MOSCOW TRIAL
233
called a pig and a renegade, but he was not tried under the article of
the Criminal Code under which Sinyavsky and Daniel were charged.
The second unusual feature was a striking difference in the way
the case was reported in the government newspaper
Izvestia
and the way
'it was reported in the Party newspaper
Pravda. Izvestia
had its own
correspondent, Yuri Feofanov, in the court, who reported day by day,
not with the objectivity that one might expect from a court reporter,
but as one whose sympathies clearly lay with the prosecution. The pieces
are written in the classical style of the Russian satirical
feuille~on,
speak
with heavy sarcasm of the accused, quote their words in order to mock
them, and in general assume the guilt of the accused before the court
had reached its verdict. The two accused are presented as cowardly
felons who squirmed under the withering attack and the iron logic of
the prosecution. There is no indication from these reports whether or
not the defense lawyers cross-examined witnesses. Indeed it appears that
there were no witnesses in the ordinary sense. The only witnesses men–
tioned were people subpoenaed by the prosecution
to
give evidence
against the accused. They were mostly acquaintances of Sinyavsky and
Daniel who had known of their work but had failed to denounce them
to the authorities. It is impossible to gain any real idea of how the case
was actually conducted from these heavily biased reports.
If
the accused
were given a fair trial, the
I zvestia
correspondent made every attempt
to obscure the fact.
The reports in
Pravda
were not qualitatively different from those
in
Izvestia,
but it was noticeable that
Pravda
devoted much less space
to the trial, giving only brief Tass Agency accounts, except on the last
day, when it ran a piece from its own correspondent. The Tass reports
are less heavily sarcastic than Feofanov's, but they are even less revealing
about what actually took place. All we can see is that both the accused
based their defense on the argument that literature and propaganda are
two different things, and that authors do not necessarily share the senti–
ments pronounced by his characters. It was rejected out of hand by the
prosecution and the presiding judge. As
Pravda
wrote-and this is a good
example of the way the trial was reported:
Those present in the court found it irksome, particularly when
the accused were being questioned. To put it bluntly, it was
very disagreeable to observe the unsavory game of the two
double-dealers. What was the essence of the statements of
Sinyavsky and Daniel? Sometimes it was a blank denial of the
anti-Soviet essence of their works, sometimes it was nebulous
disquisitions about the nature of artistic creation, and sometimes
it was a stubborn attempt to disassociate themselves from their
