Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Though many Soviet writers had been persecuted for unorthodox opinions without due legal process, Sinyavsky and Daniel were the first to be put on trial simply for what they had written. The trial in February 1966 was officially a public one, with both defendants being granted their “full rights.” As the New York Herald Tribune observed, “These rights included the right to be laughed at by a hand-picked audience of 70 persons… [and] the right to have only the prosecution side of the case reported in some detail to those who cannot claim access to the “open” trial because they have no passes.” 13The stage-managed proceedings were, however, spoiled by the failure of the defendants to play the roles allotted to them. Against all the traditions of Soviet show trials, Sinyavsky and Daniel refused either to admit guilt or to show contrition.

Despite the sycophantic audience, the prosecution was visibly disconcerted by the courageous and articulate defendants. Sinyavsky exposed the elementary confusion in a prosecution case which identified the opinions of fictional characters with those of their authors. He was also able to refer to the bugging of his flat before he was interrupted in mid-sentence. 14The state prosecutor, undeterred either by his own mental confusion or by his uncertain grasp of the law, 15concluded with an absurdly melodramatic denunciation of the two authors’ work: “They pour mud on whatever is most holy, most pure—love, friendship, motherhood. Their women are either monsters or bitches. Their men are debauched.” But the most serious crime committed by Sinyavsky and Daniel was that of ideological subversion:

The social danger of their work, of what they have done, is particularly acute at this time, when ideological warfare is being stepped up, when the entire propaganda machine of international reaction, connected as it is with the intelligence services, is being brought into play to contaminate our youth with the poison of nihilism, to get its tentacles into our intellectual circles by hook or by crook… 16

Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp, Daniel to five.

The promised official transcript of the trial never appeared—a sure sign of the weakness of the prosecution case. An unofficial transcript, however, assembled by supporters of the defendants, was published in the West. To penetrate the dissidents who had come together in support of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the Centre selected two illegals in their late twenties, Anatoli Andreyevich Tonkonog (code-named TANOV) and his wife Yelena Timofeyevna Fyodorova (TANOVA). Tonkonog reported that the sale of the transcripts of the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel in the West had been organized by an entrepreneurial KGB agent, Nikolai Vasilyevich Dyakonov (codenamed GOGOL), who had worked for the Novosti Press Agency in the United States and other Western countries. According to one of Tonkonog’s informants, Dyakonov was “a real wheeler-dealer” who dealt in foreign currency and sold Russian abstract paintings and unpublished literary works to Western buyers. 17

Though the KGB evidently considered that the prosecution of Dyakonov would be too embarrassing, after a long investigation it put on trial in January 1968 four young dissidents who had compiled the transcript and other documents concerning the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel: Aleksandr Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Alexei Dobrovolsky and Vera Lashkova. Ginzburg and Galanskov had for some years taken leading roles in the production of samizdat journals. Their trial proceeded in much the same manner as that of Sinyavsky and Daniel. The courtroom audience was, once again, picked by the KGB and the defense was prevented from calling most of its witnesses. The two principal defendants, Ginzburg and Galanskov, again refused to contribute to the success of their own show trial and were sentenced to five and seven years in labor camp respectively. Emboldened by the courage of the defendants and the interest of the Western media, Daniel’s wife, Larisa Bogoraz, and a fellow dissident, Pavel Litvinov, issued an impassioned denunciation of the conduct of the trial to foreign correspondents, with a request “that it be published and broadcast by radio as soon as possible.” 18Tonkonog later reported that the small demonstration in Red Square in August 1968 against Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia was also organized by Larisa Bogoraz. On this occasion Litvinov and other dissidents tried to dissuade her, but ten of them joined her when she insisted on going ahead. The KGB inevitably broke up the demonstration and arrested the demonstrators. 19

THUS FAR THE writer who most concerned the Soviet authorities, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, codenamed PAUK (“Spider”) by the KGB, 20had escaped arrest. Solzhenitsyn had been saved in part by his celebrity. The labor camp novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which changed him almost overnight from an obscure provincial teacher of mathematics and physics into a world-renowned author, had been published in 1962 with the personal blessing of Khrushchev. During a sweep of Moscow dissidents shortly after the arrest of Sinyavsky and Daniel in September 1965, the KGB had discovered and confiscated manuscripts which Solzhenitsyn had left for safekeeping at the home of a friend. The KGB reported to the Central Committee that the manuscripts provided proof that “Solzhenitsyn indulges in politically damaging statements and disseminates slanderous fabrications.” Both the KGB chairman, Vladimir Semichastny, and the Public Prosecutor, Roman Rudenko, were, however, uncertain how to proceed against such a celebrated writer, and simply referred Solzhenitsyn’s manuscripts to the Writers’ Union, which did not supply the denunciation expected of it for another eighteen months. By the time the Central Committee considered the matter in March 1967, Solzhenitsyn had sent his latest novel, Cancer Ward, to the West and had almost finished The Gulag Archipelago, his epic study of the labor camps. Within the Central Committee, the initiative in calling for “decisive measures” to deal with Solzhenitsyn’s “anti-Soviet activities” came from Andropov, who succeeded Semichastny as KGB chairman in the summer of 1967. 21

For the remaining seventeen years of his life, Andropov remained the dissidents’ most determined opponent within the Soviet leadership. First-hand involvement in crushing the Hungarian uprising, reinforced by second-hand experience of the Prague Spring during his first year as KGB chairman, convinced him that one of the chief threats to the Soviet Bloc was Western-sponsored ideological subversion:

The enemy gives direct and indirect support to counter-revolutionary elements, engages in ideological sabotage, establishes all sorts of anti-Socialist, anti-Soviet and other hostile organizations and seeks to fan the flames of nationalism. Graphic confirmation of this is provided by the events in Czechoslovakia… 22

In the wake of the Prague Spring, Andropov set up a new KGB Fifth Directorate to monitor and crack down on dissent in all its forms. Specialized departments within the directorate were responsible for the surveillance of intellectuals, students, nationalists from ethnic minorities, religious believers and Jews. 23

Solzhenitsyn increasingly became one of Andropov’s personal obsessions. The announcement in October 1970 that the great subversive had won the Nobel Prize for Literature prompted the KGB chairman to submit to the Politburo a memorandum, also signed by Rudenko, enclosing a draft decree to deprive Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship and expel him from the Soviet Union:

When analyzing the materials on Solzhenitsyn and his works, one cannot fail to arrive at the conclusion that we are dealing with a political opponent of the Soviet state and social system… If Solzhenitsyn continues to reside in the country after receiving the Nobel Prize, it will strengthen his position, and allow him to propagandize his views more actively. 24