Russia: Applying a Czarist Remedy

By almost any reckoning, the five defendants in a Moscow trial last week could expect severe sentences. They had been arrested seven weeks ago in, of all places, Moscow's Red Square, where they had dared to unfurl banners saying "Hands off Czechoslovakia!" and "Shame on the Invaders!" Furthermore, two of the defendants were acknowledged leaders of the Soviet Union's growing intellectual dissent: Pavel Litvinov, the 31-year-old physicist grandson of Stalin's prewar Foreign Minister, and Mrs. Larisa Daniel, the wife of the imprisoned writer. To make matters even worse, all five defendants not only refused to plead guilty to the charges of disturbing the public order and slandering the Soviet Union but even insisted that the KGB (secret police) had violated their rights of freedom of assembly and speech guaranteed in the Soviet constitution.

Precarious Victory. In such circumstances, it seemed a foregone conclusion that all five defendants would receive the maximum penalty for their offense: three years at hard labor. But the judge's verdict against the three leading dissenters was surprisingly mild. Instead of imposing the usual Soviet sentence of imprisonment for convicted dissenters, the court elected to apply an old Czarist remedy nowadays mostly used for minor offenses: exile. Litvinov was banished for five years to a remote area, probably in Siberia. Mrs. Daniel was given four years. A third, Moscow Philologist Konstantin Babitsky, 32, was sentenced to three years in exile. "You may be sure," a court spokesman told foreign newsmen, who were barred from the trial, "that they will not be sent to a health resort."

Even so, since exiles are allowed to take their families with them, the three were far better off than the two other defendants: Vadim Delone, a 21-year-old poet and student, was sentenced to 34 months in a labor camp, and Vladimir Dremlyuga, 26, an unemployed worker, was given the maximum three-year sentence at hard labor. Exile was, in fact, by far the most lenient punishment inflicted in any of the current series of show trials of Soviet intellectuals that began nearly three years ago, when Mrs. Daniel's husband was sentenced to five years at hard labor and Literary Critic Andrei Sinyavsky to seven years in a labor camp.

The relative mildness of the three sentences seemed to indicate that the Soviet leaders at present have no desire to make martyrs of Russia's leading dissenters, particularly not of one so prominent as the grandson of a Foreign Minister. In that light, the verdict was likely to be interpreted as a sort of precarious victory by the score or so Russians who bravely dared KGB retaliation by standing vigil outside the courthouse during the entire trial. Unable to enter the courtroom, the protesters assembled across the street in an outdoor reading pavilion. There a petition against the trial was drawn up by former Major General Pyotr Grigorenko, 61, an outspoken bear of a man, who was drummed out of the Red Army in 1964 and confined for 14 months in a mental hospital for openly protesting against restraints on personal freedom.