LYUDMILA I. GINSBURG PROTESTS SLANDER OF HER SON
By Gerry Foley
Bold counterattacks in the Soviet Union against the official campaign of slander of the four dissident intellectuals sentenced on January 12 for circulating a record of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial seem to mark a new stage in the escalating rebellion of the intellectuals against heavy-handed bureaucratic thoughtcontrol and intimidation.
The trial of these four, Aleksandr Ginsburg, Yuri Galanskov, Aleksei Dobrovolsky and Vera Lashkova, was preceded by a wave of exceptionally sharp protests which brought new repressions against the protesters. However, if the slander canpaign which was unleashed against these four in the Soviet press after they received their harsh sentences was intended to intimidate further protest, it has not achieved its purpose.
Along with new and outspoken protests by prominent writers and intellec-— tuals, Aleksandr Ginsburg's mother, Mrs. Lyudmila I. Ginsburg, has announced her intention to sue Komsomolskaya Pravda, the organ of the Young Communist League, for false allegations against her son.
In its article on the trial of the four appearing on January 18, Komsomolskaya Pravda published what purported to be extracts from the court record and stated, among other things, that Ginsburg was unmasked at the trial as an agent of NTS [Natsional Trudovoi Soyuz -- National Workers Alliance, an ultrareactionary emigré organization].
Mrs. Ginsburg's intention and her denunciations of the distorted accounts of her son's trial were learned from copies of a letter by her to Komsomolskaya Pravda circulating in Moscow. This letter has not been published by Komsomolskaya Pravda and no reporters without clearance from the Soviet authorities were allowed to attend a news conference given by Mrs.
Ginsburg on January 19.
In her letter, Mrs. Ginsburg spe-
cifically denied reports that espionage
equipment and NTS literature had been
found in her son's apartment or that such
accusations had even seriously been made
at the trial.
An excerpt from her letter, cited
in the New York Times of February 4, seems
illustrative of the method used by the
Stalinist inquisitors and their journal-
istic henchmen in fabricating this slander.
"The prosecutor, having called him
an agent of the N.T.S., admitted in court
that he had used the wrong word inadver-
tently. Evidently, also by inadvertence,
this verbal mistake got into the text of
the accusation. However, none of the
evidence in the case, none of the deposi-
tions of the witnesses, not one question
from the prosecutor even touched on this
point."
Mrs. Ginsburg's protests were
seconded in a letter to Komsomolskaya
Pravda by Yevgeny I. Kushev, a codefendant
of Ginsburg's who was given a one-year
suspended sentence. Kushev stated in his
letter, which is quoted in the New York
Times of February 7, that Komsomolskaya
Pravda had distorted his testimony to
make it appear that he had accused Gins-
burg and the other defendants of dis-
tributing NTIS leaflets. He demanded an
editorial retraction.
According to the 1960 criminal
code of the Russian Republic of the So-
viet Union, unfounded accusations of
crimes against the state are punishable
by five years deprivation of liberty, a
sentence equal to that received by Alek-
sandr Ginsburg. This provision in the Rus-
sian code may represent a concession to
the revulsion against the political slan-
ders of the Stalin period. However, Mrs.
Ginsburg's courage in threatening to take Soviet law at its word is evident in view of the savage sentences which her son and his companions received for their protests against violations of Soviet law in the Sinyavsky-Daniel case.
Her spirited defense of her son marks a sharp contrast to the Stalin period when fear was so great that no one dared protest the disappearance of victims, and even close friends and relatives were afraid to shelter their children.
At the same time, renewed protests py Soviet intellectuals are being heard. The New York Times of February 7 reports two particularly emphatic statements.
A letter of protest against the Ginsburg trial by two sons of the very well-known Soviet writer Vera Panova has been sent to the Soviet Supreme Court, the party politburo and the Supreme Soviet. The two, Boris B. Vakhtin, a member of the Writers Union, and Yuri B. Vakhtin, a biologist, denounced "an abnormal atmosphere" surrounding the trial, and violations of legality by the authorities. A personal note in their protest made a poignant counterpoint to Mrs. Ginsburg's statements:
"We lost our father during the Stalinist mass purges. He was posthumously rehabilitated. We cannot accept the thought that there could be a repetition
of the horrors endured by our country and
people, a repetition of the terrible time
of lawlessness and bestiality."
Also, a letter signed by fifty-two
writers, scientists, university teachers,
and others is being circulated. It con-
demns the secrecy of this and other such
trials; it declares that "a legally con-
ducted and organized trial need not fear
the glare of publicity." The letter
charges that impartial observers having
been barred from the Ginsburg trial, news-
papers were able to print accounts "dis-
torting the trial and deceiving readers."
The official attempt to slander
Ginsburg and his codefendants and the
response to it by Soviet intellectuals
is the latest development in a series of
ever harder blows and counterblows ex-
changed between the bureaucratic author-
ities and Soviet intellectuals seeking
freedom of expression.
Ginsburg and the other three were
sentenced for protesting the Daniel-
Sinyavsky trial. Vladimir Bukovsky, a
young student who led a demonstration
of support for Ginsburg and the others
when they were first arrested, was rail-
roaded to prison. An attempt by Pavel
Litvinov, the grandson of Stalin's for-
eign minister Maxim Litvinov, to circu-
late a record of the proceedings of Bu-
kovsky's trial and to protest its arbi-
trary character brought reprisals against
hin. .
CAO KY