The trial of Valeria NOVODVORSKAYA (b. 1951) took place on 16 March 1970 in the Moscow Region Court.
A second-year student of the Institute of Foreign Languages (CCE 11.7), Novodvorskaya was charged under Article 70 (RSFSR Criminal Code: “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”).
Valeria Novodvorskaya, 1950-2014
She was accused of preparing and afterwards distributing leaflets in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on 5 December 1969, Soviet Constitution Day.
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The text of the leaflet was as follows:
A Poem on Constitution Day
Thank you Party
For all you have done and are doing
To nurture the hatred we feel today.
Thank you Party.
Thank you Party
For the high noon of grovelling duplicity,
For the inertia, deception and mental dishonesty
Thank you Party.
Thank you Party
For all the falsehood and lies,
For all the portraits and informers,
For the shots in Prague’s square,
For all the lies you’ve yet to tell.
For the paradise of factories and of flats,
All built on crimes in the torture
Chambers of yesterday and today
And for our black world.
Thank you Party
For our bitter unbelief
In the remnants of a formula
Lost in the misty darkness ‘fore the dawn.
Thank you Party
For our gall and our despair,
For our base silence
Thank you Party.
Thank you Party
For the burden of the foredoomed truth,
For the fusillades of future fighting
Thank you Party.
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Trial
The trial took place in the accused’s absence, since Novodvorskaya was pronounced to be of unsound mind by a diagnostic team from the Serbsky Institute. In their view she was suffering from “schizophrenia and paranoidal personality development”.
Novodvorskaya’s defence counsel was Bobuzhsky.
He declined to meet Novodvorskaya before the trial, since, according to the law supposedly, defence counsel has no right to meet with a client who has been declared of unsound mind.
Five witnesses were questioned in court:
- the policeman who detained Novodvorskaya at the Palace of Congresses;
- a ticket controller from the Palace;
- a female student from the Institute of Foreign Languages;
- and also Novodvorskaya’s parents, who appeared at the trial as witnesses and were unable to speak as representatives of the defendant.
In his speech the public prosecutor commented that Novodvorskaya’s actions were akin to those of the terrorists who had shot at the astronauts [note 1].
The defence counsel requested that the court replace Article 70 with the less serious Article 190-1 (“systematic dissemination … of deliberate fabrications which defame the Soviet political and social system”).
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The court decided that Novodvorskaya should be forcibly committed for treatment to a Special Psychiatric Hospital, in Kazan (CCE 10.10) [note 2].
After the trial, Novodvorskaya was allowed to meet her relatives. She had not been informed, it turned out, that her trial had taken place.
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NOTES
[1] This is a reference to the 22 January 1969 attack on government vehicle, ZIL 111G, as it left the Kremlin. Army officer Junior Lieutenant Victor Ilyn believed he was firing at a car carrying Leonid Brezhnev. In fact, the vehicle was transporting Soviet astronauts (cosmonauts). Source: Rossiiskaya gazeta online (23 March 2019).
The 22-year-old would-be assassin was arrested and sent to a psychiatric hospital where, until his release in 1990, he spent the next two decades.
[2] In August 1971, Novodvorskaya was transferred from the Kazan SPH to an ordinary psychiatric hospital in Moscow. She was released from any further psychiatric treatment in mid-February 1972 (CCE 24.11 item 12).
In late 1978, Novodvorskaya was again briefly incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital (CCE 51.11).
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