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VIM MOSCOW TRIAL

The Two That Didn't Get Away

By RONALD HINGLEY

THE Moscow Trial of the writers ,Andrei Sinyaysky and Yuly Daniel has ended in the accused being severely sentenced for engaging in anti-Soviet propaganda by smuggling their liter- ary work abroad. One of the many outstanding puzzles about this affair is its timing. After all, Soviet literary smuggling has been flourishing ever since Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago was ffrst pub- lished in the West in 1958. Moreover, it appears from the Moscow trial proceedings of last week that the true identity of 'Tertz' (Sinyaysky's pen- name) and `Arzhak' (Daniel's) has been known to the KGB for some time. So why arrest and try them at this particular moment?

A revelation made during Saturday's court proceedings in Moscow supplies a possible clue. The two accused men indicated that they had been planning, shortly before their arrest, to re- nounce their pseudonyms and to come out into the open in their true names, which were un- known to the public. One can understand their reasons. Mr. Valery Tarsis, now on a visit to England, had for some time flatly refused to hide behind any nom de guerre and, though he was compulsorily confined in a Soviet mental hospital for a period, he has been getting away with things very nicely since his release. Even before he received his unexpected exit visa, it seems that he had come to enjoy something like extra- territorial rights in Moscow, where he was visited by Russians and foreigners—being celebrated almost as if he were Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana and leaving the authorities helpless. To have flung the author of Ward 7 back in the booby-hatch described so eloquently in his own book pub- lished in the West—that would have been piling multi-decker irony on agony to a point beyond the generous limits of absurdity allowed by Soviet controllers of literature.

From the Soviet authorities' point of view, the danger was that Sinyaysky and Daniel might themselves, by throwing off their disguise, have acquired l'arsis status' in Moscow. And with three Tarsises behaving like free citizens a chain reaction might well have set in. 'Perhaps when you've gone there will be six people like you, then twelve and so on, and in the end your kind will be the majority.' Can it be that some highly placed Soviet official remembered these words from Chekhov's Three Sisters when the order was given to institute proceedings?

Be this as it may, this is the first time on record that Soviet writers—who have been previously persecuted in all sorts of ways—have been made the main or sole defendants in a kind of show trial. The nearest recent parallel is the case of the young poet Joseph Brodsky, sentenced for parasitism in Leningrad two years ago—and since released, which is at least an encouraging sign. Like Brodsky before, Sinyaysky and Daniel refused to plead guilty. Like Brodsky, too, they had been tried and found guilty by Soviet organs of publicity long before their actual trial had so much as started. Thus their judges merely con- firmed the verdict previously passed, in a flurry of scurrilous abuse, by Soviet journalists. In the Brodsky case the court room even carried a notice 'The Trial of the Parasite Brodsky,' which was to prejudge the issue with a vengeance. But the Sinyaysky-Daniel affair has been pre- judged on a more lavish scale, not least in an English-language broadcast from Moscow by Mr. Boris Belitsky.

Brodsky's trial became fairly notorious at the time. so it is easy to overlook the fact that his was not a show trial at all, quite the reverse. It was a hole-in-the-corner affair which might never have been heard of, if a transcript had not been smuggled abroad—like Sinyaysky's and Daniel's own works, which it resembles in some ways.

Another peculiarity of the Sinyaysky-Daniel trial is the incompetence with which it has been staged, by contrast with the trial of Mr. Gerald Brooke under the same general heading. Yet this is a country which can draw on a unique fund of experience in the preliminary rigging of such public pageantry. This time the organisers seem to have lost the courage of their convictions and to have forgotten that one must never do things by halves on these occasions.

Was this a true show trial or wasn't it? Though the proceedings were theoretically open, places in the court room were reserved for a pre-selected claque of docile citizens, and outraged Soviet bourgeois—with a few honourable exceptions in- cluding the wives of the accused. For informa- tion on what is going on, the world has had to depend on the heavily slanted bulletins of Tass. Previous experience suggests that such occasions can be either open or shut, but not both at the same time. Stalin and Vyshinsky must be squirm- ing in their last resting places over such child- ishness.

An even worse error has been the authorities'

failure to do their homework properly. In the pre. trial proceedings the accused evidently agreed to follow normal etiquette on these occasions by pleading guilty—only to do the opposite Mien they found themselves actually in the dock, which was not playing the game at all. Thus they ran rings round their prosecutors, tactically speak. ing, and incidentally showed that to half-rig a trial is as foolish as to have it half-open. The manipulators have been-manipulated.

These blunders have been compounded by th mishandling of the Tarsis affair. And yet no plausible reason has been suggested why mo Soviet thought criminals should have been put on trial at the very time when a third has been given an exit visa and is, according to recent reports, contemplating a world lecture tour. Was this designed to distract general attention from the indecorous proceedings in MoscoWr? Or, more particularly, to impress more diffident Commun. ist parties outside the USSR, including the Italians, known to be worried about the impli cations? Of the Moscow trial that seems an even fainter hope when one remembers the Italian Communists' dissatisfaction with KtrushcheN's handling of the arts. And even Khrushchev did at least blow hot and cold by turns—not at the same time.

Or can it be that the Soviet authorities genu. inely believed Mr. Tarsis to be unhinged—as in deed be might well have become as a result of the way in which he was treated—and therefo likely to bring himself into discredit by obviously disturbed behaviour? Judging by the dignity and controlled forcefulness of his press conference in London, that might turn out to be the most inept calculation of all.

The result of all this has been a scandal 'o grandiose that Moscow's blundering has ese drawn criticism from the British Communist party, as well as more forthright con demnati from the Swedish, Danish, and Finnish parties All this represents a further welcome extension of Western Communist parties' tendency reject Soviet interference with the arts. The we known earlier example of this was Togliatti' warning to Khrushchev in late 1962 that the Italian Communist party could not associate i self with his condemnation of abstract art. Thus episodes like the hounding' of Sinyaysky and Daniel discredit Communism without compen- sating advantage—or so the Western Communist parties feel, oppressed as they are by the obliga tion to defend Soviet cultural policy—when th is at all possible—to non-Communist intellet tuals in their own countries.

Even more impressive is the way in which, home in the Soviet Union, the Central Co mittee is now trying to repair the damage chastising the 'Stalinist' reporting of the trial by t Soviet press, and the trial itself' has been attack —even if only by implication—on the Pa, of the Communist youth paper Komsoin skaya Pravda. On February 12 this published story showing how Pushkin had once placed hi self in a predicament similar to that of Sinyaysk. and Daniel by writing, and allowing to be circa lated, copies of his long, blasphemous pot Gavriiliada, which is even more disrespectful to the Virgin Mary than Tertz and Daniel have bed to Marx and Lenin. But when Pushkin admitted his responsibility, the inquisition was halted hl Nicholas I in person and no further proceedin. were taken. The implications of this for Koillo' molskaya Pravda's readers are only too Pla'n' even the cruellest of the-Tsars was less tyrannical in his treatment of writers than are present-da Soviet controllers of the arts.