World: Protest on Trial

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On Aug. 25, only four days after Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia, a small group of Russian dissenters in Moscow's Red Square unfurled banners that said HANDS OFF CZECHOSLOVAKIA! and SHAME ON THE INVADERS! Beaten, cursed and arrested by KGB (secret police) agents, they were charged with making a public disturbance and slandering the Soviet Union. After a three-day trial, a Moscow court two weeks ago imposed terms of exile or imprisonment on the five defendants. By banning foreign newsmen from the trial and by packing the small courtroom with a specially selected hostile audience, the Soviet authorities sought to curb information about the proceedings. They failed. Last week Western newsmen in Moscow received surreptitious copies* of the final remarks of two of those on trial: Mrs. Larisa Daniel, wife of the imprisoned writer Yuri Daniel, and Pavel Litvinov, the 31-year-old physicist grandson of Stalin's prewar Foreign Minister. The reasoned, quiet pleas of the two dissenters are an eloquent echo of all those, from Socrates to Zola, who risked their own freedom in order to defend the right of men to speak freely.

MRS. DANIEL: I do not think that a critical attitude to ward any specific action of the government and the Communist Party should mean a slandering of the system.

JUDGE: Do not speak of your motives. That has nothing to do with the court.

MRS. DANIEL: I have to speak of my motives, since this question was asked of me. I did not act on impulse. I thought about what I was doing, and fully knew what the consequences might be. I do not consider myself a public person, still less a political one.

I thought some public personages might speak out publicly, but they did not. I was faced with the choice of acting on my own or keeping silent. For me to have kept silent would have meant joining those who support the action with which I did not agree. That would have been like lying. If I had not done this, I would have had to consider myself responsible for the error of our government. Feeling as I do about those who kept silent in a former period [the Stalin era], I consider myself responsible.

PROSECUTOR: The defendant has no right to speak of things that have nothing to do with the accusation and no right to speak of the actions of the Soviet government and people. I demand that Defendant Bogoraz [Mrs. Daniel's maiden name] be denied the right to continue.

JUDGE TO MRS. DANIEL: This is my third reprimand to you. You are trying to speak of your motives.

MRS. DANIEL: So far, I have not touched on my motives in the Czechoslovak question. I do not admit guilt, but have I any regrets? To some extent, I do. I regret very deeply the fact that with me on this bench is a young man whose personality is still unformed. I am speaking of [Vadim] Delone [a 21-year-old student and poet sentenced to 34 months at hard labor], whose character may be crippled by being sent to a prison camp. I regret, too, that the gifted, honest scholar [Konstantin] Babitsky [a 32-year-old Moscow philologist, who was banished for three years] will be torn away from his work.

VOICE FROM COURTROOM: Speak about yourself.