The case of Alexei Tikhy (April 1957)
On 18 April 1957 in the town of Stalino (today Donetsk), the Regional Court with Moskalenko presiding and Procurator Sudarev participating, heard in closed session the case charging Alexei Tikhy with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. The accused conducted his own defence.
From the verdict:
“The accused A.I. Tikhy, working as head of education at the Alexeyevo-Druzhkovka Middle School for Young Workers, having a hostile attitude to the existing system in the USSR, expressed anti-Soviet views on 16 January and 11 February 1957 in the presence of teachers of this school: he stated that Soviet schools had allegedly reached a dead-end and that communism was not being built in the USSR.
“When summoned for a talk by the Konstantinov district committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party on 12 February 1957, Tikhy again expressed his anti-Soviet views on a number of political questions, stating in particular that we were not building communism — what we were building, he himself did not know — and that workers led a beggarly existence in collective and state farms.
“He called elections to the Soviets of Workers Deputies a farce; he said that democratic centralism was not justified in any way at the present time and was incompatible with democracy; there was no democracy now in the USSR but that it allegedly existed in France and other States. What existed in our country, he said, was a completely unjustified dictatorship of the Communist Party, and so on.
“During the second half of January and the beginning of February 1957, Tikhy compiled a number of anti-Soviet inscriptions on 14 pieces of paper, which he stored and in which he libelled the CPSU and Soviet reality, said that the actions of the [1956] Hungarian counter-revolutionary insurgents were justified, and called for the overthrow of the existing state system in the USSR.
“In the first half of February 1957 Tikhy wrote a letter of anti-Soviet content, which he addressed to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Ukraine SSR Supreme Soviet, sending a copy of the letter to his friend citizen E.I. Konyukhova in Priazovsky district (Zaporozhe Region).
“In this letter (his own copy) Tikhy libelled the CPSU and Soviet reality and also called for the overthrow of the state system in the USSR.”
Alexei I. Tikhy pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. He has admitted all the facts listed above, asserting however that there was nothing criminal in his actions.
The court sentenced Tikhy to seven years in the camps. His term began on 15 February 1957, the day of his arrest. Tikhy served out his sentence in full. The same court (in Stalino, now Donetsk) sentenced Tikhy a second time in 1977 (see “The Trial of Rudenko and Tykhy”, this issue CCE 46.4).
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The case of Suslensky & Meshener (October 1970)
On 30 October 1970 the Moldavian SSR Supreme Court heard in closed session the case charging Yakov Suslensky (see [1] and “The Right to Leave one’s Country” in this issue) and Josif Meshener [2] with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. The prosecution at the trial was conducted by Procurator M. S. Kizikov. The accused were defended by the Moscow lawyer V.Ya. Shveisky and the Leningrad lawyer Ya.S. Rozhansky.
In the verdict Suslensky was charged with making personal notes in diary form, writing letters to Soviet newspapers and journals, to the CPSU Central Committee, to Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, to the BBC and the United Nations, making tape-recordings of foreign radio broadcasts and telling other people about them, talking to his friends (particularly expressing his feelings about the armed invasion of Czechoslovakia) and acquainting them with the novels of Solzhenitsyn. Suslensky’s poetry formed part of the evidence against him:
I breathe so unfreely / In my own native land,
And people write so badly / Of their past and their thoughts,
But then it occurred to me / To walk on the opposite side,
Carrying with difficulty / My gloomy little head.
These lines were referred to in the verdict:
“He wrote a poem which libels Soviet reality, expresses his hostility to the Soviet social system and his intention of fighting against it.”
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The case evidence against Meshener in the indictment included his letters to the CPSU Central Committee, the letter by Suslensky that he sent to the BBC, a letter to the UN, conversations with friends, and retelling Western radio broadcasts.
The court sentenced Suslensky to seven, and Meshener to six years in hard-regime camps. Suslensky began his term on 29 January 1970; Meshener began his on 11 February 1970.
They served out their sentences in strict-regime camps and in Valdimir Prison. Both Suslensky and Meshener have now completed their terms and left the USSR.
The verdict in their case will be published in full in the “Archive of the Chronicle”.
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NOTES
- Yakov Suslensky CCE 15.10 [7], CCE 16.10 [9] & CCE 44.17-3.
↩︎ - Josif Meshener: see CCE 16.10 [9],CCE 39.3 & CCE 40.15 [29].
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A Chronicle of Current Events 