MOSCOW LITERARY TRIAL

All Are Guilty

By TIBOR SZAMUELY

ADREI SINYAVSKY and 1 were students together at Moscow University in 1948-50: he at the Philological, and 1 at the Historical Faculty. Although never particularly close friends, we knew each other fairly well; we belonged to more or less the same set, and on one or two occasions be visited my digs in Pushkin Square.

Andrei was then a young man of twenty-three or twenty-four, short and rather stocky, with fair hair, a round face, rosy cheeks and a generous snub nose. In his old military greatcoat he looked the archetypal Russian student, par- ticularly after he started to grow ,a beard. He was a very shy and reserved boy, a devoted lover of modern Russian poetry, especially of Mayakovsky and Pasternak, and apparently quite apolitical—he never seemed to be interested in the interminable political discussions which Russian students could not abjure, even in those gloomy years. We knew that he wrote stories, but there was nothing remarkable about that— almost everyone was doing it. None of his friends. I am sure, had any intimation then that Andrei was to become one of the two most significant Russian prose writers to appear within the past thirty years (the other being Solzhenitsyn).

Still less could anybody have imagined that in '1966 Andrei Sinyaysky was going to be the central figure in the most important Soviet poli- tical trial since 1938.

1 have just read the transcript of the trial of Andrei Sinyaysky ('Abram Tertz') and Yuli Daniel ('Nikolai Arzhak'). There can be no doubt whatsoever about its authenticity. It is a terrifying and in many ways a unique document.

Probably the most important feature of the case is the fact that for the first time in Soviet history writers have been put on trial solely for their writings. To be sure, a great many writers have in the past been persecuted, imprisoned, even executed in the Soviet Union—from the great Russian poet Gumilyov, executed in 1921, through the literary holocaust of the 'thirties (Babel, Mandelshtam, Pilnyak and many others). down to the Jewish writers massacred in 1952. But none of these had been tried as writers: they were all condemned on charges of anti- Soviet conspiracy, high treason, espionage and similar fanciful non-literary activities. Sinyaysky and Daniel have been sentenced for what they had written.

Therefore we have the extraordinary spectacle of prosecutor and judge earnestly discussing problems of literary theory, and pointing with horror, as proof of anti-Sovietism, to the absence in Sinyaysky's and Daniel's writings of 'positive heroes.' Where is the positive hero? Where is there a single decent, clean-living Soviet citizen?' they asked plaintively again and again.

Moreover—and this clinched the matter—the books had been published abroad. When Daniel referred to the foreign publication of critical writings by such Soviet authors as Zoshchenko and Babel,. the judge interrupted: 'No, no! All these had been published in our country. But not Arzhak. The others were honest authors. they never sent anything abroad. That makes a big. difference.'

The court itself was only the tip of the iceberg. the visible part of the vast concentration of forces that had been brought to bear on the two writers. One of Stalin's most notorious ideological

hatchet-men, the `philosopher' Yudin, was drafted as an expert—to certify sagaciously that the Jew Daniel was . . . 'a consummate, convinced anti- Semite'!

In the face of this immense pressure the two men conducted themselves with incredible courage, dignity and loyalty: never once break- ing down, defending their ideas and their actions to the end, protecting each other where possible. The accused turned into accusers. Witness this typical outburst of Daniel's: The things about which I write are taboo for literature and for the press. But literature has a right to describe any period and any problem. I believe that in a nation's life there can be no prohibited subjects . . I wrote 'all are guilty' because we have received no answer to the question 'who is guilty?' No one has ever pub- licly told us who is guilty of these crimes, and I shall never believe that only three men— Stalin, Beria, Ryumin—could have made the life of a whole country unbearable.

The conduct of the trial was certainly more civilised than in the bad old days, when Vyshinsky would rave about 'death for the mad dogs.' Yet in a sense this demonstration of `Soviet legality' is even more frightening than the excesses of the 'cult of personality.' It shows minds so warped, so blindly intolerant as to be completely shuttered to ordinary human logic and reason. It reminds one of nothing so much as the trial scene in Alice in Wonderland. At one point, for instance, the judge thundered at Sinyaysky: 'You write about thought-readers and filters under toilets. In other words, someone made a decision about the installation of such devices. That's the sort of thing covered by Article 70—slander. Doesn't this malign our people, our society, our system?' Writing about the use of overhearing devices is anti-Soviet slander—yet the court calmly accepts as evidence the record of Sinyaysky's conversa- tion taken down by a tape-recorder secretly in- stalled in his home!

And, to add the final touch of lunacy to the weird proceedings, one of the main charges, brought in all seriousness against Sinyaysky, was that of having foully slandered the Soviet Union by declaring—in his essay On Socialist Realism— that 'there is no freedom of speech and of creative activity in our country'! Definitely. one up on Lewis Carroll.

The trial was, even by Soviet standards, a deliberate travesty of justice: Article 70 of the Russian Criminal Code, on which the prosecu- tion was based, speaks of 'agitation or propa- ganda conducted with the aim of undermining or weakening the Soviet regime,' and of 'the dis- semination with the same aim of slanderous fabrications, maligning the Soviet system of State and society.' Intent is thus an indispensable element of the crime of anti-Soviet propaganda, yet the court made not the slightest attempt to establish intent with regard to Sinyaysky and Daniel.

The mere fact that their writings sharply criticised certain basic aspects of the Soviet system provided ample grounds for verdict and sentence. Whether this criticism was justified or not was entirely irrelevant. Daniel himself pointed out that nobody denies what I say; they don't say: 'You are lying, it was nothing of the sort.' No, my words just pass them by, as though they had never been spoken. . . . 'Slander'—that's a eery useful reply to anything said by a person on trial.

The most revolting aspect of the whole affair is undoubtedly the behaviour of the official Soviet 'literary community.' In other countries writers' organisations stand up for their perse. cuted -colleagues, whether they agree with their views or not; in Russia the Union of Writers delegated two of its members to act as 'public accusers.' These amateurs easily outdid the official prosecution in malevolence, bigotry and viciousness. The 'writer' Vasilyev made no show of discussing the literary issues; he was interested only in two things: where did Sinyaysky hide his manuscripts, and what presents had he received from his capitalist friends? Vasilyev listed them gloatingly: two cardigans, two pullovers, a orlon shirt. . . . (Sinyaysky furiously interjected: 'Are you trying to say that I betrayed my countri, for these rags?') A few weeks later Mikhail Sholokhov—the worthy recipient of a Nobel Prize—told a wildly cheering twenty-third party congress how much he regretted that this business had not occurred in the 'memorable 1920s,' when the culprits would certainly not have escaped with their lives.

It was left to the two small figures in the dock to redeem the -honour of Russian literature and to defend it from the inquisitors. In his final plea Sinyaysky said : The question arises: what is propaganda. and what is literature? The viewpoint of the Prose- cution is that literature is a form of propaganda, and that there are only two kinds of propaganda: pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet. It is a poor business if writers are judged and categorised by such standards.

The trial is over. Andrei Sinyaysky and Yuli Daniel have been taken to their prison camps. Barbed wire and armed sentries guard the most gifted Russian writer of his generation. In a world which has become inured to the existence of injustice, cruelty and tyranny, two brave men have struck a blow for freedom. We are all in their debt.