On 6 March 1979, the Leningrad KGB conducted a search at the flat of Arseny Roginsky (see “Case 46012”, this issue, CCE 53.15), a teacher of literature at Evening School No. 148.
*
DISMISSAL
On 28 March N. I. Kurochkin, head of the Kursky district department of education, summoned Roginsky to tell him that the KGB had informed him of the search and to suggest that Roginsky leave the school “of his own accord”.
Roginsky refused.
The next day school director V.V. Popov asked the trade union committee for the dismissal of Roginsky to be approved. The committee approved Roginsky’s dismissal in accordance with Article 254, pt. 3 (RSFSR Code of Labour Laws: “commission by an employee engaged in education of an amoral misdemeanour which is incompatible with his continued employment in the given job”).
The same day, the district department of education’s order of dismissal came through.
*
APPEAL
Roginsky submitted a statement of claim to a court, in which he demanded reinstatement and compensation for enforced loss of wages The Moskovsky district people’s court in Leningrad started to consider the case.
The hearing was immediately postponed until 8 May, then again until 11 May. On 11 May the hearings were renewed; the third and final court hearing was on 14 May. (Usually, cases of this kind are dealt with in two to three hours.)
*
Present in court were Roginsky, a lawyer representing his interests, a legal adviser representing the interests of the respondent, and the Procurator.
Teachers who had been present at the 29 March union committee meeting, the school director and the head of the district department of education were questioned.
As the whole process of Roginsky’s dismissal had gone through without anything in writing which could serve as a basis for a dismissal decision — the school director informed the teaching staff; he received this information orally from the head of the Kursky district department of education; who himself passed on what he had been told orally by KGB officials — the court sent an inquiry to the KGB.
*
In the middle of the last hearing a ‘certificate’ (spravka) was received, signed by the Head of the Leningrad KGB Investigations Department V. I. Tretyakovsky:
“In February 1977, on instructions from the Kaluga Region KGB, a search was conducted at the home of A. B. Roginsky, during which documents were confiscated — the so-called compilation A Chronicle of Current Events, two volumes of the book by the writer Platonov, Kotlovan (published in the USA), and a series of other works of a politically harmful nature.
“On the basis of the materials confiscated, A. B. Roginsky, in June 1977, was issued with a warning by the KGB as a precautionary measure, and the Leningrad Procurator was informed of this.
“In March 1979 another search was conducted in Roginsky’s home by the Leningrad Region KGB Investigations Department on the instructions of the Moscow Procurator’s Office regarding criminal Case No. 46012, in the process of which materials of a harmful nature were discovered and confiscated.“
*
The position of the school administration with regard to the dismissal of Roginsky is typified by two remarks made by school director Popov at the union committee meeting on 29 March.
In reply to Roginsky’s question as to what activities the director considered incompatible with the position of teacher he said: “The two searches conducted at your home.”
To clarify his position Popov said: “Searches do not happen to honest people.” It is typical that only in court did the director and the teachers discover what had in fact been confiscated from Roginsky.
*
At the hearing representatives of the school stressed Roginsky’s efficiency in carrying out his teaching obligations. The director, who had attended Roginsky’s classes more than once, agreed that the presence of harmful literature in Roginsky’s home had not been reflected in his work as a teacher.
The ‘amorality’ of Roginsky’s actions had also not extended to circulation of this literature. (Agreeing with the representatives of the defendant, the presiding judge told Roginsky: “If it were a question of circulation, you would be up for trial under the relevant article.”) The subject under discussion was, in the main, whether a teacher has, or does not have, the right to own in his personal library ‘harmful’ books; the criteria governing harmfulness were also discussed.
*
EDUCATION AUTHORITIES
The lawyer defending the interests of the respondent defined Roginsky’s guilt as follows: “The books confiscated from him do not meet the KGB’s demands concerning literature.” The head of the district department of education, called as a witness, expressed the opinion that the only books a Soviet teacher needs are those available in school libraries.
Another witness, a teacher, made a less categorical statement: every person knows which books are politically harmful and which are not. This intuitive knowledge, in the witness’s words, “was formed in the 1930s and 1940s”.
At the request of A. B. Roginsky, the president of the court read out the record of the search on 6 March 1979.
The overwhelming majority of the books confiscated, Roginsky pointed out, were freely available in any research library in the USSR. He showed the court some of these books, which he had taken out the previous day from libraries in Leningrad, and also published works by Soviet authors containing quotations from the works of Berdyaev, Antsiferov and Gippius.
Roginsky stated that, in addition to his work at the school, he studied Russian history: his articles had been published, and as a professional historian he needed a great variety of books.
He also expressed his conviction that regardless of anyone’s profession, just to pose the question of what a person does or does not have the right to read is absurd and illegal. It is all the more illegal to evaluate serious literature on the basis of ‘certificates’ issued by one Institution or another.
*
DEFENCE & PROSECUTION
Roginsky’s lawyer stressed the illegality of a dismissal procedure without written documentation, based on oral instructions, with the teaching staff kept totally uninformed. She also noted that an ideological assessment of the literature cannot come from KGB agencies but, rather, from a team of experts nominated by the court.
The Procurator, in her speech, expressed her total unanimity with the respondent, i.e. the school authorities.
In her opinion, the ‘harmfulness’ of the literature confiscated from Roginsky was fully proven by the “certificate from case sheet 34” (i.e., the KGB certificate, Chronicle), as “whatever Roginsky and his lawyer may claim, the court has no reason not to trust the judgment of the KGB.” The claim that the dismissal procedure was undocumented was also, in her opinion, unsubstantiated: “the head of the district department of education was obliged to trust the KGB officials.”
*
DECISION & APPEAL
The court’s decision says, in part:
“From the certificate on Case Sheet 34 it is evident that A. B. Roginsky committed misdemeanours incompatible with the morality of a Soviet teacher. The court considers that the termination of the work contract with the plaintiff is in strict accordance with the law.“
The Leningrad City Court rejected Roginsky’s appeal. It also rejected Roginsky’s request that the note in his work-book should be changed to spell out the nature of his ‘amoral act’.
*
Arseny Borisovich ROGINSKY’s repeated attempts [1] since then to gain employment as a teacher have been unsuccessful.
==============================================
NOTES
- On Roginsky (1946-2017), see Case 40512, March-July 1979 (CCE 53.15), November 1981 trial (CCE 63.5 pdf 22-28) and 1988 KGB report: Roginsky was reported as praising the Chronicle, its editors and contributors, for their “historically genuine work” (16 November 1988, 1979-K).
See also “Samizdat Update” reports about the Pamyat almanac, 1976-1979: No. 1 (CCE 42.12 item 2); No. 2 (CCE 51.21 item 17); and No. 3 (CCE 52.17 item 9).
*
Roginsky was a leading researcher and activist at Memorial from the late 1980s onwards and chaired International Memorial from 1998 until his death.
↩︎
==========================
A Chronicle of Current Events 