238
MAX HAYWARD
has shocked-and frightened-the Soviet public. Many of them must
have remembered an article which appeared in December, 1964, in
Izvestia-the
same paper that almost a year later was to open the
public campaign against Sinyavsky and Daniel with ' the scurrilous
article by Eremin. The earlier article was a long and authoritative
article, called "On Socialist Justice," and written by none other than
the President of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., A. Gorkin. It criti–
cized as "throwbacks to the past" continuing instances in which a
man's guilt is decided on beforehand: "until the court
has
had its say,
until the court has come to its final decision, a defendant cannot be
regarded as guilty and cannot be called a criminal,
howeD'er weighty and
convincing the evidence against him mil')l be."
Gorkin goes on to attack
the widespread practice of presumption of guilt by the police and the
people who conduct the preliminary investigation. In particular he
sharply criticized as being in blatant contradiction with the fundamentals
of Soviet law, the practice of newspapers prejudicing court cases:
Sometimes articles appear in the press, in which persons are
pronounced guilty before their cases have been heard in court,
and the question of their punishment is predetermined. It is
pos–
sible and necessary to criticize in the press deficiencies in the
workings of the courts, but to anticipate the court's verdict
and thereby to exercise pressure on it means not to combat
mistakes in the administration of justice but to aid and abet
them.
Many Russians will also have wondered whether it was necessary
once more to discredit before the whole world the operation of Soviet
justice in a case involving heresy and sacrilege. There was an item in
the Soviet press on the next to last day of the trial which many Rus–
sians will have read as an oblique comment on it. Whether by accident or
design,
K omSOimolskcrya Pravda
published prominently in its issue of
February 12, on a different page from its report on the closing stages
of the SinyavskyjDaniel trial, an apparently innocuous feature article
on a letter written by Pushkin to Nicholas I in 1828. The authenticity
of this letter had just been established and, according to
K omsomolskaya
Pravda's
correspondent, it had caused something of a sensation among
Pushkin scholars. In 1818 Pushkin had written and distributed anony–
mously a long
poem
called
The Gabrieliad.
This is a blasphemous
epic in which Lucifer and the archangel Gabriel compete for the favors
of the Virgin Mary, with the result that there is some question as to the
paternity of Jesus Christ. The "ideology," very strictly guarded, of
Russia under the Tsars was
pravoslavie,
the Russian orthodox religion.
