As soon as it was known that the pre-trial investigation into the case of Pimenov, Vail and Zinovieva had ended (CCE 16.2), Ye. Smirnov’s pamphlet “Bravo, Comrade Tolstikov!” appeared in samizdat [1].
His pamphlet names the documents mentioned in the charge against Pimenov, including “Two Thousand Words” [2]. Valery Chalidze sent a statement to the Leningrad City Procurator, informing him that the document “Two Thousand Words” had been distributed by official Soviet agencies TASS and Soyuzpechat [3]. It was highly negligent of the pre-trial investigation to overlook this circumstance.
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TRIAL
On 4 October 1970 a group of scientists (Andrei Sakharov, Valentin Turchin, Valery Chalidze and others) sent a statement of their intention to attend the trial to the Kaluga Region Court (CCE 16.2).
At the first hearing of the case on 14 October the principle of legal proceedings being held in public was in effect violated, to which the defence made no objection.
In this connection Chalidze wrote an Open Letter on 17 October to Pimenov’s defence counsel S.A. Kheifits. It was the defendant’s procedural right, he pointed out, for judicial proceedings to be held in public. Defence of that right was among the obligations of the defendant’s attorney.
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SENTENCE
After the sentence of exile was passed on Vail and Pimenov, Chalidze sent a complaint to the RSFSR Supreme Court. The Kaluga Region Court, he wrote, had violated Article 319 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure: Pimenov had not been released from custody, and Vail had been taken into custody in the courtroom.
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LETTER
At the beginning of November 1970 ten scholars and scientists (M.A. Leontovich, A.D. Sakharov, V.F. Turchin, A. N. Tverdokhlebov, V.N. Chalidze and others) sent a letter to the RSFSR Supreme Court. It expressed their concern [4]
“at the severity of the sentence and at the very fact of judicial prosecution for actions which in a democratic society ought to be regarded as a normal phenomenon of civic life.”
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NOTES
- The Russian original of Smirnov’s text was published in the emigre newspaper Novoye Russkoye Slovo (New York, 7 January 1971).
↩︎ - The well-known Czechoslovak liberal manifesto of 1968.
See “Survey of Samizdat” (CCE 5.1, item 1.1) and Zygmunt Zeman, Prague Spring, //publisher: place 1969 (pp. 61-65).
↩︎ - The telegraph agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) and the official Soviet distribution agency, Soyuzpechat.
↩︎ - The Russian text of the letter was published in Novoye Russkoye Slovo (New York. 22 December 1970); an English version appeared on 16 November 1970 in The Times (London) and The New York Times.
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