BEGINS. -- THE TRIAL ENDS
By Pierre Frank
"We are not concerned about what you write and keep in your desk dra:er," Smirnov, the judge who sentenced the writers Sinyavsky and Daniel, told a meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers where he was asked to explain his.sentence. These words deserve to go down in history. You can think what you please: but it must stay in your desk drawer. Judge Smirnov has given us the exact measure of the changes that have come about in the Soviet Union since the death of Stalin -a more liberal regime certainly, but not a democratic one. Freedom of opinion has its place in a desk drawer. To take it out of the drawer, to try to express it, that runs the risk of years in prison.
The ruling bureaucrats have, it is true, many reasons ‘to fear freedom of expression among the writers. We have already given a synopsis of Daniel's short story Moscow Speaking. [See World Outlook March 4.] Likewise of interest is Sinyavsky's short story, The Trial Begins, which is included fin a-book published in French under the title, Le Verglas (The Frost). It was written in 1956; that is, in the period immediately following the death of Stalin when there was a certain ferment, before Khrushchev ‘succeeded in reestablishing an equilibrium by setting as the goal...«a'consumers: society in the Western style. © DS So,
The central character of The Trial Pegins is prosecutor Vladimir Petrovitch Globov, a conformist to the nth degree. He tells his son: "You're preparing to chose a career in law? That's fine, that's serious...But your doubts, your problems, let me tell you, are not worth a fart...One of these screwball notions bothering you? You're still too young to understand anything about politics... Hold on, you just stuck up for the former internees..Well,. believe me, I-know a little more: than you do:'on that subject. They're all scoundrels and traitors. And talking about wages! You'd like to pay a minister and a cleaning woman the same thing? Go on, here's three hundred ‘rubles; see if.you can run the government with. that! You think those at the top are dumber. than us? But while you're conjugating your German verbs and arguing philosophy , the ones up there have foreseen and figured out everything." =. .
“We find him in charge of a dossier against: "Citizen Rabinovich, gynecologist," for having “practiced an illegal abortion. " The case brings him to. think: 7
“He had already had occasion to indict a Rabinovich, maybe even two or three, in the past. How could he remember tham all? Anyway, all these Rabinoviches are petty bourgeois by nature, enemies of socialism, everybody knows it, even schoolboys. There are exceptions of course. There is Ehrenburg for example.. But look at Trotsky, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev and the cosmopolitan critics. ~- They all have a congenital tendency to treachery. "
Globov's second marriage is to the beautiful Marina Pavlovna.
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With this qnutualty they can utilize the one's office and the other’ Ss beauty. to mutual y furt er their’ positions” in Society. oo, ae
Nevertheless only something minor is necessary to set the. drama in motion. It begins with a marital quarrel in the course of which. Marina’ Pavlovna informs , her: husband that- she has had an abortion: ~ Po ee FO eye veg! Do ee o ae
"The. explosion of an atom bomb. . The surface of the earth wiped clean; no. more; enemies to. overcome: .Almost unconscious, he refletted that he’ was doubly dishonored:' “as a vhusband and as a pro= secutor. ». How, could’ he reproach Citizen. Rabinovich, _ when his own, wife?. Poa - . Lo
“But “the drama concerns his son Sergei above: all, a ‘high school boy who organizes a "Party" and works out a program for his "Party":
"Cleaning women will get the highest wages. Ministers: will be reduced to a starvation pittance to prove their disinterested motives. Taxes, torture, thievery will‘ all disappear. Freedom will be total, so glorious that no one will ever again want to imprison anyone. and everyone will have what he needs. Quotatioris from, Mayakovski will be pasted up everywhere along. the, streets."—
The boy Seryozha and girl Katia continue their discussion on the party program. .
"Tn Seryozha' s description everything fell into: place. even no more. harmoniously than I have said. Only one point remained ‘unclear’ in Katia's mind: Must we overthrow the government immediately by : m force or wait until the rest of the world has liquidated capitalism” ° Seryozha advised waiting for the world revolution but he admitted finally, although . Painfully, that ‘the government would (still have ; to be overthrown." ” 7
This affair is called to the attention of the authorities by a lawyer, a skeptic, who nonetheless is disturbed to come upon "Trotskyism of the 1920's." Katia is trampled by the crowd in the terrible stampede that occurred in Moscow after the death of Stalin. Seryozha is accuséd-of having contaets with foreign intelligence services. Prosecutor Globov rejects the pleas of an old revolutionist, the mother of his first wife, for her grandson: "A traitor is no. son of mine. oe ‘Finally he gets another promotion.
But The. ‘Trial Begins has another climax which stands | out even more in the Light of the sentence just given Sinyavski.’ ‘The epilogue » in reality occurs in a labor camp on the'river Kolima when Sergei, the schoolboy, and Rabinovich, the doctor, meet...the author: How and.why was Sinyavski | sent to the camp?
- TO. policemen, Vitya and . Tolya,” ‘in search of a way” “to. Perret out the. most intimate thoughts: and feelings: of the author have an
| os "If we instalted & dragnet or a' special ‘s¢reen under every
-house and gave strict ‘orders to the porters to collect every piece of paper with writing on it....It seems a quite scientific method to sift through the crap. ".
By this means, ‘the author says, the authorities found the rough drafts of his short story and he was called before a tribunal for "slander, pornography and disclosure of state secrets."
"T was re roached. above all with not having depicted my positive characters [prosecutor Globov, the lawyer Karlinsky, Marina, | the two plainclothesmen] in the many-sided activities of their calling, but with having posed them as malevolent entities, presented to the readers in their most untypical aspects. As for the negative characters [the abortionist Rabinovich, the saboteur Seryozha, and his accomplice Katia] they obviously received. their just.deserts, in my slanderous work, but their reactionary basis was not sufficiently brought. out." a
_ . I- have. far from. given an exact. idea. of this book, which is almost: one hundred pages long, in which the. question of "ends" and "means". is: taken up continually in different ways, and in which there are also reactionary tendencies. But what I have sought to indicate is that in rejecting "Socialist Realism" and conformist literature with its "positive types" and its "negatives types" the author gives us a strikingly true picture of the part of Soviet society that he describes: the bourgeois style of life and thought of functionaries with their minds set on their own advancement; and the rebellion of youth suffocating in lies who turn spontaneously toward ideas in which the adults recognize - the spectre of "Trotskyism." fo , oe,
Writing of such acid nature could only. ‘make Judge Smirnov grind his teeth, since his liberalism extends only to the point that he will not prosecute what stays in desk drawers. The trial ends with a sentence of seven years.