EXCERPTS FROM LITVINOV'S LETTER ON BUKOVSKY CASE
One of those who figured most prominently in support of four dissident Soviet writers, sentenced January 12 to prison terms ranging up to seven years, was Pavel M. Litvinov, the grandson of Maxim M. Litvinov, Stalin's one-time foreign minister. [For text of Litvinov's statement on that trial, issued jointly with Larisa Daniel, wife of the imprisoned Soviet writer Yuli Daniel, see World Outlook, January 26, p. 69.]
Litvinov first came to prominence as a voice supporting dissident, antibureaucratic writers only a few weeks before the January trial, when an open letter issued by him appeared in the world press.
The open letter pertained to an earlier trial of three literary rebels which took place last August. The chief defendant in that trial was Vladimir Bukovsky, who was sentenced to three years imprisonment for leading a demonstration for free speech in January 1967 in Moscow.
Litvinov's letter reported a conversation between himself and a secret police officer named Gostev, in which Litvinov was warned not to make public the transcript of the Bukovsky trial, as they knew he was preparing to do.
The Soviet bureaucracy has not only failed to make public the proceedings of its trials of recent years aimed against political dissidents. It has also carried out reprisals against anyone making that information public. It thereby shows its own guilty conscience and fear of its repressive actions becoming known.
The real "crime," for example, for which the four young defendants were sentenced in January was not that they were "foreign agents" (as the obvious frame-up claimed).It was that they had compiled and published the transcript and other materials relating to the 1965 trial of anti-Stalinist writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.
The following excerpts from Litvinov's letter give some flavor of the obstacles Soviet citizens have to contend with in their struggle for realization of the socialist democracy supposedly assured by the Soviet constitution. After the police officer Gostev's initial warning, Litvinov contended he was doing nothing illegal. The conversation continued as follows:
"I: ...What kind of slander could
there be in recording the hearing of a
case before a Soviet court?
"Gostev: Well, your notes will be
a biased distortion of facts and a slan-
der of the court's actions and that would
be proved by the agency competent to
handle such cases.
"I: How can you possibly know that?
Instead of starting a new case, you your-
self should publish the record of this
criminal trial and in this way kill the
rumors circulating in Moscow.
"Gostev: And why do we need to pub-
lish it? It is an ordinary criminal case
of disturbance of the peace.
"I: If so, it is all the more in-
portant to give information about it, to
let all the people see that it is really
an ordinary case.
"Gostev: Vecherniaia Moskva of
Sept. 4, 1967, gives all the information
about the case. All that has to be known
about that trial is in there."
Vecherniaia Moskva, a Moscow eve-
ning paper, ran four short paragraphs on
the case, stating that all three defen-
dants had pleaded guilty. Litvinov pointed
out that Bukovsky had not pleaded guilty
at all. Gostev's reply was, "What does it
matter whether he pleaded guilty or not?
The court found him guilty. Consequently,
he is guilty."
Further on, the conversation went
as follows:
"Gostev: ...And in general, Pavel
Mikhailovich, have in mind: Vecherniaia
Moskva has printed all that the Soviet
people should know about this case and
this information is completely true and
we warn you that if not only you, but
your friends or anybody makes this record
[public], you specifically will be held
responsible for it. You understand very
well that such a record can be used by our
ideological enemies, especially on the eve
of the 50th anniversary of Soviet power.
"I: But I do not know of any law
that would prohibit the dissemination of
a nonsecret document only because it might
be misused by somebody. Much critical ma-
terial in Soviet newspapers might also be
misused by somebody."
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