1. The Trial of G. Mikhailov
The trial of Georgy Nikolayevich Mikhailov (b. 1944) took place from 27 August to 18 September 1979 in the Krasnogvardeisky district people’s court in Leningrad.
Mikhailov was charged under Articles 153 pt. 2 (‘private enterprise activity and activity as a commercial middleman’) and 162, pt. 2 (‘conduct of a forbidden trade’) of the RSFSR Criminal Code. The Judge was V. I. Kovalenko. The prosecutor, L. I. Rodionova; the defence counsel, V. I. Vishnevsky.
*
From 1968 Mikhailov was a teacher of Physics at Leningrad University’s Special Boarding School No. 45. In 1974 he completed courses in English and French and started working as a freelancer at the House of Friendship.
In July 1974 he was summoned to the KGB for a talk, during which he was first subjected to intimidation and then asked to collaborate. He refused and stopped visiting the House of Friendship.
In 1974 Mikhailov started to collect pictures, He arranged an exhibition for the artist Yu. Galetsky in his flat, and his home subsequently became a permanent exhibition room. He has calculated that over five years more than 1,500 paintings by 100 artists have been seen there by about 9,000 people.
On 27 July 1977 a search was conducted at Mikhailov’s flat. In his opinion this was a result of a letter he had written to Shchelokov complaining at the actions of OVIR, the police and the KGB, who had refused him permission for a trip to visit friends in East Germany. (Before 1974 he had not been refused permission for such trips.) He also said in his letter that the organs of internal affairs had been spreading slanderous information about him and demanding that the school administration dismiss him. At the search, apart from correspondence and foreign books, a camera, artists’ catalogues and a collection of slides and photographs were confiscated.
On 3 August 1977 Investigator Grigorovich interrogated Mikhailov and on 14 August 1977 an article appeared in The Week [Nedelya], ‘Who are you? Doctor Mamontov?’ Mikhailov was a parasite, it said, who earned little bits of money by giving foreigners ‘not-so-innocent information’ about ‘permafrost and boats with submarine fins’.
Mikhailov wrote a letter to the Procurator of Novgorod (with whose sanction the search had been conducted), to the USSR Procurator-General and to the editor of The Week, protesting against the illegal actions and slanderous accusations. On 30 August 1977 he was arrested, interrogated and then released immediately.
On 2 September 1977 he was dismissed from his job and brought an action against the school administration. On 9 September 1977 he was asked to collect the things that had been confiscated during the search. He refused to go for them and the next day all the things, including the slides, camera and photographs, were brought to his house.
On 26 September 1977 Mikhailov received an answer from the Procurator of Novgorod which said that no one in the Novgorod Procuracy had sanctioned the search. It transpired that the head of the Krasnogvardeisky district Department of the Leningrad KGB had signed his name on Novgorod Procuracy stationery. In spite of insistent requests not to take the matter any further and to consider the incident forgotten, Mikhailov continued to correspond with the Procuracies of Leningrad, the RSFSR and the USSR almost up to the time of his arrest in February 1979. As a result, he was returned some items which had been ‘overlooked’ earlier and paid 75 roubles compensation for the unlawful search. Mikhailov was told several times that several specially created commissions were looking into his case, that the Procurator of Novgorod’s answer was issued in error, that the people who had broken the law had been punished, and that as for Mikhailov himself — there had been nothing criminal in his activities and he was free to pursue his involvement in pictures and photographs.
On 4 November 1977 a court reinstated Mikhailov at work and he was paid compensation for his period of involuntary unemployment. He tried to sue the author of the article in The Week for libel, but the court did not accept his petition on the grounds that there was no basis for assuming that the article was about him personally, since the article did not mention ‘the patronymic of Georgy Mikhailov’. During that time, he was informed, in a roundabout manner, that if he wanted to emigrate no obstacles would be put in his way.
On 21 February 1979 Mikhailov was arrested. It was 13 days before he was formally charged (witnesses were being interrogated during this period).
*
On 27 August 1979, the first day of the trial, the indictment was read out.
Mikhailov was charged with receiving around 12,000 roubles in commissions on the buying and selling of pictures by Leningrad artists which had been exhibited in his flat, and with the receipt of 4,000 roubles from conduct of a forbidden trade — the preparation of photographic reproductions in quantity (slides and photographs).
Mikhailov pleaded not guilty and explained that in 1977 he had received official confirmation that what he was doing was legal. The Judge interrupted Mikhailov constantly and told him to ‘confine his observations to the present case’. Mikhailov stated:
‘… the investigation had no grounds for charging me with activity as a commercial middleman; this part of the indictment is a fabrication and demonstrates the investigation’s dishonesty. I declare categorically: I never, in any form, received payment. Everything I did for artists and for my friends I did completely unselfishly and because of my interest in art in general and particularly in the art of contemporary young artists whose pictures I collected, exhibited and talked about to my friends and acquaintances.
‘According to witnesses’ testimony, visitors to the exhibition organized by Mikhailov in his fiat were able to buy works that they liked, and in this event, as a rule, they paid the artist himself. Only in rare cases did the artist ask for Mikhailov to collect the money for him. There was no charge for participation in or visits to the exhibition, and Mikhailov received no commission on pictures that were sold.’
At the pre-trial investigation several artists said that they had given some of their work to Mikhailov as payment for his ‘services’. However, this evidence was not confirmed at the trial. All the witnesses explained such evidence as the result of pressure by the investigators and asserted that they had given their pictures to Mikhailov out of friendship and because they wanted them to be in the collection of a well-known collector.
Mikhailov refuted the charge of conduct of a forbidden trade:
‘… I did not engage in a forbidden trade in prints and photographic reproductions, and I could not have done so as I did not possess the necessary reproducing equipment, as is confirmed by the results of both searches. It is also confirmed by the explanations which I received from the relevant legal organs to whom I had applied after the first search.
‘The charge of preparing photocopies and of profiting from the preparation of slides and photographs is false, because I took no money from artists for preparing slides and photographs … For my work in preparing the slides and photographs from their pictures, the artists themselves offered me the choice of a number of their pictures or the right to choose pictures of theirs in the future …
‘Therefore, both of the charges brought against me, engaging in commercial dealings and in a forbidden trade, are groundless; they are the fabrication, insulting to all concerned, of the investigative organs and the Procuracy with the purpose of discrediting me as a person, as a citizen and as a teacher; they represent a continuation of the persecution I have suffered from organs of the Procuracy since the time of the unlawful search, and are a settling of accounts for the consequences to a number of people of my appeal to the law in my own defence.’
Witnesses confirmed that Mikhailov had taken money only for photographic materials: one slide cost them 50 kopecks as against the State price of 1 rouble 50 kopecks; or there had been a collectors’ exchange, with slides being exchanged for pictures.
An expert was questioned at the trial who did not accept that photographs and slides were photographic output, let alone ‘reproductions in quantity’. However, a second expert, brought in at the request of the Procurator, said that any photographic image constituted photographic output. According to the second expert, ‘one of the inefficient ways of reproducing slides in quantity is by using a camera and repeatedly photographing one and the same subject… the preparation of negatives permits photographs and slides of varying formats to be printed and duplicated at any time in the future’. The defence lawyer’s petition for appointment of a third expert was rejected.
*
The Procurator demanded a sentence of two and a half years’ deprivation of freedom under Article 153, pt. 2 and three years under Article 162, pt. 2; as a combined sentence he called for three years in an ordinary-regime corrective labour camp and confiscation of property. The lawyer asked for acquittal: under Article 153 because there was no evidence a crime had been committed, and under Article 162 because of inconclusive evidence.
The court sentenced Mikhailov to four years in an ordinary-regime camp and confiscation of property. Unofficial Leningrad artists and writers issued a statement of protest against the sentence (46 signatures).
*
2. The Trial of Yermolayev and Polyakov
On 24 September 1979, the Moskvoretsky district people’s court in Moscow, presided over by N. N. Orlova, examined the case against Sergei Yermolayev and Igor Polyakov, charged under Article 206, pt. 2 (RSFSR Criminal Code: ‘malicious hooliganism’). The prosecutor was Procurator Tsitsenko. Lawyer E. S. Shalman (CCE 50.7) defended Yermolayev; A. A. Rogatkin defended Polyakov.
Polyakov and Yermolayev were arrested during the night of 13-14 January 1979 (CCE 52.4-2). Both the accused underwent psychiatric examinations and were ruled responsible (CCE 53.29).
*
The courtroom was filled with a specially invited public long before the beginning of the hearing. Policemen crowded the staircase to the fourth floor of the court building, where the case was being heard. Only Polyakov’s mother and his wife Elizaveta Tsitovskaya were admitted to the courtroom; Igor’s father A. M. Polyakov and Sergei’s mother M. P. Yermolayeva remained in the courtroom after they had been examined as witnesses (both were summoned by the defence).
Yermolayev submitted three petitions at the beginning of the trial: to allow his friends and relatives into the courtroom; to have the things confiscated from him during the search (CCE 52.4-2) returned to him, as they had no relevance to the case; and to postpone the trial, since the papers which he was using to prepare for it had been confiscated from him that morning by the Butyrka Prison administration. Defence counsel Shalman supported these petitions.
To the first petition, the Judge replied that there was no room in the courtroom; to the second, that the problem would be sorted out later; to the third, that the trial would not be postponed, but that if it were essential for Yermolayev to prepare his defence he would be given time for this.
Yermolayev then stated that he could not take part in the trial and asked to be removed from the courtroom. When this request was refused, he said that he would not give any evidence at the trial.
*
According to the indictment, at 20 minutes past midnight on 14 January (1 January by the pre-Revolutionary calendar [The ‘Old New Year’, ed.]) Yermolayev and Polyakov had entered a car of an underground train and started shouting insults about the CPSU. They did not respond to citizens’ requests that they cease this outrage. They resisted the citizens who detained them, pushing them away and twisting their fingers; they tried hard not to let themselves be removed from the car. In the police room they insulted the police official who had helped to detain them as well as other citizens and the Soviet people as a whole. They had knelt and prayed.
Polyakov told the court that he and Yermolayev had shouted out twice: ‘The CPSU is a gang! The CPSU are butchers!’, after which they had remained silent. He had not put up any resistance to Bogoyavlensky or any of the others. He had not said a word in the police room. He did not deny that he had not been sober.
As Yermolayev had refused to give evidence in court, the evidence which he had given during the investigation was read out. (Yermolayev explained that he had given that evidence assuming that he was being charged under Article 206, pt. 1: Investigator Chistyakov had assured him of that; the same Chistyakov had written down his evidence and had distorted all his points.)
*
Witness V. I. Bogoyavlensky began by demanding the most severe punishment for Yermolayev and Polyakov and their strictest isolation from society. He related that he had been travelling by underground with his acquaintance Osipova when, on Yermolayev’s count of ‘three, four! ‘, Yermolayev and Polyakov had shouted out twice, ‘The CPSU is a gang! The CPSU are butchers!‘ Horrified, he had approached and seized them. Polyakov had pulled his finger away, causing him pain. He had then asked other citizens to help him detain the hooligans. Three men had approached and together they had taken the detained parties to the police.
When Rogatkin asked whether the accused had resisted when being taken away, Bogoyavlensky answered that they could not have resisted since they were being held by four strong men. In the police room, according to Bogoyavlensky, Yermolayev and Polyakov had insulted the witnesses and the Soviet people as a whole and had said that they would have liked to serve in Vlasov’s army [during World War II]. Polyakov had called Osipova a woman of loose morals (according to Osipova’s evidence it was Yermolayev who was insulting her). Bogoyavlensky said that he had been so horrified at Yermolayev’s and Polyakov’s shouts that he had been ready to strangle them with his own two hands.
A. A. Osipova, virtually repeating what Bogoyavlensky had said, added that if she had had children like that, she would have killed them (after the trial Bogoyavlensky and Osipova left the court building in a police car).
There were two further witnesses who had been involved in the detention: N. I. Ryzhkov (who confirmed Polyakov’s evidence that he had remained silent in the police room) and policeman Zagitdulin (who said that Yermolayev had insulted him by calling him a crawler, that they had not resisted him, and that he had found Sakharov’s telephone number in Yermolayev’s address book).
In the report on Polyakov from his place of work it said that he was one of the department’s best specialists and that he had tendered his resignation from the Komsomol several months before his arrest (the Komsomol expelled him after his arrest).
*
In her speech the Procurator accused the defendants of ‘slanderous fabrications defaming the Soviet political and social system’. She named an aggravating circumstance — they were both drunk — and extenuating circumstances: youth, first offence, Polyakov had a child to support (in fact Polyakov has no children). The Procurator demanded five years’ deprivation of freedom for Yermolayev (the maximum sentence under Article 206, pt. 2) and four years for Polyakov.
The lawyer Rogatkin said that if his defendant was being accused of ‘slanderous fabrications defaming then he should be charged under Article 190-1, but he would not be found guilty because the article applies to ‘systematic circulation’ and not to an isolated incident. The lawyer demonstrated, by reference to the testimony of the witnesses, that Polyakov had not behaved like a hooligan and had not resisted; moreover, his actions could not be called ‘exceptionally cynical or especially insolent’ (the words of Article 206, pt. 2). The lawyer argued that Polyakov’s action was a result of his drunken state. He asked for Polyakov to be sentenced to an administrative measure of punishment.
The lawyer Shalman also said that the actions of his defendant did not constitute a crime under Article 206, He pointed out that the accused could not have put up the resistance attributed to them against four adult, healthy men, one of whom was a boxer (Bogoyavlensky). In view of Yermolayev’s state of health (he has gastritis, inflammation of the gall-bladder and hepatitis) he asked for him to be acquitted.
In his final speech Polyakov said that the incident had not arisen purely accidentally. He regretted that it had turned out as it had, but the incident had been sparked off by his convictions, which he did not feel it necessary to discuss in the courtroom.
Yermolayev also said that his shouts had reflected his convictions, but also regretted that he had expressed them in such a way. A short while before the incident A. Ogorodnikov (CCE 52.11) and others of his friends had been sentenced. He considered that they had been unlawfully sentenced, and so it was possible to understand his state of mind. Yermolayev said that his shouts had not insulted the people or the State and that much of the witnesses’ evidence was false.
The court sentenced Yermolayev to four years and Polyakov to three years, six months in hard-regime camps. (The record of the trial states that the Procurator demanded not five but four, and not four but three years.)
*
A. Naidenovich wrote a short (three-page) essay entitled ‘An Open Trial Soviet-Style’ about the circumstances surrounding the trial. On 8 October E. Tsitovskaya appealed to Amnesty International to defend her husband, because in a country that calls itself civilized it is unthinkable to allow a man to be sentenced to three-and-a-half years for insulting … the political party in power.
On 11 November 1979, the Moscow City Court, in an appeal hearing, left the sentence in force. By agreement with their defendants, the lawyers did not attend the appeal hearing, which lasted a few minutes.
*
3. The Trial of Nikitin
On 23 May 1979, a criminal charge under Article 190-1 (RSFSR Criminal Code) was brought against Nikolai Nikitin (CCEs 51, 53), a member of the FIAWP [Free Inter-Trade Association of Working People] Council of Representatives (CCE 51.19-2). On 1 June Senior Investigator Topolyan of the Leningrad Procuracy signed a warrant for Nikitin’s arrest. It appears that in June and July the investigative organs did not know the whereabouts of Nikitin.
During the night of 3-4 August 1979 Nikitin was detained in Vsevolod Kuvakin’s flat (this issue CCE 54.4-2). He was taken to Police Station No. 101. There he was immediately shown the warrant for his arrest, sanctioned by Procurator Vasilev with the date of 6 August. Nikitin started a hunger-strike as a sign of protest and maintained it until the end of the trial.
On 7 August Investigator N. S. Borovik (CCE 52.4-2) conducted a search in Kuvakin’s flat in connection with the Nikitin case. FIAWP bulletins and copies of Kuvakin’s letters and statements to Soviet authorities were confiscated. Kuvakin noted on the search record a protest against the confiscation of materials that had no connection with any criminal case. On 7 September he sent written complaints to the Procurators of Moscow and Leningrad.
*
On 22 October 1979, the Leningrad City Court, presided over by Skipetrova, examined the case against Nikitin. The prosecutor at the trial was Procurator Petrov. Nikitin declined to have a defence counsel. Friends of Nikitin and a specially invited public were present at the trial.
Nikitin (b. 1948) was charged with having participated, in 1978-9, in composing FIAWP documents including: a statement about the formation of FIAWP; statements in defence of Valeria Novodvorskaya (CCE 51.11 & CCE 52.7), Mikhail Kukobaka (CCE 51.8 & CCE 53.13), Vladimir Skvirsky (CCE 51.19-2; CCE 52.4-2 & CCE 53.9) and Lev Sergeyev; a statement to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions [ICFTU] and a statement to the ILO [International Labour Organization]; a copy of the latter statement, in Nikitin’s handwriting, had been confiscated from Mark Morozov’s flat (CCE 53.14).
Nikitin pleaded not guilty. He explained that the statement to the ILO was simply copied from a text by an unknown author; he said that he was acquainted with the contents of the other statements but that he had not helped to compose them and had signed them in his capacity as a member of the FIAWP Council of Representatives. Nikitin also pointed out that the statement in defence of Sergeyev had nothing to do with FIAWP, as it had been written long before FIAWP’s formation. The statement to the ICFTU, as it was unfinished, should be regarded simply as a piece of paper.
Nikitin petitioned to be allowed to give evidence sitting down; it was the third month of his hunger-strike and his head was spinning. The Judge granted the petition.
When People’s Assessor Rylova asked: ‘When did your involvement in this type of activity begin and for how long have you had these convictions?’, Nikitin answered, ‘My convictions are recent ones. They were formed when I began to discover more about what’s going on around me and when they started openly persecuting defenders of the rule of law.’
Rylova: Where did you make these discoveries? Such facts, you know, if they do exist, are not usually publicized (laughter in the courtroom).
Nikitin: I made these discoveries in the newspaper Pravda, in the newspaper Izvestiya and through other channels of information.
Among the witnesses examined at the trial were Lev Volokhonsky (brought in under guard), the accused’s wife Alexandra Nikitina, Yury Ushakov (his pseudonym is Galetsky; he was interrogated during the pre-trial investigation of the Volokhonsky case, CCE 53.11) and Andrei Druzhinin (he was examined at Volokhonsky’s trial).
Here is an excerpt from the examination of Volokhonsky:
Judge: Did Nikitin play an active part in composing FIAWP documents?
Volokhonsky: Nikitin is on the FIAWP Council of Representatives and signed the FIAWP documents under which his signature appears.
Judge: Whom can one consider to be the author of FIAWP documents?
Volokhonsky: The Council of Representatives, everyone who signed. Judge You mean that the people who sign a document are its coauthors?
Volokhonsky: Yes, of course.
Nikitin: The people who have signed a document must be its co-authors — is that your personal opinion?
Volokhonsky: Yes, obviously.
The following is an extract from the Procurator’s prosecution speech:
‘There are in existence renegades like Nikitin who try to defame everything. We have fought such renegades in the past and we will continue to fight them until we have suppressed such views.’
The Procurator asked for Nikitin’s state of health (he has a weak heart), his good record and the fact that this was a first offence to be taken into account, and for the court to award a punishment of two years’ deprivation of freedom in an ordinary-regime camp.
*
From Nikitin’s defence speech:
‘In the indictment, FIAWP’s tasks were twice called deliberately false and slanderous, yet the task of the FIAWP, like that of any other trade union, is to defend workers’ rights.
‘By introducing such statements into the indictment, the Soviet authorities slander not only me personally but the FIAWP as a whole, and thus attempt to discredit the trade union movement by any means possible.
‘The FIAWP is a legal trades union organization. The right to establish such organizations is guaranteed by the USSR Constitution and also by the International Covenants signed by the Soviet Government. Therefore, the prosecution of Soviet citizens for belonging to a trades union organization which is not under the control of the CPSU is an anti-Constitutional act and it is a crime to carry out such a prosecution.
‘…The prosecution did not even try to prove that the contents of the FIAWP documents were untrue and I therefore consider it ridiculous to discuss the question of my relationship to these letters — whether I composed them, whether I circulated or merely signed them … I only read the documents that I signed, but I was in full agreement with their contents. However, I am neither their author nor their distributor.
‘The charge is based on false assumptions. I am charged with preparing and distributing letters. The fact that I signed them is considered to mean that I wrote them.
‘The case is a fabrication from beginning to end.’
From his final speech:
‘The Procurator mentioned in his speech that my parents had fought and defended Leningrad. I want to go into this in more detail. My parents defended with sweat and blood an embattled land, their Motherland, but not the Stalin regime. And this was in spite of the fact that they and millions of other Soviet people lived in fear, under pressure, under the threat of the camps.
‘I do not want a return to the Stalin era or to those events which took place after his death, in Novocherkassk for example.
‘I will always oppose violations of workers’ rights, wherever they occur and whoever perpetrates them.
‘Two members of the FIAWP Council of Representatives have already been sentenced. I am the third. The FIAWP, a free trades union, is being tried under our very eyes…
‘I also want to state that during the pre-trial investigation I was locked up for a month with a man in the active stage of tuberculosis. During this whole period I was not allowed the exercise laid down by law, the cell was never aired and the windows were never opened. When this man stopped his hunger-strike, which he could no longer maintain because of his state of health, and he was taken elsewhere, I asked to be examined for tuberculosis and my request was refused.
‘Recently I have been very short of breath and my heart rate has increased. I am not talking about staying healthy now, I’m talking about staying alive. I am therefore stopping my hunger-strike, but I will be forced to resume it if I am not examined for tuberculosis and if I do not receive the necessary medical help. It’s all right to risk one’s health, but no one can deprive me of my right to live.
The judgment repeated all the points mentioned in the indictment apart from the letter to the ILO. The court sentenced Nikitin to one-and-a-half years in an ordinary-regime camp. The Judge called the sentence an act of humanity on the part of the Soviet State.
Skipetrova refused to allow notes to be taken during the trial. On 26 October V. Kuvakin sent a letter to the President of the Leningrad City Court complaining about ‘the violation of the principle of openness of court proceedings’.
*
4. The Trial of Rossiisky
On 12 September 1979, the day after he lost his job, Alexander Gotovtsev (whose artistic pseudonym is ‘Rossiisky’) was arrested as a parasite.
On 11 November the Babushkino district people’s court in Moscow, presided over by Judge Zhuikov, examined the case against him. Gotovtsev was charged under Article 209 (RSFSR Criminal Code), on the grounds that in the course of one year from 30 May 1978 he had been out of work for more than four months, despite the fact that he had twice been cautioned.
*
Gotovtsev was in fact out of work from 30 May until 30 July and from 22-31 August 1978 and from 1 March until 26 July 1979.
He was first cautioned on 11 September 1978, when he was already working. He left his job on 1 March 1979. Later in March he gave in his old passport to get a new one. He was only given the new passport in June, and without a passport he could not get a job. On 30 May he was cautioned again and then sent to the Labour Commission. The next day he received a letter from Police Station No. 106 to say that he could go and collect his passport. On 27 July he started a job found for him by the Labour Commission, as a yard-keeper. After a visit to his head office. Works Department 106, he received two reprimands in the course of four working days. He was asked to leave. He left on 11 September. On 12 September he was arrested.
Gotovtsev explained the reasons for his periods without work to the court.
By vocation and profession, he was a musician; he had graduated from the cello class of music school and had also taken an exam to qualify him as a guitar teacher. It was difficult to find work in his field, but from 1 September 1978 to 1 March 1979 he had had such work, teaching guitar to children in the Yauza House of Culture. In answer to the Judge’s question about his reasons for leaving the club, Gotovtsev explained that he had had conflicts with the management — he had changed the time of his classes, as at the time allocated to him he was disturbed by rehearsals of a vocal and instrumental ensemble, and the manager had forbidden him to make the change. (It is known that the club’s management was censured for employing Gotovtsev in the first place, see below.)
Gotovtsev also explained that, in spite of his efforts, it took three months for him to obtain a new passport and he could not get a letter explaining that his passport was being renewed.
In his speech for the defence, counsel V. M. Shershevsky pointed out that there had been no grounds for the first caution issued to Gotovtsev and that the caution therefore had no force in law. Moreover, the indictment had ignored the objective impossibility of Gotovtsev’s finding a job between March and May 1979. The defence counsel said that the hasty arrest of Gotovtsev, just one day after he had lost his job, gave one the impression that the police had other reasons for arresting him. He asked for Gotovtsev to be acquitted on the grounds that no crime had been committed.
The sentence: one year in ordinary-regime camps.
*
Alexander Rossiisky is known as a writer and performer of songs, many of which have contemporary socio-political themes.
He was an active member of the Unofficial Song Club and the ‘Sundays’ (CCE 41.13) and has received attention from the KGB for a long time (CCE 43.2). Gotovtsev was interrogated at M. Morozov’s pretrial investigation (trial, CCE 53.14; Morozov is his father-in-law), but did not give evidence (CCE 52.4-2).
*
When Gotovtsev was under arrest, KGB officials came to talk to him. (One of them was present at the trial.)
They promised to close his case if he would give evidence against Valery Abramkin and write an incriminating statement against him and Searches. At his trial he managed to exchange a few words with Abramkin during a break (entrance to the courtroom was unrestricted), and to say that he had been told during interrogations that Abramkin had already been arrested.
An appeal (23 signatures) was circulated before the trial:
‘In Defence of Alexander Rossiisky
‘… The case against the ‘parasite’ Alexander Gotovtsev was prepared in advance and thoroughly.
‘First, a man whose credentials identified him as an official of the Crime Department talked to the management of the House of Culture where he was working. Then the club’s director was accused through Party channels of helping Gotovtsev to get up a Zionist circle. In the end, Rossiisky was forced to leave the club. The police withheld his passport for three months in order to prevent his finding a new job; they even refused to give him a letter to say that his passport was being renewed. After complaints to a higher authority, the passport was given to him only the day after a caution had been drawn up about his parasitic existence’. Gotovtsev was forced to leave his next job for approximately the same reasons as he had had to leave the previous one, and the authorities arrested him the next day without even giving him the chance to collect his labour book (the point at which, by Soviet law, a person is considered formally to have left his job).
‘The indictment of Alexander Rossiisky will exploit this five-month break from working, three months of which were organized by the police department by not giving him a passport. However as in dozens of similar cases, Rossiisky’s fate will not be determined by the real circumstances of the ‘case’ but by the fact that he IS a dissenter and by the contents of his art. The guardians of our ideological innocence fear his songs — both the ones he has already sung and, even more, the ones he has yet to sing
‘The hounding of dissenters in the USSR has broadened its horizons to include not only defenders of the rule of law but also those whose artistic works are not helpful to the authorities and those whose activities make the growth of free art possible.
‘Apart from Alexander Rossiisky we can mention in this context a man recently sentenced in Leningrad — Georgy Mikhailov, and the nonconformist artist Vyacheslav Sysoyev. The charges against these people (parasitism’, ‘speculation’, ‘circulation of pornography’) are criminal ones, but the price they are paying for the right to free creation is no less pernicious for that. We appeal to all honest people, both in our country and abroad, to rally to the defence of Alexander Rossiisky. We understand perfectly that this is unlikely to stop the reprisals against an innocent man; it has not helped in the past, but we have no other means, no other possibilities…’
(For information on Sysoyev see CCE 53.29 and this issue CCE 54.23-1.)
===========================================
A Chronicle of Current Events 