From 15 to 18 April a repeat trial of Ivan Yakhimovich was held (CCE 9.3 and CCE 11.15, item 22), following a second expert examination at the Serbsky Institute. The team of experts once again declared I. Yakhimovich to be of unsound mind, but with the reservation that compulsory treatment might be carried out in an ordinary hospital [i.e. not a prison-hospital].
Ivan Yakhimovich (b. 1931)
The court approved this conclusion and recommended I. Yakhimovich for compulsory treatment in an ordinary hospital. Yakhimovich’s wife was not permitted to see her husband and was told that he would have to wait for a bed in a mental hospital.
Yakhimovich is now in the Riga Republican Psychiatric Hospital. At first he was in a ward with seriously disturbed patients, but was subsequently transferred to a ward where the patients were less seriously ill.
KIEV
The hearing in the case of Bakhtiyarov [CCE 10.4] began on 20 February. He was charged with Anti-Soviet Agitation under Article 62 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code (equivalent to Article 70 of the Russian Code). Bakhtiyarov is a student and was born in 1947.
The case was heard in open court.
The accused was charged on the grounds that certain books had been found either in his possession or in the possession of his friends. The books were as follows: The Technology of Power by [A.] Avtorkhanov; The Origins and Meaning of Russian Communism by [the philosopher Nikolai] Berdyaev; The New Class by [Milovan] Djilas; photocopies of Bridges, the NTS journal [CCE 14.13]; Woe from Wit by (Vyacheslav] Chornovil (a samizdat edition)?; “A Letter to a Friend” by Loza, and also some sort of programme, the authorship of which was ascribed to Bakhtiyarov.
For reasons which are not known, after the first session there were five postponements in the hearing.
Eventually, at the beginning of April, the court resumed the hearing. During the course of the trial, Article 62 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code was replaced by Article 187-1 (article 190-1 of the Russian Code), supposedly because Bakhtiyarov’s authorship of the aforementioned programme had not been proven.
The sentence was three years’ imprisonment in ordinary-regime camps.
BEGOVAT (Uzbekistan)
At the beginning of March the aged Crimean Tatar poet Muarem Martynov was convicted here for his speech at the funeral of A.Ye. Kostyorin [CCE 5.1, item 12] and for being a signatory of a series of Crimean Tatar Information Bulletins. (He was charged under the Article of the Uzbek Criminal Code corresponding to 190-1 of the Russian Code.) Martynov was sentenced to a suspended term of two years’ imprisonment.
ANGREN (Uzbekistan)
At the beginning of March the trial took place of Seidomet Khalibayev (charged under the same article as Martynov). The sentence was one year in ordinary-regime camps.
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