PURGES OF THIRTIES CITED IN SINYAVSKY-DANIEL TRIAL
Larissa Daniel, the wife of Yuli Daniel, the Soviet writer condemned to five years at hard: labor for publishing fiction abroad, granted an exclusive interview to Agence France Press after visiting her husband February 14. oo a
She said that Andrei Sinyavsky, condemned to seven years at hard labor for the same "crime," had been visited by his wife the same day. The men were being held in separate.cells :at- the Lefortovo prison awaiting transfer to the Mordovia labor camp on the Volga ‘south of Gorky. cis Mrs. Daniel sat in the trial for four days and was therefore in position to indicate some of the things that occurred in the supposedly "public" trial that was held behind closed doors.
Constantine -Paustovsky, one of the best-known and most respected writers in the Soviet Union, had sent a letter to Sinyavsky's _attorney, she said. The 64-year-old writer took a strong stand in the letter in favor of the two defendants and against the trial. However, said Mrs. Daniel, the court did not: read ‘the letter atoud | as “part of the record. . :
Paustovsky wrote that he saw nothing "anti-Soviet" in the works published abroad’under the pen names of "Tertz" and "Arzhak." From an artistic point. of view, he did not care for. them, he added, but their publication was a matter of personal conscience and to place. the. two authors on trial on criminal charges was a grave affair that would tend, to- injure ‘the: prestige of the Soviet. Union.
In his own defense Yuli Daniel stressed, “according to his wife, that the “slanders" of Soviet society. which the prosecution saw in Moscow Calling in particular, were basically a psychological analy~ sis of the period of the cult of the personality of Stalin.
Daniel cited a long list of writers and artists who disappeared in the vast Stalinist -purges..He told.his judges that it was to avoid something like that occurring again that he had sent his writings abroad. He also accused two delegates of the Writers Union of tearing quotations out of context in order to destroy hin.
| SINYAVSKY-DANIEL WITNESS PACES