MOSCOW TRIAL
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Surkov (Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers) and others. They
were met by silence. Only on November 22 did Surkov admit the arrests
at a press conference in Paris, at the same time giving a solemn assur–
ance that "socialist legality" would be observed.
The Soviet public had to wait another two months before they
were first officially apprised of the arrest ,of Sinyavsky and Daniel. On
January 13, 1966,
Izvestia
published an article about the case by Dmitri
Eremin, a little-known writer who had won the Stalin Prize in 1952.
En–
titled "The Turncoats," this article set the tone for the pre-trial
campaign, and for the trial itself. To call it prejudicial would be an
understatement. Eremin expressed regret that certain (unnamed) West–
ern intellectuals should have protested the arrest of Sinyavsky and
Daniel, who were double-faced agents of Western anti-Soviet propa–
ganda. Behind a facade of legitimate open activity, he said, they had
hidden "hatred for our system, vile mockery of everything dear
to
our
Motherland and people." This amounts
to
an accusation of sacrilege.
"Double-dealing" or "two-facedness" is not covered by the Soviet
criminal code. There is no specific ban on the use of pseudonyms, pub–
lishing abroad, writing one thing under one name and something else
under another.
Sacrilege, however, can
be
accommodated in a pinch under Article 70
of the Criminal Code:
Agitation or propaganda carried out with the purpose of sub–
verting or weakening the Soviet regime or in order to commit
particularly dangerous crimes against the state, the dissemina–
tion with a similar purpose of slanderous inventions denigrating
the Soviet state and social system, also the dissemination, pro–
duction or harboring for the said purposes of literature of similar
content, is punished by imprisonment for a period of from six
months to seven years, with or without exile for a further
period of two to five years.
Clearly, everything hinges here on proof of
intent.
Eremin, and
subsequently the prosecution at the trial, based the case against Sinyavsky
and Daniel on the allegation that their work was consciously intended
to subvert and weaken the Soviet system. In other words, their literary
work had to
be
equated with seditious leaflets or proclamations, even
though it was not available to the Soviet public, not distributed inside
the country, and could hence scarcely be shown to subvert an audience
it did not reach. To prove that the defendants' work was sacriligious
in
content and seditious in intent, Eremin and the prosecution quoted
certain passages out of context.
"The first thing you feel in reading their works," wrote Eremin,
