The Final Statement
‘And there is no need to argue that people are not being tried for their beliefs, but for spreading them. To uphold such a position in a court ruling is to officially teach Soviet citizens hypocrisy: think whatever you like, but say the opposite.’
I am not a lawyer. The lawyer has already discussed the legal aspects of the case at length. I will approach many of the questions from a ‘naïve’ perspective – that of common sense. I will not address many issues. I will say very little about the specific incidents and the facts underlying the charges, literally just a few words. But, as the lawyer has already pointed out, the indictment as a whole requires revision. The prosecutor fully endorses the charges, even though the indictment contains at least 37 inaccuracies. Incidentally, five of them disappeared following Popov’s testimony. Not so many remain now – just 32. I do not think there is any point in repeating this list… It is for the court to sort this out. I believe that, unlike the prosecutor, the court will take these inaccuracies into account. After all, the prosecutor himself said that everything must be examined in detail during the trial. I believe these examinations will be reflected in the court’s findings. Unfortunately, however, they were not reflected at all in the prosecutor’s speech.
And there are some truly astonishing things in the indictment. There are incidents that have come out of nowhere: neither did I make the statements attributed to me, nor were they corroborated by witnesses – and yet they are presented as though I had made them and witness testimony had confirmed them. I am referring to incidents involving Popov and Vladimirsky.
Just a couple of words about something the prosecutor devoted considerable attention to: the sources from which samizdat literature was obtained. No, Mr Prosecutor, I was by no means referring to bare assertions. My written statement submitted to the court contains the details you are interested in – the place, the time, and the circumstances. The only reason I did not mention all this earlier is that, in fact – and on this point you are entirely correct – it has absolutely no bearing on the legal classification of my actions. As for Shikhanovich, whom you categorically identify as the source, neither the place nor the time you are asking about appears in the materials of either the preliminary investigation or the trial.
Ultimately, the issue should not primarily concern the facts or specific incidents. That is not where the fundamental difference between my position and the indictment lies. It is not a question of whether a particular incident should be included in the charges. Whatever legal classification is assigned to what is happening here – Article 70, as the prosecutor proposes, or Article 190, as the lawyer requests–the main question that must be resolved is how criminal the various works in question actually are. Unfortunately, the law contains no clear criteria for determining whether a particular work should be deemed criminal. We must therefore acknowledge that there is an extremely broad range of possible interpretations. In particular, the degree to which a work is considered criminal depends on geography. For example, during the search of my home, works such as Akhmatova’s Requiem and Stalin’s Heirs, a Freudian analysis of novels by Kochetov and Shevtsov, were confiscated. I have not been charged with possessing them. In Odessa, however, Reize Palatnik was charged with possessing Requiem, while Melnik was charged with possessing Stalin’s Heirs – not merely the same document, but the very same copy. As you can see, the law is being applied inconsistently depending on geography: Odessa, Leningrad, Moscow.
The situation also changes over time. You know that many authors, including Babel and Pilnyak, were still considered anti-Soviet until relatively recently. During the search of my home, a copy of Raskolnikov’s Letter to Stalin was confiscated. It was once regarded as the foremost criminal document, but is now known as a profoundly patriotic text. I mention all this because, unfortunately, we must constantly exercise great caution given the imprecision of such assessments: what exactly should be considered criminal?
During my, so to speak, association with samizdat, I came across three rather unusual publications. One was François Fejtő’s A History of the People’s Democracies: Hungary, another was Tom Cliff’s Stalinist Russia, and the third was Russell Grenfell’s Unconditional Hatred. Had all three books been confiscated from me in typewritten form, I have no doubt that at least two would have been included in the indictment as anti-Soviet works. But here is the point: all three were published by the Foreign Literature Publishing House, yet they bore serial numbers and the label ‘prohibited literature’. The question is: prohibited for whom? Obviously, not for the people for whom they were published. In other words, there is a category of people who are permitted, and perhaps even expected, to read them. Apparently, the rest of Soviet society is considered insufficiently educated to do so. But let us accept that for the sake of argument. Here is another question. At one time, the State Political Publishing House published H. G. Wells’s famous book Russia in the Shadows, which contains anti-Soviet fabrications denigrating the Soviet social and political system on every page. The solution was remarkably simple: the book was prefaced with an introduction stating that Soviet readers would be able to distinguish truth from falsehood for themselves…
Thus, the issue is not merely which facts and assessments are presented in a given work. Strictly speaking, the law contains no qualifications on this point. Therefore, the question is not only what a person reads or distributes, but, above all, the purpose for which that person or organisation does so. This is precisely where the dividing line lies between different understandings of the situation. Right here, and nowhere else.
So, what motives guided me? The indictment gives a very brief answer: actions intended to undermine and weaken Soviet power. In discussing these motives, the prosecution merely quotes the wording of the law and says nothing more. But why? For what purpose, in the prosecution’s view, would a particular person – specifically, myself – begin reading, let alone distributing, samizdat? I thought the prosecutor would address this in his closing argument. There was much he could have said. But he did not, for one simple reason: the alleged motive of undermining and weakening Soviet power is a myth, unsupported by any evidence.
What hypothetical motives might the prosecution invent, even if they were unfounded? What theories could it propose? The first is obvious and perhaps the easiest to imagine. Supposedly, I dream of overthrowing Soviet power so that I can live under capitalism, start a factory, earn rental income… Yet the witnesses who have testified here, as well as those who know me, can confirm that material wealth has never been of much interest to me. No one would therefore believe that I want to restore capitalism.
Perhaps I was motivated by a desire for publicity? But I did not take part in demonstrations, write protest letters, or publish any works of my own. Publicity does not interest me either, and this motive is equally absent.
What else could be suggested? What, exactly, was I trying to achieve? This remains unclear. Apparently, this is neither the first instance of such a misunderstanding nor likely to be the last. Nevertheless, sooner or later, it will be necessary to understand. I tried to explain this during questioning, but I was interrupted and could not make my point sufficiently clear. I shall try to do so now.
During questioning, I began by saying that there are a number of serious negative aspects of our society that concern me. The prosecutor asked how I could reconcile this with our achievements in housing construction. To settle this question once and for all, let me put it this way. I am well aware of our achievements in housing construction and our successes in rocket engineering. I know them very well. I also know that we are damming the Yenisei and have already dammed the Angara, and I am equally aware of our achievements in ballet. As for the material I distributed, let me tell you this: in the articles I wrote, the lectures I delivered, and the films I advised on, I devoted considerable attention to our country’s strengths and achievements. More than that, I believe I made a contribution to these achievements myself, however small. When I was already in the pre-trial detention centre and read an article in Pravda about the results of the Soviet Mars 2 and Mars 3 automatic space stations’ exploration of Mars, I felt proud that, even though I had been imprisoned, I was still contributing… What more is there to say about our achievements in housing construction?
But none of this changes the fact that our society also has serious shortcomings. Very serious ones. Patriotism does not mean turning a blind eye to them; it means seeing them clearly. This is not the place to analyse them in detail. I can briefly outline the issues at stake: serious economic problems; the narrow scope of economic reform; the regrettable isolation of our science from global scientific and technological developments; the disappearance from the press of references to, and even the very term, ‘the cult of personality’; unjustifiably severe censorship restrictions; growing tensions surrounding the nationalities question; and an increase in politically motivated trials. All of this became particularly acute in 1968, the year of the events in Czechoslovakia. For me personally, as well as for many of my acquaintances and many other people I encountered, this was a devastating blow. It came as a profound shock.
I tried to find answers to all these problems in the press. I could not.
At the same time, I increasingly encountered another source of information, a phenomenon known as ‘samizdat’. People may have different attitudes towards it. They may condemn it or praise it… But whatever their attitude, it exists. A dialectical approach requires us to understand that nothing arises in society without a cause. A phenomenon, whether good or bad, has emerged… and everyone must understand what brought it into being. Samizdat has now become widespread. It has become a social phenomenon. I consulted foreign academic dictionaries and discovered that the Russian word ‘samizdat’ had entered many of them. I do not think this is something to celebrate, particularly given that another word Russian contributed to other languages a decade earlier was ‘sputnik’…
Samizdat attracted me for two reasons. First, I have been accustomed to thinking in Marxist terms and understand that this phenomenon requires study and analysis.
I wanted to understand what samizdat was, what social roots it had, and why and for what purpose it had emerged. Second, when I cannot find answers to certain questions in the pages of the official press, it is only natural to seek them in samizdat. These are the motives that drew me to it.
It is no coincidence that I mentioned the scientific and technical intelligentsia. This is the very intelligentsia that the prosecutor claimed produces no material wealth. Mr Prosecutor, you are twenty years too late! You have overlooked something as significant as the scientific and technological revolution, which has transformed the world! I could – but will not – cite dozens of books by sociologists and economists demonstrating what this revolution has brought about. They explain that, in industrialised countries today, 75 per cent of national income growth is attributable not to an expansion of productive assets but to the wider application of knowledge, the level of knowledge itself, and the work of the intelligentsia. I shall not do so.
I could cite many articles and works by Marxist philosophers, but I shall mention just one source: the Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which states that a defining feature of the period we are living through is that science has become a direct productive force. A direct productive force, Mr Prosecutor. It is high time you familiarised yourself with this document–with the CPSU Programme–before making such statements…
Judge: You should address the court, not the prosecutor.
I beg your pardon.
This is why I became interested in this case and this issue. It is in the very nature of a researcher to seek to form an independent opinion on a subject that has captured their serious interest. When discussing my reading of various works, the prosecutor suggested that I should simply put little check marks next to what I ought to read and what I should avoid. This strikes me as strange. A researcher cannot adopt someone else’s opinion on a given subject. The essence of being a researcher is to find things out for oneself. In this respect, Marx was the ideal researcher. And not only in this respect. You may know that, in response to a questionnaire from his daughters, Marx stated: ‘My favourite motto is: “Doubt everything.”‘ I believe that, for me and for people of my generation, this idea of Marx’s came naturally because we grew up in a very particular period. It was a time when cybernetics was branded a pseudoscience, genetics was denounced as fascist, and the theory of relativity was dismissed as an ‘idealist aberration’. It was a time when all philosophy – ‘the essence of all philosophy’, in Heine’s words – was contained in Chapter Four of the Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks); when all economic theory was reduced to Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism; and God forbid anyone should stray beyond that… Well, this upbringing had its consequences. I will not take anyone’s word for anything, neither then nor now. Let me give you a specific example. I am being charged with possessing Djilas’s book The New Class. The foreign press wrote extensively about this book, as did our own press. Literaturnaya Gazeta published several scathing articles about it. So what? Having read these articles and learned that the book was anti-Soviet and anti-socialist, was I supposed simply to accept their judgement, refrain from reading it, and take no further interest? Of course not. I had heard that the book claimed to offer a new departure in theory. Very well, let me read it for myself. I obtained the book and read it. Yes, I came to the conclusion that, theoretically speaking, there was very little substance to it; it was a weak book, and it had indeed been written from a hostile standpoint. But I had to see this for myself, and for myself alone. The fact that a book has not been approved for publication does not, in itself, constitute sufficient grounds for classifying it as hostile.
Samizdat contains many books that are undoubtedly valuable, important, and necessary, and that could be of immense benefit, even though they bear no official label. These include the sociological studies of Zhores Medvedev, the historical works of Roy Medvedev, Chalidze’s articles on legal issues, and Pomerants’s philosophical works. There is also fiction by Pilnyak, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova. Incidentally, the recently deceased Tvardovsky also enriched samizdat with his poem By Right of Memory, a copy of which was confiscated from me. The fact that a work has not yet been published and does not bear the stamp of Glavlit, the censorship authority, is therefore no proof of its anti-Soviet orientation. It is no coincidence that only one-tenth of the enormous amount of literature confiscated from me was included in the indictment. Only one-tenth was deemed criminal. The rest was not considered criminal, even by the prosecution’s own standards–let alone in any substantive sense. Even by the prosecution’s own standards…
The prosecution has tried to portray me as someone whose sole purpose was to distribute hostile literature. Can this really be accepted?
Information is the bread and butter of a researcher. Just as a farmer works with the soil and a worker with metal, an intellectual works with information. One can form an independent opinion only by having access to information. For example, it is important to know all the circumstances surrounding Stalin’s rise to power, because history teaches us lessons. But there are no books on this subject on the shelves of bookshops, so I have to turn to Avtorkhanov. I would like to read about political show trials in the newspapers, but no such material appears there, so I turn to the Chronicle. What alternatives can you offer me?
These are the motives that led me to samizdat.
Is samizdat a normal phenomenon? Of course not. It is a symptom of a diseased society. In a society developing normally, all the issues discussed in samizdat should be addressed in the pages of newspapers. Only in a society developing abnormally are pressing issues driven underground and their discussion given an air of illegality. This atmosphere of illegality lends samizdat a number of negative characteristics. It is precisely this illegality that sometimes fuels the extremism found in samizdat. It is also what makes samizdat particularly attractive to certain forces abroad that have no interest in the democratic development of our country and instead pursue their own selfish aims. Those who have no interest in correcting the mistakes made in our homeland exploit samizdat for their own purposes. They feed off it. Nevertheless, this danger should not be exaggerated. We should not regard hostile forces as an authority whose verdict is beyond question. History offers several examples of their miscalculations. For instance, the German government hoped that by allowing Lenin to travel through Germany in a sealed train, it would improve its military position on the Eastern Front through Bolshevik propaganda. What did it get in return? The November Revolution in Bavaria, an echo of the October Revolution. Hostile forces will miscalculate this time as well. Democratisation will not weaken socialism in our country; it will strengthen it. In the 1920s, the famous ‘cordon sanitaire’ was established around our country to prevent ideas from our country from reaching the West. Are we now going to establish a similar ‘cordon sanitaire’ ourselves? Are we afraid now? From my experience giving lectures on anti-religious subjects, I know that a lecturer who knows nothing about the Bible will never succeed. It seems to me that firm convictions grow stronger when confronted with a hostile ideology.
Finally, there is a third negative feature of samizdat: the romantic allure of the ‘forbidden fruit’ draws young people into it before their convictions have fully developed, simply because they are captivated by the atmosphere. This can shatter their lives. We have seen such people here in court: Melnik and Popov. I am deeply troubled by the fate of my young comrades. I do not know Melnik well, but his fate matters to me, because ‘never ask for whom the bell tolls’. Popov is particularly close to me – he was my student. It was precisely because I wanted to ease the plight of these people that, in March, I submitted my statement renouncing samizdat as a method. The prosecutor tried to distort the meaning of this statement, claiming that I had supposedly condemned my own activities and called them criminal. It is easy to establish that this is false by reading the statement itself. Nothing in it should be interpreted as a renunciation of my political convictions. Convictions are not gloves that one can change on the go. My statement concerned samizdat only as a method and nothing more. I have never considered my activities criminal. The prosecutor also tried to suggest that my statement had been prompted by fear. It is astonishing that you should take pride in instilling fear! You should be striving to make yourselves understood, yet you want people to fear you! Well, Popov stood before you here, crushed by fear. Are you pleased to have such an ally? But I can assure you that neither during the investigation nor here in court has a single action of mine been motivated by fear. Fear is, in general, an emotion unworthy of a human being. Communism cannot be built on fear. Of course, I am not suicidal, and the prospect of a labour camp does not appeal to me in the slightest. But if a person possesses inner freedom, then the loss of external freedom is not all that important. For freedom is necessity overcome. My departure from samizdat is merely a fact of my biography. Dozens of others, drawn to it by this very trial, will undoubtedly take my place, and, judging by what I can see happening in this courtroom, this process has already begun.
How can samizdat be eliminated? Samizdat is a cancerous growth in a society whose development has gone awry. It cannot be cured with a knife – metastases will appear… You could arrest and imprison dozens more mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers and force them to produce material goods. But that would hardly be the most economical way to use scientific and technical personnel during a scientific and technological revolution. Nor would it be an effective way to eliminate samizdat. Every such trial so far has triggered a chain reaction of further trials. In 1966, there was only one such trial–that of Sinyavsky and Daniel – whereas now there are hundreds every year.
Judge: This is information the court does not have.
Samizdat can be eliminated only by understanding that it is not the whim of a few malicious individuals but a social phenomenon that responds to a pressing need: ‘If the stars are lit, it means someone needs them.’ The demand for information that has no place in the official press is demonstrated by the publication of numbered editions of books such as Cliff’s Stalinist Russia. If they were nothing but slander, why publish them at all? We must ensure that people can obtain information not from Avtorkhanov’s works circulated through samizdat or from Stalinist Russia, distributed by subscription lists, but openly, in the pages of the press. Lenin said that under socialism every cook should be able to govern the state, which means that the masses must know and understand everything. ‘Freedom of the press,’ Lenin wrote, ‘means that all opinions of all citizens may be freely expressed.’ Later, at the First Congress of the Communist International in 1919, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stated: ‘True freedom and equality will exist in a system… in which nothing prevents every worker (or group of workers, regardless of its size) from enjoying and exercising an equal right to use public printing presses and publicly owned paper.’
There is only one solution to the problem of samizdat: the introduction of genuine freedom of the press. There is no other way. This must not be postponed to some distant future. Shakespeare wisely said: ‘Time is always ripe to do what is right.’
If there is any truly anti-Soviet idea, it is the belief that, in a clash between two ideas – socialist and anti-socialist – the socialist idea is bound to lose. But that is not my idea; it is the prosecutor’s, taken to its logical conclusion. Of course, it is false. Freedom of the press will not weaken socialism. Criticism will exist, and there is no need to fear it. It is time to understand that a patriot is not someone who constantly shouts ‘hurrah’ and votes ‘yes’. Such patriotism often conceals nothing more than a desire to protect one’s own comfortable position. How much suffering this kind of ‘patriotism’ has brought to our country! But there is another kind of patriotism, described long ago by Nekrasov: ‘He who lives without sorrow and anger does not love his homeland.’ Those who embrace this kind of patriotism may gain little from it, but it deserves respect, not repression.
I shall now turn to the section of the indictment dealing with oral propaganda. It occupies little space, but in some respects it is the most important section, because it concerns not the views of the authors of samizdat works, which I may or may not have shared, but my own views. I have never concealed them. I have openly expressed my political convictions in conversations with friends and acquaintances, of whom there are hundreds. Not one of them has ever considered my views hostile to my country. Their shared opinion strengthens my confidence that I am right. If one prosecutor considers me an enemy of my country while hundreds of others think otherwise, then life is still worth living!
The section on oral propaganda accuses me of slander. Slander is a legal term. The investigation should therefore have established that I not only lied but did so knowingly. Yet this question never even arose during the investigation, so convinced were the investigators that I firmly believed what I was saying. Take the question of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which was raised repeatedly during questioning. The investigator repeatedly expressed regret that he could not refute my arguments because he was not sufficiently prepared for the debate. And now this is being turned into a formal charge of slander. A term such as ‘slander’, unsupported by evidence, ceases to be a legal term and becomes nothing more than an insult directed at the accused. I am prepared to hear the verdict, but not to endure insults. I demand that this terminology be removed from the verdict in its entirety.
There is another peculiarity of the section on oral propaganda. I am not a lawyer, so it is only natural that I should turn to popular legal literature for an explanation of the law. What else is the purpose of public legal education? And so, when we turn to the book Especially Dangerous State Crimes, we read: ‘…there is no crime under Article 70 when a person criticises particular policies of the CPSU or the Soviet government, or considers them misguided. Thus, for example, disagreement with the development of virgin and fallow lands, criticism of the USSR’s foreign policy, disapproval of Soviet assistance to other countries, and the like cannot serve as grounds for criminal prosecution.’
Now let us look at the statements attributed to me in the indictment. Are they not precisely the kind described in this quotation? Very well, include them in the verdict. But at the same time, issue a special ruling against the State Legal Publishing House, whose publications mislead Soviet citizens. Many will welcome the prosecutor’s position, which equates any criticism of lawlessness with anti-Soviet sentiment. The remnants of the 1937 purges will be delighted to shelter under Article 70 of the Criminal Code. The prosecutor spoke here about the struggle taking place throughout the world and the bombs falling on Vietnam. Yes, bombs are a danger, but there is another danger we must not forget: the danger of Stalinism’s resurgence.
The judge interrupts, remarking that this is irrelevant to the case.
Among the statements described as allegedly slanderous in the indictment is my belief that people in the USSR are tried for their convictions. Even if that is not the case, let this trial be the first in which a person is convicted for their beliefs. And there is no need to argue that people are not being tried for their beliefs, but for spreading them. To uphold such a position in a court ruling is to officially teach Soviet citizens hypocrisy: think whatever you like, but say the opposite. Yet Herzen said long ago: ‘Only outspoken, public speech can satisfy a person.’ His associate Ogarev echoed him: ‘Only a conviction expressed aloud is sacred.’
There is one detail in this trial that makes it particularly poignant: one of the targets of my oral propaganda was Vladimirsky. The court has established the close bond of friendship that has united us for twenty-five years. He was closer to me than anyone else. And now our private conversations, our most intimate reflections and arguments, have suddenly become the subject of a criminal investigation. What a strange precedent! By way of contrast, I would like to recall the position of the great freethinker Voltaire: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If we strip away all the legal sophistry and lay bare the essence of the matter, the question is very simple. The answer matters not only to me but also to you, members of the court, to everyone in this courtroom, and to those beyond it: on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the USSR, will a private conversation between two close friends be deemed a criminal offence, or will it not?
Turning now to the specific sentence proposed by the prosecutor – five years in a strict-regime labour camp followed by two years of exile–I would remind you that, in addition to the sentence you impose, I will face an additional punishment: five years without a residence permit, bringing the total period of separation from my family to twelve years. Now compare this with Lenin’s sentence in 1897 for founding the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class: three years, not in a labour camp but in exile in Shushenskoye. Who was more dangerous: Lenin to the tsarist regime, or me to the Soviet regime? Furthermore, according to contemporary research, three years is enough for a researcher to lose their professional qualifications completely if cut off from active work and regular reading. In other words, three years would be enough to erase me from scientific life forever. Or does the prosecutor see this harsher punishment as evidence of progress in socialist humanitarianism?
I have outlined before you the range of issues raised by this trial, which is called a criminal proceeding but is, in reality, a political one. Of course, the court cannot resolve all these problems, but it can influence how they are addressed. Repression can be escalated further, sustaining an unnatural state of tension, or the seriousness of these problems can be recognised and steps taken to ease that tension. I therefore make just one appeal to the court: moderation and restraint.
Thank you.
30 October 1972
Moscow Regional Court, visiting session, Noginsk, Moscow Oblast, USSR.
Source: ‘Free Speech’, issue 14–15.
Read more: Wikipedia.
Photo: Sakharov Centre.