World Notes SOVIET UNION

As the judge read the verdict in the Moscow courtroom last week, the defendant erupted. "I'm ready to die for Russia," yelled Konstantin Smirnov- Ostashvili, 54, leader of a faction of Pamyat, the ultra-right, Russian nationalist movement. "It's all a lie!" Unfazed, the judge sentenced Smirnov-Ostashvili to two years of hard labor for shouting anti-Semitic threats at a meeting of liberal writers last January.

It was remarkable that he had come to trial at all. Though a videotape made at the January session clearly showed the Pamyat leader shouting his diatribe against Jews through a megaphone, it was not until July -- and after pressure from liberal intellectuals -- that Smirnov-Ostashvili was charged with "inciting ethnic hatred" under a little-used article in the Russian Federation criminal code.

The verdict came as welcome news for Jews both in the Soviet Union and abroad. As Jerry Strober of the U.S. National Conference on Soviet Jewry put it, the decision was "a further sign of the Soviet Union's increasing recognition of its human-rights obligations."