CCE 53
KGB officer V. A. Orekhov was arrested on 30 October 1978 (CCE 53.14 ‘The Trial of Morozov’).
A. Imnadze was sentenced in December 1978 (CCE 53.19-2) for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’ to five years in strict-regime camps and four years’ exile.
Vasyl Sichko was expelled from the university not in 1973 (as first written in CCE 53.17), but in 1977. He was expelled because his father Petro Sichko had refused to work for the KGB (so writes Vasily’s mother Stefania Petrash). The Sichkos, father and son, spoke at the grave of Ivasyuk not on 12 June (CCE 53.17), but on 10 June.
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At the beginning of June, Captain Rak (Perm Camp 35) seized the draft manuscript of a statement from Kamil Ismagilov.
As a result of the incident, an order was issued condemning him to 10 days in a punishment cell, but this was done only on 15 June, the day S. Kovalyov began his hunger-strike (CCE 53.19-1). On 28 June, ending his own hunger-strike, Ismagilov informed the camp administration that he intended to strike from 10 July if Kovalyov’s demands had not been met by then.
On 2 July A. Yuskevich began a three-day hunger-strike in support of Kovalyov. N. Grigoryan (CCE 53.19-1) declared a three-day hunger-strike on 4 July — also In support of Kovalyov.
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A. V. Nikitkov, Presbyter of the Ryazan Baptist congregation, and N. F. Popov were sentenced only under Article 190-1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code (CCE 53.24). The charge under Article 142 was dropped in both cases during the pre-trial investigation.
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The Case of Lubman
The Chronicle has been able to obtain fuller and more precise information on the case of Leonid Lubman (CCE 51.9-1 & CCE 53.19-1).
Leonid Yakovlevich LUBMAN is a graduate of the Faculty of Radio-technology at Leningrad Polytechnic. He worked for some time in a secret institution. On deciding to emigrate from the USSR, he left this job. For the past five years Lubman worked as head of the Labour Organization Department at an electrical fittings factory.
Two months before his arrest, while he was preparing his application to OVIR, he did not want to make trouble for the management of the factory, and transferred to a job as an engineer in the Department of Finance and Wages at a factory manufacturing electrical goods. Lubman has written a number of articles on production organization, which were published in Soviet scientific journals [note 1]. He also wrote a dissertation on this theme, but was unable to defend it publicly.
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Lubman was arrested on 20 August 1977.
The same day searches were carried out at the flat he shared with his former wife (they were divorced shortly before his arrest) and at his parents’ flat. During the search at Lubman’s flat, his completed application for emigration to Israel was discovered.
Until January 1978 Lubman was facing a charge under Article 70 (RSFSR Criminal Code). In January 1978 a Deputy Procurator of the RSFSR visited Leningrad. From that time the charge against Lubman changed: now he was now charged under Article 64 of the Code. The investigation of Lubman’s case was conducted by Ryabchuk, Deputy Head of the Leningrad KGB Investigations Department (‘All you Jews are alike, you should all be shot’, he once said to Lubman), and A. P. Tsygankov.
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TRIAL
The Leningrad City Court, presided over by Karlov, examined Lubman’s case from 15 to 18 March 1978. Counsel S. A. Kheifets defended Lubman. On the first day of the trial, the court superintendent refused to allow Lubman’s parents into the courtroom: ‘You haven’t received permission — this is a closed trial’. They were allowed in to hear the judgment.
It was stated in the judgment that in 1976-1977 Lubman had
- sent documents to the CIA (USA) which contained State Secrets;
- offered advice about subversive activity in the USSR, such as terrorism, espionage, diversion and radio-propaganda;
- he also sent out material on the Soviet Union written from an anti-Soviet viewpoint.
On 26 July 1977 Lubman had contacted citizen Laura Bush, living in Copenhagen, to agree on the time when his foreign contact would visit him. (Lubman had indeed rung a friend in Copenhagen — a former Soviet citizen who had married a Dane, Chronicle.)
In August 1977 he had tried to send abroad 248 pages of manuscripts and documents of hostile content. Lubman had criticized about 30 Party and State officials and heads of a secret institution from a hostile viewpoint: defence counsel Kheifets submitted to the court an article from Leningrad Pravda which criticized the work of the same institution and also mentioned certain individuals by name.
Lubman had given the car number of one of the Party and State leaders and had written about measures to safeguard his security (this referred to the cortège of cars, well-known to every Leningrader, of Romanov, the First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee); he had given information to the CIA about a military secret, the manufacture of the ‘Argument’, produced by a certain State enterprise (defence counsel pointed out to the court that Lubman’s manuscript mentions only the name ‘Argument’, nothing else), and had revealed classified fact concerning the work of another secret enterprise.
Lubman’s guilt was borne out by his own partial confession that he had written these documents, and by the customs search carried out on 10 August 1977 on Italian citizen Nicoletta Gabrielli, during which articles by Lubman on production organization, which she had intended to pass on to Laura Bush, were confiscated.
Lubman met Gabrielli, an Italian philologist on a 10-day study period in the USSR, twice at his flat (at the trial Lubman denied meeting Gabrielli; during the search at customs Nicoletta Gabrielli stated that she had been given the manuscript by an unknown man on Nevsky Prospekt; Gabrielli was not at the trial). The judgment also stated that as Lubman was a Party member, had graduated from a Marxist-Leninist university and had earned expressions of gratitude and good character references, his actions had been premeditated.
The court sentenced Lubman to 13 years in strict-regime camps.
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On 10 April 1978, TASS put out a report for distribution abroad on Lubman’s conviction for ‘treason to the Motherland’.
On 12 April 1978 the executive bureau of NTS put out a declaration, ‘Invention of a typical case of treason to the Motherland’ [note 2]:
… The KGB has thought up a case of ‘espionage’ to cover up its own unlawful activities against all kinds of dissent. Lubman is the author of a book, unpublished in the USSR, on Soviet economic problems. Lubman asked friends who were leaving for the West to investigate the possibilities of publishing his book. The NTS asked the Italian Slavonic scholar N. Gabrielli to visit the author and offer to take out his work for publication abroad. Lubman transmitted to N. Gabrielli the manuscript and his instructions for its publication. However, when N. Gabrielli was leaving the USSR, the thick manuscript (several hundred pages long and signed by the author) was discovered during a customs search and confiscated.
Mrs Gabrielli was not detained, although according to the TASS report, she was taking out ’a series of documents’ in which Lubman allegedly gave secret information … It is clear that the KGB decided to whip up a typical ‘case’ of spying only much later. The NTS draws attention to the fact that the authorities are again resorting to methods they loved to use in the Stalin years …
The journal Zvezda (No. 6, 1979) published an article by V. Volodin about Lubman and the NTS, ‘A Story of Degradation and Treason’.
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NOTES
[1] For example, an article on increasing labour productivity in the ship-building industry, in Sudostroenie (Ship Construction), 1974, No. 10.
[2] See full text in Possev, 1978, No. 5, p. 14. The NTS (Popular Labour Alliance) is based in Paris and Frankfurt.
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A Chronicle of Current Events 