The journal New Times (No. 1, 1976), published an interview with A. Ya. Sukharev, the first Deputy-Minister of Justice of the USSR, headed ‘Concerning some Dishonest Proponents of the Rights of Soviet Man’.
A. Ya. Sukharev asserts that ‘in the sphere of safeguarding and defending human rights our country has already reached a level about which ordinary citizens in the so-called “free world” can only dream.’ He addresses himself, on his own admission, to a Western audience. The article was, however, also read within the country, and has drawn many responses.
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In his article ‘Are there Political Prisoners in the Soviet Union?’ A. Amalrik disputes many of Sukharev’s statements, for example his assertion that the Soviet authorities have never persecuted people solely for their membership of any social, public or political group. Amalrik recalls the practice of taking hostages during the years of the establishment of Soviet power, the dispossession of the kulaks, and the persecution of small peoples such as the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans.
In reply to Sukharev’s assertion that ‘one can be sentenced only for one’s actions, and for those which are against the law and criminal; one cannot be sentenced for one’s opinions; opinions are not the business of justice’, Amalrik writes that it is impossible to sentence people for convictions they have not expressed — until a machine for reading thoughts is invented, but that once an ‘unorthodox thought has been expressed — printed, written or spoken — it is considered to be an action for which one may be sentenced. Moreover, the evaluation of the thought expressed as “anti-Soviet” or otherwise depends entirely on the considerations of the investigating bodies at that particular moment, for there is no juridical definition of the concept “anti-Soviet”.’
Ivan Svetlichny, in a letter from a labour camp (No 35 of the Perm camp-complex) comments with mordant indignation on Sukharev’s statement that Soviet justice has never prosecuted people for their convictions or for belonging to an opposition party (in the past) and so on.
Referring to his own experience and that of his comrades. I. A. Svetlichny refutes Sukharev: ‘… the absolute majority of trials for so-called agitation and propaganda were closed trials, and in those cases when exceptions were made to the general rule and “open” trials were held (as in my own case, for instance), a specially selected public was present in the court-room. Even my own mother, not to mention my friends and comrades, stood for several days at the door of the court’ Svetlichny ridicules Sukharev’s description of the conditions of prisoners’ detention and of the ‘preservation of their rights’.
Sukharev devoted a significant portion of his interview to the case of Kovalyov (CCE 38.3).
The authors of letters addressed to Sukharev and to the editors of the journal have compared his version with their own observations; they are L. Boitsova (Kovalyov’s wife), A. Mizyakin (his colleague) and V. Turchin, who were witnesses at the trial; Ivan Kovalyov (Kovalyov’s son), who was present in the court-room, and Yu. Orlov and N. P. Lisovskaya, who stood at the door of the court for four days.
Sukharev asserts that the trial was open. N. P. Lisovskaya recounts in a letter:
“… At the door of the court-room where the sessions were taking place stood plain-clothed guards. On the first two days they admitted to the courtroom only people who showed them printed cardboard tokens, and on the last two days they admitted them without the tokens, as by then they knew by sight whom to admit and whom not to admit.
“On the morning of the third day I arrived at the building where the trial was being held an hour and a half before the beginning of the session and saw with my own eyes that people were being admitted not through the main entrance (which was already closed), but through the emergency exit. When the main entrance to the building was opened T went up to the doors of the court-room and saw that there were plenty of free places, but nonetheless they did not admit me, repeating in a monotone; ‘There are no places’. In reply to the statement I submitted to the chairman requesting him to admit me to the court-room, the chairman played a cheap trick on me: he pretended that he was telephoning the superintendent and asking him to help me to enter the court-room, but in fact there was no-one at the other end of the telephone, since when I sought out the superintendent he said that no-one had telephoned him, and in fact he had been in the court-room, where it would have been impossible to telephone him …
“Not only were those of us who wished to be present at the trial not admitted, but on the first day a platoon of soldiers was called out and ordered to draw the curtains of the windows more closely so that we could not even see through a chink what was happening in the court-room …”
According to Sukharev’s assertion, ‘Kovalyov was granted the right to defence stipulated by the law, and he made extensive use of it’. L. Boitsova recalls that Kovalyov was forced to conduct his own defence at the trial, since ‘the defence lawyers he chose did not have some sort of “pass” for cases heard in open sessions (?)’. A, Mizyakin points out that not one of the people whom Kovalyov asked to be summoned as witnesses was called into court. Kovalyov’s questions to the witnesses who appeared in court were constantly disallowed; the court ignored contradictions in the evidence of witnesses (concrete examples of both are given in Ivan Kovalyov’s letter).
‘Moreover, the witnesses summoned by the court were removed from the court-room after being questioned, despite Kovalyov’s demand to retain all witnesses after questioning: at any point in the court examination, he might have supplementary questions for any of them. According to criminal procedural regulations, witnesses are obliged to remain in the court-room after questioning until the end of the court examination …’ (from A. Mizyakin’s letter).
In reply to Sukharev’s statement that ’the examination of his case was conducted painstakingly, thoroughly and objectively. More than twenty witnesses were questioned in the case, a great quantity of documents and other evidence was analysed and checked, … (His case consisted of 30 volumes, numbering about 15,000 pages)’, Ludmila Boitsova, Ivan Kovalyov and Arie Mizyakin point out that less than twenty hours were spent on the ‘painstaking examination’ and that ‘in almost every case the examination of documents took the form of merely reading out the first words of the documents’.
N. P. Lisovskaya ends her letter like this: ‘How can we believe the remainder of Sukharev s interview when he so distorts the events of the present day? It is worthwhile to ponder why he calmly tells lies when he knows perfectly well that there are people able to expose him as a liar.’
Comparing the charges brought against S. Kovalyov with the views of Sukharev, Yu. Orlov and V. Turchin in their joint letter draw this conclusion: ‘Thus the Ministry of Justice has officially confirmed that the mere distribution of information about political repression in the Soviet Union is considered to be an especially dangerous State crime!’
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The Chronicle considers it necessary to comment on the following opinion of Sukharev’s:
‘… thanks to the irresponsibility of Kovalyov and those like him. there are many such lists floating around in the West, which, to put it mildly, cannot but arouse disbelief by their fantastic fabrications. But it can happen that genuine names of people against whom criminal proceedings have been instituted appear in them. For example, on one of the lists transmitted to the West by Kovalyov, fascist accomplices and members of punitive expeditions who during the war tormented, tortured and shot Soviet people appear as “victims of the arbitrary actions of the Soviet authorities’’ and “fighters for democratic rights”. One is a certain Dudenas, an active participant in punitive expeditions and mass executions in Lithuania and Belorussia, whose hands are reddened with the blood of hundreds of people. Another is the fascist toady Ostrovsky, who by his servility towards the Hitlerites and by unthinkable bestiality earned the rank of “President of the Belorussian Central Rada’ formed by the Nazis in occupied Minsk.’
The people Sukharev mentions are in fact named in the ‘List of Prisoners in the Perm Camps known to the Chronicle’, contained in CCE 33.6, an issue which incriminated Kovalyov. (Although Sukharev scrupulously avoids mentioning the Chronicle, he undoubtedly has this list in mind.)
However, in the first place Ostrovsky appears in the list under section VII, ‘War Criminals’. Here is what the list says about him: ‘73. Ostrovsky: was once a minister in the Belorussian government set up by the Germans. Sentence, 25 years. In the camp he is a member of the Soviet of the Colony Collective (for some reason Sukharev does not mention this last fact).
In the second place, although Dudenas appears in the list under section VI, ‘Lithuanian National Movement’, it does not follow from this that the Chronicle designates him as a ‘fighter for democratic rights’, since the foreword to the list states: Tt should be borne in mind that there may be errors in the dividing of prisoners into groups. For example, among the Lithuanians listed under “National Movement”, there are some of whom the Chronicle knows only their names and terms of imprisonment; among these there may be some persons convicted for collaboration with the Germans during the war’. And in the list, there is nothing about Dudenas except his surname and his sentence.
The Chronicle is forced to conclude that Sukharev is consciously and intentionally distorting its reports and libelling Kovalyov.
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A Chronicle of Current Events 