Sinyavsky–Daniel trial

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Sinyavsky–Daniel trial
Native name Процесс Синявского и Даниэля
DateFebruary 10–13, 1966 (1966-02-10 – 1966-02-13)
Location
anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code)
VerdictSinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in strict-regime labor camp, Yuli Daniel was sentenced to five years

The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial (

not guilty
, unusual for a political charge in the Soviet Union, but were sentenced to seven and five years in labor camps, respectively.

The Sinyavsky-Daniel case is widely considered to mark the end of the liberal Khrushchev Thaw period and the rise of political repression in the Soviet Union under hardliner Leonid Brezhnev, and a major starting impulse for the Soviet dissident movement.[1][2]

Trial

Background

Soviet society, and would naturally be rejected for publication by the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Sinyavsky and Daniel's works were smuggled out of the Soviet Union as samizdat (illegal self-published writings) to the West and published in foreign editorials under pseudonyms to protect their identities. Sinyavsky began publishing under the pen name Abram Tertz in Paris in 1959, and Daniel began publishing under the pen name Nikolai Arzhak in 1961. The publication of Daniel's This is Moscow Speaking and Sinyavsky's The Trial Begins in the West between 1959 and 1962 caught the attention of the KGB, the main security agency and secret police of the Soviet Union. Although the KGB was not familiar with the authors, they soon discovered that Arzhak, the author of This is Moscow Speaking, was the pseudonym of Yuli Daniel, and that Tertz was the pseudonym of his friend Andrei Sinyavsky. Both writers were placed under round-the-clock surveillance and their apartments were secretly searched. Information was also gathered from Sinyavsky and Daniel's colleagues acting as informants as well as KGB agents posing as neighbors' relatives.[3]: 307–311  [4]

On 13 September 1965, Andrei Sinyavsky was arrested, and Yuli Daniel's arrest followed five days later. Initially, leaders of the CPSU were hesitant about prosecuting Sinyavsky and Daniel, but the trial pressed ahead under the initiative of General Secretary

high treason". Referencing foreign criticism, it warned that no leniency would be shown to the defendants.[5]: 223  [7]
: 19–21 

Charges

Sinyavsky and Daniel's offenses were not illegal under

anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.[8]: 654  The article punished

Agitation or propaganda carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening of the Soviet regime ['vlast'] or of committing particular, especially dangerous crimes against the state, or the circulation, for the same purpose of slanderous fabrications which defame the Soviet state and social system, or the circulation or preparation or keeping, for the same purposes, of literature with such content.[9]

: 153–154 

Sinyavsky and Daniel's works published abroad were considered to consciously intend to subvert and weaken the Soviet system and constitute anti-Soviet propaganda – the first time that the article was applied to fiction.[10]

Hearings

The hearings began on February 10, 1966, in Moscow City Court under chairman of the court Lev Smirnov. The trials of Sinyavsky and Daniel were not open to the public or foreign observers, and only fragments of the proceedings reached the outside world.[3]: 309 

Citing their works, the prosecution claimed Sinyaysky and Daniel had purposefully attempted to make the Soviet state look corrupt and immoral on the world stage.[11] Sinyavsky's and Daniel's literary works were themselves presented as evidence.[7]

The defendants in turn claimed to be loyal

not guilty.[5]
: 224 

Sentence

On 12 February 1966, the court sentenced Yuli Daniel to five years in a strict-regime labor camp. The next day, Andrei Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a strict-regime labor camp.[13] Daniel and Sinyavsky were sent to the special labor camps for political criminals in Mordovia, with both spending time in the Dubravlag.

Daniel served his five-year full term, and after his release lived in the cities of

autobiographical and retrospective
works.

In 1991, the Supreme Court of the RSFSR rescinded the verdict and sentences against Sinyavsky and Daniel, and ordered the case closed for lack of the elements of a crime.[14]

Significance and legacy

Reaction abroad

Articles in the

anti-communist Radio Liberty.[15]
: 171 

The trial was universally condemned in the Western media and drew criticism from public figures from around the world.[16]: 15–16  PEN International as well as individual writers such as W. H. Auden, William Styron and Hannah Arendt expressed their indignation.[5] Others who petitioned for the writers' release were Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Lillian Hellman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, Philip Roth, Marguerite Duras and Philip Toynbee.[17] After Sinyavsky and Daniel's conviction, Graham Greene unsuccessfully asked for his royalties in the Soviet Union to be paid over to their wives.[5]

Criticism of the trial and sentences was also shared by

communist publications in Great Britain, the United States, Italy, and France. Lifelong communist Louis Aragon published his concerns in a declaration in L'Humanité, and, together with Jean-Paul Sartre, subsequently refused to participate in the Tenth Congress of Soviet Writers.[5][18] The Scandinavian Communist parties condemned the trial outright.[5]

In the spring of 1968, the US ambassador to the

UN Human Rights Commission to the plight of the imprisoned writers, describing the trial as "an outrageous attempt to give the form of legality to the suppression of a basic human right."[19] The Soviet delegation, Iran and countries of communist and the Afro-Asian bloc secured the deletion of this speech from the records of the commission.[20][21]
: 160 

Internal reaction

The proceedings were framed by denunciations in the media, headed by the newspapers

Lidia Chukovskaya accused Sholokhov of betraying the centuries-long tradition of protecting fellow literators from unfair persecution and asserted that his "shameful speech will not be forgotten by History".[22]

Nonetheless, the trial provoked protests. A letter which became known as the "Letter of the 63" (also: 62), signed by members of the

Venyamin Kaverin, Bella Akhmadulina, Bulat Okudzhava and Arseny Tarkovsky.[24]

We think that any attempt to whitewash Stalin can cause a serious split in Soviet society. Stalin bears responsibility not only for the numerous deaths of innocent people, for our lack of preparation for the [Second World] war, for the divergences from the Leninist norms of the party and the state life. His crimes and wrongdoing distorted the idea of communism to such a degree that our people would never forgive him. [...]

The issue of Stalin’s political rehabilitation is not only an issue for our domestic but also for our foreign policy. Any step towards his rehabilitation would undoubtedly lead to a new split within the world communist movement, now between us and communists in the West. From their point of view, such a rehabilitation would be considered as our capitulation to the Chinese [communist leadership]. [...] Nowadays, when we are threatened both by the activity of the American imperialists and the West Germans seeking revenge and by the leaders of the Communist Party of China, it would be absolutely unreasonable to create a pretext for a split, or even for new difficulties in our relations with the brotherly [communist] parties in the West.

— Open letter to Brezhnev signed by twenty-five intellectuals[25]

On February 14, 1966, twenty-five prominent Soviet intellectuals wrote an open letter to

Ivan Maysky, writers Konstantin Paustovsky and Viktor Nekrasov, composer Dmitri Shostakovich, actors Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Maya Plisetskaya, Oleg Yefremov and others. The letter was widely circulated in samizdat but was never published by the official press. Some of the signers suffered repercussions such as denial to travel abroad and restrictions to officially publish their work.[25]

Several people, including Daniel's wife Larisa Bogoraz, sent independent letters in support of Sinyavsky and Daniel.[26]

Chairman of the KGB
, wrote the following in his notes:

Beginning in December 1965, speeches were held in Moscow in defense of Sinyavsky and Daniel and in memory of the victims of Stalinism. The participants demanded a revision of laws and certain articles of the Criminal Code, and the release from custody of distributors of anti-Soviet documents detained by the KGB.

The actions of the participants in the gatherings were not random. They were inspired and prepared by people who set out to discredit the Soviet system. Among them were Volpin, Yakir, Ginzburg, and others. Snegov, Henri, Petrovsky, Balter, Kosterin, Nekrich, Chukovskaya, as well as some scientists and cultural figures who signed a number of dubious documents, played an unseemly role in this matter. This group of 35-40 people produced and distributed anti-Soviet literature and held demonstrations. It was associated with the foreign anti-Soviet organization NTS, whose leaders sent direct instructions to individual members of this group.

In this regard, the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR and the KGB prosecuted the following: Ginzburg, Galanskov, Dobrovolsky, Lashkova, Radzievsky, Kushev, Khaustov, Bukovsky, Delaunay, and Gabay.[27]

Dissident movement

Many members of the intelligentsia felt ambivalent towards the publication of works abroad, especially under a pseudonym. Nevertheless, many saw the Sinyavsky–Daniel case as a return to the show trials of the 1930s and a sign that the Brezhnev Politburo was preparing to reverse the gains of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization. Critics of the trial protested the harsh sentences meted out to Sinyavsky and Daniel and emphasized issues of creative freedom and the historical role of the writer in Russian society.[8]: 658  [28]: 122 

Others were troubled by the claims of the court that the trial was in full adherence to existing laws and rights guaranteed in the

glasnost meeting" (митинг гласности).[29] It became an annual event in Moscow, whose notable attendees included Andrei Sakharov.[8]
: 660 

The demonstration was followed by an increase in open protest and

Galanskov-Ginzburg trial) in itself became a landmark in the Soviet human rights movement
.

Underground coverage of these and similar events ultimately led to the appearance of the samizdat civil rights periodical Chronicle of Current Events in April 1968.

The encounter with foreign journalists during the course of the trial also helped foster a type of dissident-journalist relationship which became increasingly important to the emerging dissident movement. Through such media organs as

Radio Liberty, Voice of America, the BBC, and the Deutsche Welle, samizdat materials offered to and published by Western correspondents were rebroadcast into the Soviet Union and became available to segments of the Soviet population who had no other means of learning about the movement.[15]: 171 [30]
: 914 

Political and legal consequences

The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel was the first Soviet show trial during which writers were openly convicted solely for their literary work.[22][31][6]: 24 

The trial brought to the end the period of Khrushchev's liberalism (

Brezhnev Stagnation).[28]: 121  The further restrictions were achieved by an increase in arrests and persecutions as well as changes in the legal code itself. In September 1966 the Soviet legislature introduced several amendments to the RSFSR Criminal Code. Responding to the trial, in which the prosecution had found it difficult to prove the intent to do harm that was required by article 70, and to the public demonstration in support of Sinyavsky and Daniel, it added two subsections to Article 190:[9][32]

See also

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-312-16816-2
    .
  2. ^ (in Russian) http://www.igrunov.ru/vin/vchk-vin-dissid/smysl/articl_diss/vchk-vin-dissid-dem_mov-speech_92.html — Речь В.В. Игрунова на Международной научной конференции "Диссидентское Движение в СССР. 1950-е — 1980-е."
  3. ^
    ISBN 0465003125
    .
  4. ^ Vasili Mitrokhin, The Pathfinders (the Sinyavsky-Daniel show trial. Folder 41. The Chekist Anthology). Mitrokhin Archive from the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP). [1]
  5. ^
    ISBN 9781412811613
    .
  6. ^
    OCLC 358400
    .
  7. ^
    ISBN 978-0-7391-0488-0
    .
  8. ^
    S2CID 159974080
    .
  9. ^
    ISBN 978-0-674-82636-6
  10. ISBN 978-1-4381-1001-1
    .
  11. ^ The works cited at the trial were Sinyavski's On Socialist Realism (1959), The Trial Begins (1960), Lyubimov (The Makepeace Experiment) (1964), as well as Daniel's This Is Moscow Speaking (1963), The Man from MINAP (1963), Hands (1966), and Atonement (1964). Green, J., Karolides, N. J. (eds.): Encyclopedia of Censorship, New York: Facts On File, 2005. p. 515
  12. S2CID 251258011
    . Retrieved 23 December 2022.
  13. ISBN 978-0-8122-3418-3
    .
  14. ^
    ISBN 978-1-56324-344-8
    .
  15. ^
    ISBN 978-0-8131-7124-1
    .
  16. ISBN 978-0-88738-252-9
    .
  17. ISBN 978-0822959113
    .
  18. ISBN 0521381142
    .
  19. ^ Drew Middleton, U.S. Scores Trials of Soviet Writers, N.Y. Times, 7 Mar. 1968, at 1.
  20. ^ Drew Middleton, Soviet Wins Deletion of Most of US Charge From UN Report, N.Y. Times, 15 Mar. 1968, at 6.
  21. S2CID 144147528
    . Retrieved 2015-08-27.
  22. ^ a b c Benedikt Sarnov, Stalin and writers, (Russian: «Сталин и писатели»), four volumes, Eksmo, Moscow, 2008—2011, IBN 978-5-699-36669-9, vol. 3, pp. 261-265
  23. ^ Obituary: Andrei Sinyavsky, The Independent, February 27, 1997
  24. ISBN 978-1-4128-1161-3
    .
  25. ^ a b Oushakine, Serguei Alex (2001). "The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat". Public Culture. 13 (2): 191–214.
    S2CID 145600839
    .    , p. 197
  26. ISBN 0-8195-6176-2
    .
  27. ^ В. Е. Семичастный. Беспокойное сердце. М. 2002, С.254
  28. ^
    ISBN 0-521-23172-8
    .
  29. ISBN 978-0-674-03344-3
    .
  30. S2CID 159647840
    . Retrieved 2016-05-08.
  31. ^ Numerous writers executed during Stalinist repressions were usually falsely accused of terrorism or espionage.
  32. ISBN 978-90-04-14087-5
    .
  33. ^
    ISBN 9028608109
    .

Further reading

Other languages

External links

Trial transcripts and documents

Coverage of the trial

Other

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