THE BUKOVSKY CASE
- 1.1 — Appeals and Trial
- 1.2 — Final Words
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Bukovsky was tried and convicted on 5 January 1972 (CCE 23.1-1) by the Moscow City Court.
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FINAL WORDS
I will not touch on the juridical side of the indictment, because I have already fully proved to the court its lack of substance [1]. In his speech my lawyer has also proved the complete lack of substance of the indictment, and I agree with him on all the points of his defence. Let me say something else: repressive measures against me have been in preparation for a long while, and I have been aware of this.
On 9 June [1970] I was summoned by Procurator Vankovich and threatened with repression [2]. Then an article appeared in Pravda (17 December 1970), under the heading “The Poverty of Anti-Communism”; the prosecutor has quoted it almost in full in her speech.
The article accused me, supposedly in return for small handouts, of “selling slanderous information to foreign correspondents in courtyard entrance-ways”. Finally, the journal Political Self-Education (No. 2, 1971) carried an article by Semyon Tsvigun, [first] deputy-chairman of the KGB, which also stated that I was engaged in anti-Soviet activities.
It is quite understandable, therefore, that the low-ranking investigator charged with my case could not go against his boss, and had to try, at whatever cost, to prove my guilt.
Vladimir Bukovsky (1942-2019)
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Prior to my arrest I was under continuous surveillance. I was harassed, threatened with murder, and one of the men who followed me even threatened me with his service pistol.
When I was already under investigation I petitioned for a criminal case to be initiated against these people. I indicated the number of the official car in which they had followed me, and provided other facts making it quite possible for them to be located. I received no answer to this petition, however, from the bodies to which I had sent it. Instead, my investigator made the following rather revealing response:
“Bukovsky’s behaviour under investigation gives grounds for ordering an examination of his mental condition”.
The investigation was carried out with innumerable procedural infringements. Not a single article of the Code of Criminal Procedure, one might say, remained uninfringed. The investigators even took such a shameful step as to put an agent, a certain Trofimov, in my cell. He himself admitted that he had been ordered to conduct provocative anti-Soviet conversations with me, the aim being to provoke me into making similar statements. In return they had promised him an early release. As you see, what I have been incriminated with as a crime is permitted to some people, if this is required by “the interests of the case”.
I sent complaints about this behaviour to various bodies. Now I have demanded that the court attach them to the case materials. The court “has been too embarrassed to do this”.
As regards the investigator, instead of examining my complaint and giving me an answer, he sent me to the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry for an in-patient medical examination.
The investigation department of the KGB’s Moscow directorate very much wanted me to be ruled insane. How convenient! There was no case against me, after all, and the prosecution had nothing on which to build, but if such a ruling were made it would be unnecessary to prove any crime had been committed: there would simply be someone who was ill, mad …
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And that’s how everything would have gone.
There would have been no need for this trial, and I would not have delivered these Final Words. I would have been sentenced in my absence, — if the intense involvement of public opinion had not had an effect.
For after the first period of examination, in mid-September, the medical commission discovered an ominous lack of clarity in the clinical picture it had of me. From the questions posed by the doctors who dealt with me after this, I understood that they were preparing to rule me insane. Only on 5 November, after the pressure exerted by public opinion, did a new medical commission rule me healthy. Here is reliable proof of my assertions (which in this court have been termed “slanderous”) that psychiatric repression of dissenters is carried out on the orders of the KGB.
I have yet another proof.
In 1966 I was interned in psychiatric hospitals for eight months, without trial or investigation; as different doctors discharged me, I was transferred from one hospital to another.
Anyway, on 5 November 1970 I was ruled sane and was once again locked up in prison. The procedural violations continued.
Article 201 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure at the end of the investigation, for instance, was crudely infringed. I demanded a defence lawyer of my choice. The investigator refused and signed Article 201 [without the statutory signature of defence counsel]; he even added in writing that I had refused to acquaint myself with my right to a defence, as provided by Article 48 of the Procedural Code. I demanded that lawyer Dina Isaakovna KAMINSKAYA be invited to defend me. I made this request to the Chairman of the Moscow Bar Association (Collegium of Lawyers). Later I received his refusal in writing.
It contained this statement: Lawyer Kaminskaya cannot be appointed for the defence, as she does not possess a security pass for secret proceedings.
I demanded to know what “secret proceedings” can be involved, when I am being tried for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda? In any case, where and in which Soviet laws is there mention of this famous “security pass”? Nowhere. So a lawyer was not provided for me. Moreover, the above-mentioned reply from the Collegium of Lawyers, was removed from the case-file and returned to the Collegium; there is a note to that effect in the case-file. The document was replaced by another, more innocent reply from the Chairman of the Collegium, which I was not shown. How is this to be evaluated? As official fraudulence, no more or less.
It took a hunger-strike lasting 12 days; a complaint to official bodies (the USSR Procurator-General, the USSR Ministry of Justice and the Central Committee of the Communist Party); and a new and active intervention by public opinion, for my legal right to a defence finally to be acknowledged.
I was provided with the services of lawyer Shveisky, who had been engaged by my mother [3].
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Today’s trial has also been held with numerous procedural infringements. The indictment uses the word “libellous” 33 times and the word “anti-Soviet” 18 times, yet it does not specify precisely which of the facts I communicated to Western correspondents are “defamatory”, nor precisely which of the materials confiscated from me during a search (and, allegedly, circulated by me) are “anti-Soviet”.
Of the nine petitions I submitted at the beginning of the trial, supported also by my lawyer, eight were rejected. Not one of the witnesses I requested, who could have refuted various points in the indictment, was summoned by the court.
I am incriminated, in particular, with handing anti-Soviet materials to the Fleming Hugo Sebreghts, who had come to Moscow. I handed these materials to him, it is alleged, in the presence of Alexander Volpin and Valery Chalidze. Yet my demand that these two men be summoned as witnesses was not granted. Nor did they summon to court even one of the eight people who could have confirmed the truthfulness of my assertions about the internment and living conditions of people in the Special Psychiatric Hospitals [4]. The court rejected my petition to summon these witnesses, on the grounds that they are mentally ill and cannot give evidence.
Among these people, however, there are two, Grigorenko’s wife Zinaida and A.A. Fainberg, the mother of Victor Fainberg, who have never been interned in Special Psychiatric Hospitals. They have visited these institutions only as relatives of internees: they could have confirmed my evidence about the conditions of imprisonment in these hospitals.
Only those witnesses were summoned whom the prosecution asked for. But what sort of witnesses were they? Before my arrest a member of the state security forces was sent to me, in all probability by KGB officials presently working in the customs inspection department at Sheremetyevo Airport. He is my former school comrade, a certain Nikitinsky, who was instructed to provoke me into committing a crime: organizing the import from abroad of equipment for an underground printing-press. But the ill-starred provocateur did not succeed. Subsequently the investigators, and now this court, have tried to turn him into a witness in connection with this charge in the indictment. We have seen here that Nikitinsky failed in this task, too.
Why were all these provocations and crude procedural infringements necessary? this stream of slander and false, unproven charges? Simply in order to punish one person?
No, there is a “principle” here, a sort of philosophy. Behind the stated charges stands another, unstated. In condemning me, the authorities are pursuing the aim of concealing their own crimes—the psychiatric repression of dissenters.
By repressing me they wish to frighten those people who have been trying to tell the world of their crimes. They do not want “to wash our dirty linen in public”, but appear on the world scene as unblemished defenders of the oppressed!
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Our society is still sick. It is sick with the fear which has remained with us from the time of Stalin.
The process of the gaining of spiritual insight by society has already begun, however, and is impossible to stop. Society already understands that the criminal is not he who washes our dirty linen in public, but he who dirties the linen. However long I may have to spend in prison, I will never renounce my beliefs. I will express them, exercising the right given to me by Article 125 of the Soviet Constitution, to all who wish to hear me. I will fight for legality and justice.
And I regret only this: that in the short period—one year, two months and three days—which I have spent at liberty, I succeeded in doing too little to this end.
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THE SENTENCE
The court sentenced Bukovsky to seven years’ loss of liberty, the first two to be served in prison, the remaining five in a strict-regime corrective labour colony, followed by five years of exile [5]. (Court expenses to the sum of 100 roubles were to be paid by Bukovsky.)
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NOTES
- See excerpts in The Times (London) and other newspapers, 8 January 1972.
↩︎ - See Russian text of Bukovsky’s transcript of this interview in Russkaya mysl (3 & 10 February 1972). A slightly condensed translation weas published in the New York Review of Books (9 March 1972).
↩︎ - Bukovsky’s hunger-strike lasted from 9 to 21 December. On 22 December his mother saw him for the first time in nine months and found him pale and haggard (UPI dispatch of 23 December).
↩︎ - In addition, in a letter to the Moscow City Court, Academician Sakharov asked that three such people, ex-inmates, be summoned to testify. Documents written by them showed that Bukovsky had publicized “not defamatory inventions but true facts” (AP dispatch from Moscow, 3 January 1972).
↩︎ - Numerous protests and appeals were made against this sentence:
[1] an appeal on 22 January by 52 of Bukovsky’s friends to UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim (text and signatories in Russkaya mysl, 23 March);
[2] A letter to the London Times (31 January) by 39 prominent British writers, scholars and politicians;
[3] An appeal by 75 Swiss writers, members of the Swiss Writers’ Association, to Kosygin (text and signatures in Der Bund, Bern, 20 January); and
[4] an appeal to Brezhnev by Academician Sakharov (The Guardian, London, 21 January).
Nevertheless, the sentence was confirmed on 22 February at a two-hour session of the RSFSR Supreme Court. Bukovsky’s friends, Andrei Sakharov and independent journalists were not admitted. Only his mother was allowed to attend the session (AP dispatch, 22 February; London Times, 23 February).
Bukovsky had been sent to Vladimir Prison, reported an AP dispatch from New York (2 March 1972), adding that his friends feared for his survival in view of his heart condition.
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