Oksana Yakovlevna MESHKO, mother of the political prisoner Alexander Sergienko (CCE 30.8), has appealed to Amnesty International. She describes the trial of her son (place and date) and the events that followed.
During the trial about ten charges were made against A. Sergienko (Ukr. Serhiyenko). Here are some of them:
1. Correcting the draft of I. Dzyuba’s work Internationalism or Russification? (Dziuba himself denies this).
2. Making statements about the events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia (he was accused of having certain conversations with students — even though Sergienko had not associated these people since his expulsion from his institute in 1967; Sergienko was expelled in connection with the arrests and persecution in the Ukraine in 1965-7).
3-4. Sergienko had been a contributor to The Ukrainian Herald and had been the author of the item ‘Obituary’. (Sergienko had delivered a speech of farewell at the funeral of Alla Gorskaya, an artist who died in mysterious circumstances, and this obituary was printed in The Ukrainian Herald. In connection with the Herald, notes that he had made in an exercise-book, confiscated during a search, were used as evidence against him. The exercise- book contained a few unconnected phrases (and a copied out extract from Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon).
5. Making slanderous statements about the Russification of the Ukraine (Sergienko had participated in an independent delegation to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP to discuss the necessity of providing teaching in Ukrainian in the institutes of higher education in the Ukrainian SSR).
6. Making nationalist statements (he took notes in Ukrainian, wrote exams in his native language and asked questions at lectures on historical materialism).
The court considered Sergienko’s ‘scornful’ comments on the book Lenin and Ukraine and a newspaper containing a speech by Brezhnev to be indications of his undoubtedly ‘dissenting views’.
During the trial the accused and his lawyer were not allowed to call most of their witnesses.
Sergienko pleaded not guilty. The defence lawyer Martysh demanded that the court acquit his client. However, the court gave him an even longer sentence than the prosecutor had asked for — adding three years’ exile to seven years of imprisonment.
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Since the trial the Sergienko case has not been available to lawyers. The lawyers I. S. Yezhov, M. Y. Linda and N. Ya. Nimirinskaya were unable to study the case.
O. Meshko’s many complaints have remained effectively unanswered. A talk with an official of the reception-room of the CPSU Central Committee, Shcherbakov, led to nothing. During their conversation he permitted himself some ironical comments about O. Meshko’s declaration to the CPSU Central Committee, Shcherbakov gave the following reason for refusing to accept the declaration: ‘The CPSU Central Committee and its members do not have the right to interfere in legal matters …’
Efforts made on his behalf by deputies of the USSR Supreme Soviet Mikhail Stelmakh, Dmitry Kabalevsky and Boris Paton have not affected Alexander Sergienko’s fate.
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