrate to Israel. Perhaps, speculates Taylor, public pressure had something to do with the Soviet government's belated act of clemency. The bare possibility justifies the lawyers' effort -- and the book.

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