Vol. 2, Nog 28 July 17, 1964
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A "PLOT" TO ASSASSINATE KHRUSHCHEV?
World Outlook has just learned through reliable sources that secret trials are occurring again in the Soviet Union. In the Mos-~ cow City Court, for instance, a trial was held behind closed doors on May 25-29, It involved a group of students and candidates of the MIMO IMoscow Higher Institute of International Relations]. The trial ended with the condemnation of three of the victims to forced labor camps, The sentences were three, four and five years respeatively under particularly severe conditions.
At the beginning, the three young defendants were accused of having organized an attempt to assassinate N.S Khrushchev. (It should be noted that they were arrested immediately after the assass~ ination of President Kennedy.) ©
The weapon they were supposed to have settled on was a . dagger. But no trace of this was brought into court. The indictment, in fact, did not cite any concrete evidence, The inquiry in.connection with the trial, which took six months, was carried out in the great est seoreoy,. me
The victims were condemned in reality for criticisms made in personal conversations about the continued existence of vestiges of the Stalinist era. During the trial, the prosecution and the judges declared that such vestiges do not exist, . These assertions were not only in flagrant contradiction with the reality but also with declarations made by the head of | the Soviet government himself,
The defendants were from 23 to 25 years old. One. of ‘them, R. -Redrigiavicus, was also accused of Lithuanian nationalism, This charge was based solely on his national origin. His wife, now reaching the ninth month of pregnancy, was not permitted to see her hus-~= band once after his arrest.
On the basis of a decision by the court, five students who were brought into the trial as witnesses were. expelled from the Komsomol tthe youth organization] and the Institute. They were accused of not having reported to the authorities the conversations which the defendants were found guilty of holding , although they knew about their "subversive" content.
The trial was prepared and directed by the political police, What is most significant about it is that it is not an isolated case, Similar trials have been occurring regularly in recent years not only in Moscow but throughout the USSR,
The only difference between this trial and many others (for example the Krasnopevtzev trial at the end of 1957 in which six persons were condemned to ten, eight and six years in forced labor | camps, the 1963 trial of students of the Moscow Faculty of Philosophy, etc.) was that the verdict was based solely on the ideas of the defen-
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dants and not, as in the preceding cases, on an attempt to spread their ideas, In this sense, the trial recalls the worst period of Stalinism,
Such trials make a.mockery of Khrushchev'!s official thesis that the USSR is now in. process of "constructing communism," Surely a society which no longer knows the class struggle need not fear the words of critical students!
The shame of putting such students on trial and condemning them to long years of forced labor is surtiotentty ¢ evidenced by the decision to do it secretly..
Horrors of Robben Island