On 15-16 June the trial of Valery Kukui (b. 1938), an engineer at the Sverdlovsk “Agricultural Machinery” concern (CCE 19.11 [13]), took place at the Sverdlovsk Region Court under Article 190-1 (RSFSR Criminal Code). Access to the courtroom was unimpeded.
The chairman of the court was A. Shalayev; the State prosecutor was Zyryanov [1]. Dobrynin of the “Agricultural Machinery” Concern (selkhoztekhnika) was “people’s prosecutor”.
Counsel for the defence was Naumov.
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THE SUBSTANCE OF THE INDICTMENT
Between 1964 and 1970 Kukui verbally disseminated information slandering the international and domestic policies of the USSR.
He claimed anti-Semitism existed in the USSR, there was no freedom of speech, Soviet policy in the Middle East was determined not by the principle of justice but by the interests of the State, and so on.
Kukui typed, duplicated and circulated literature slandering the Soviet social and political system. The works mentioned in the charge against Kukui included Heart of a Dog [2]. Kukui had to explain that this work was written not by him, but by Mikhail Bulgakov.
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In the course of the trial, however, the Procurator again returned to this story when questioning witness Varshavsky:
“Just look what obscene expressions there are in it!”
Witness: “Would you like me to read you some of the chastushki from [Sholokhov’s] Quiet Flows the Don?” [3]
Procurator: “No, I would not.”
In his address tor the prosecution Zyryanov called Heart of a Dog an anti-Soviet work. “I’d like to grab him by his calloused proletarian foot,” the procurator quoted indignantly. Defence counsel Naumov and Kukui himself in his final address insisted that Heart of a Dog did not contain anything illegal.
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When questioned himself, Kukui systematically refuted every point in the indictment: his desire to emigrate to Israel was caused solely by his national feelings; he had not circulated anti-Soviet literature; his critical remarks had always related to isolated negative phenomena (e. g. to instances of anti-Semitism), but never to the State policies of the USSR.
All the witnesses were friends and colleagues of Kukui. They gave testimony favourable to him, denying that his statements and actions were anti-Soviet. A few witnesses retracted compromising testimony, which they had given during the pre-trial investigation, stating that it had been given under pressure from the investigator and because of fear (“I thought that if Kukui was inside and I didn’t give evidence against him,” said Blank, for example: “then I’d be put inside as well”).
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The only significant witness for the prosecution was Valery’s brother Anatoly, who did not attend the trial himself because of illness. Anatoly Kukui had written a letter saying that Valery was “a Zionist and anti-Soviet”, and that he, Anatoly, knew from what his mother had told him that Valery had “copied anti-Soviet material on a typewriter”.
Their mother, Zinaida Borisovna Kukui, who was present in court, refuted Anatoly’s testimony as lies and slander. Valery stated that he and his brother had disagreements due to their unsatisfactory living conditions.
The Procurator demanded for Kukui three years in ordinary-regime, corrective-labour camps. The public prosecutor called upon the court “to punish Kukui with all the severity of Soviet law”.
Defence counsel asked that the sentence be limited to one year of compulsory labour (i.e. without imprisonment).
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DEFENDANT’S CLOSING WORDS
In his final address Valery Kukui said, among other things:
“I am indignant at the publication of the articles about me: ‘Where is the “land of his fathers”?’ and ‘Slanderers rebuffed’, in the newspaper Urals Worker [4]. These articles were written while the investigation was under way. But the tone of the articles and their form were such as to suggest that the trial was already over and my guilt proven. I discern in this an attempt to influence public opinion and the verdict of the court.“
Kukui ended his final address as follows:
“… I have faith in the justice and humanity of the Soviet court. I have faith that I shall be released, that I shall be allowed to return to my family and bring up my daughter that I shall be able to realise my dream of emigrating to Israel the land of my fathers. ”
The sentence was three years of ordinary-regime camps [5].
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NOTES
The decision to institute criminal proceedings against Kukui and to bring a court action against him was taken on the initiative of the director of the “Agricultural Machinery” Concern at a meeting of the factory collective.
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- Shalayev was judge at the trial of Andrei Amalrik (CCE 17.1) in November 1970. Zyryanov was also State prosecutor at that trial.
↩︎ - Heart of a Dog is Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 satire on the ambition to create the New Soviet Man. In the 1960s and 1970s the novella circulated in samizdat.
Kukui and his lawyer were making a principled objection to Soviet-style censorship, i.e. the pre-publication and pre-broadcast monitoring and control of all printed material, literature, the cinema and electronic media, by an unlawfully constituted body (Glavlit) which answered only to the Party (see CCE 14.9 and 12. Official Documents, 1974-1981).
The novella was not published in the USSR until 1987. The following year a film of the book was broadcast on nationwide television.
↩︎ - Humorous, sometimes risqué folk-couplets, chastushki are usually sung by two performers, one making a declaration the other topping it with a sharp or witty reply.
↩︎ - One of the Urals Worker (Uralsky rabochii) articles is summarized in a Reuters dispatch of 21 June 1971.
↩︎ - A Reuters report of 4 August 1971 gave the gist of an official complaint made against this sentence to the RSFSR Supreme Court by Andrei Sakharov and Valery Chalidze.
The report also mentions a samizdat record of the trial. The complaint listed the trial’s procedural irregularities and asked for the sentence to be quashed.
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