MOSCOW
TRIAL
231
agents of international imperialism, to whom, he says-anticipating
the court's findings-"no leniency can be shown."
Eremin's article-if that had been its intention-d.id nothing to
allay disquiet in the West. It seemed almost incredible that the Soviet
authorities would proceed to the trial of a case which had now ·been so
hopelessly prejudiced. There were indeed signs of hesitation in the face
of mounting protest.
Pravda,
the Party newspaper, said nothing.
Izvestia
tried to run a follow-up campaign of "massive indignation" in response
to Eremin's article. But it could produce only three or four rather
unconvincing expressions of outrage from an ill-assorted collection of
"average citizens." The classical orchestration was lacking.
On January 22, the
Literary Gazette
produced a slightly more
sophisticated, but none the less prejudicial, attack on the two writers by
a virtually unknown critic, Zoya Kedrina (who was also to figure at the
trial as a so-called public accuser, i.e., a kind of "expert" witness for
the prosecution). She also produces lots of out-of-context quotations,
and makes great play with one passage from Daniel-Arzhak which
could
be construed as a call for terrorism. In
This
is
Moscow Speaking,
there is an ambiguous passage in which the hero, who is on the whole
against murder and violence, toys in his imagination with the idea of
assassinating the Soviet leaders. This evokes a memory of the war, of
people being blown to pieces by grenades, crushed by tanks, etc. It is
not clear whether the author rejects the idea of terror because of this
sudden memory, or not. Kedrina does not give the author the benefit of
the doubt, and interprets this passage as a clear call for terrorism
against the Soviet regime, calling Daniel-Arzhak a fascist who advocates
a "program of bloody wars and putches, a program of liberation
from communism by terror."
Nobody at any stage either before or during the trial was able to
produce any passage from the writings of Sinyavsky-Tertz which, even
tom out of context, could be interpreted as anything as serious as a call
for the assassination of public figures, or for the use of violence in any
form. In many countries a call for terror, even in literary form, would
be
regarded as seditious and might legitimately give cause for legal
proceedings. Now, here we have a very odd contradiction. Without argu–
ing the merits of Kedrina's interpretation of the passage in Arzhak, let us
suppose for a moment that a case could be made of the kind which
cannot, for lack of evidence, be made about the works of Tertz. Let us
suppose for the sake of argument that one of the
two
writers has written
something which is indeed seditious in that it calls for the violent over–
throw of the present Soviet system and the assassination of its leaders.
If
the prosecution had believed this to be so, and if they accepted
