Valentyn Moroz was arrested (CCE 14.11 [1]) at his home in Ivano-Frankovsk (West Ukraine) on 1 June 1970.
The charge against him was brought under Article 62 (UkSSR Criminal Code = Article 70, RSFSR Code) [1]. The investigation was conducted by officials of the Ivano-Frankovsk Region KGB under the direction of Major Baranov and Captain Prigornitsky.
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BARANOV has been known since 1949, when he conducted investigations into cases of juveniles (in the Lvov Region’s Zolochevsky district) and of students at the Lvov Polytechnic Institute who were accused of creating a nationalist organisation. They received sentences of 25 years’ imprisonment.
In 1965 Baranov was in charge of the case of Panas Zalivakha (Article 62, UkSSR Criminal Code), an artist who was released in 1970 after five years in the camps [2] and now lives in Ivano-Frankovsk.
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Valentyn Moroz, 1936-2019
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ARREST AND SEARCHES
At the beginning of May 1970 Moroz was in the village of Kosmach (in the Carpathians, south-west Ukraine). While he was tape-recording a mass in church, an attempt was made to apprehend him but the local inhabitants prevented this.
In connection with the arrest of Moroz, searches were also carried out at the homes of: the priest Vasyl Romanyuk (CCE 28.7 [3]) in Kosmach, when church books were confiscated; Viacheslav Chornovil in Lvov; and five other people. About thirty people were questioned as witnesses.
Moroz was charged with writing and circulating the works “Datan and Moses”, “Among the Snows” [3], “A Chronicle of Resistance” (CCE 14.12 [1]), “I have seen Mahomet” and, for the second time, “A Report from the Beria Reservation” [4].
An investigation about the “Report” had already been conducted in 1968-1969, when Moroz was in a Mordovian camp. The investigation was terminated, since there was no proof of authorship.
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TRIAL
The case of Valentyn Moroz [correction CCE 18.14] was heard by the Ivano-Frankovsk Region Court behind closed doors on 17-18 November 1970. The prosecutor was the Regional Assistant Procurator Gorodko, defence counsel was E. M. Kogan (Moscow).
A few days before the trial twelve inhabitants of Lvov asked the chairman of the Court to admit them to the trial. Two days later many of them were warned at their place of work that if they went to the trial they would be dismissed.
Panas Zalivakha was reminded by the police that he was under surveillance, and was forbidden to attend the trial. Nevertheless people came to the trial from various towns. They were not admitted to the court-room.
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WITNESSES
Ivan Dzyuba (Kiev), B.D. Antonenko-Davidovich (Kiev), Viacheslav Chornovil (Lvov) and V.V. Bobyak (Kosov; the latter had not previously known Moroz), were summoned by the court as witnesses.
The witnesses and the accused refused to give evidence at a trial held behind closed doors, which they regarded as unlawful. Antonenko-Davidovich, citing the works of Lenin, declared that the trial was anti-Soviet. He added that he himself had twice been tried behind closed doors, that both sentences had much later been annulled by the Supreme Court as unlawful. Antonenko-Davidovich said he had no wish to take part in a case for which he might later be convicted.
Witnesses Dzyuba, Chornovil and Antonenko-Davidovich stated that they would give evidence only at a public trial, if such a trial were to be held. Despite a protest by the defence counsel, the court resolved to hear the evidence given by the witnesses during the pre-trial investigation.
During the pre-trial investigation the writer B.D. Antonenko-Davidovich had testified that the discovery at his home of a draft of an article by Moroz proved only that he (Moroz) had gone to an older, more experienced writer for advice, but not that the documents mentioned in the charge had been circulated.
Neither did the discovery in Dzyuba’s possession of the article “Among the Snows” prove that it had been circulated, since it was addressed to him. In addition Dzyuba insisted that “Among the Snows” was the personal affair of two people — the author and the addressee. (Moroz’s article “Among the Snows” was written à propos Ivan Dzyuba’s statement [5] in the official newspaper Literaturnaya Ukraina, 6 January 1970.)
The Procurator demanded ten years’ imprisonment and five years’ exile for Moroz.
Defence counsel asked the court to change the basis of the charge to Article 187-1 (UkSSR Criminal Code = Article 190-1, RSFSR Code).
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SENTENCE
The court sentenced Valentyn Moroz to nine years’ confinement (six years in prison, three years in special-regime camps), and to five years’ exile: Moroz was judged to be an especially dangerous recidivist.
During the delivery of the sentence, Party secretaries, directors of local establishments and officials of the KGB were present in court; among Moroz’s relatives and friends only his wife and father were admitted to the proceedings.
The witnesses submitted a protest to the Appeal Court.
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NOTES
- On Moroz, see CCE 14.11 [1], CCE 17.2, CCE 18.5 [8], CCE 32.12 and Name Index.
↩︎ - On the case of Panakha, see Viacheslav Chornovil, The Chornovil Papers, London, 1968 (pp. 117-130).
↩︎ - The Ukrainian text of “Datan and Moses” was published in Ukrainsky samostiynk, No. 158 (October 1970, Munich). “Among the Snows” was due to be published in Ukrainian in Suchasnist (Munich).
↩︎ - An English translation of “Report from the Beria Reservation” may be found in Michael Browne (ed), Ferment in the Ukraine, London, 1971 (document 11, pp. 119-157).
↩︎ - For an English version of Dzyuba’s statement, and an analysis of the circumstances surrounding it, see the second edition of his Internationalism or Russification? (London, 1970).
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