Telford Taylor - Courts of Terror

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC .

Copyright 1976 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
New York, and simultaneously in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

Library of Congress Catalogue Number: 7536822
eISBN: 978-0-307-81989-5

v3.1

Five counsels who handled arguments against indicted German officials in Nuremberg, 1946. Left to right: Auguste Champetier de Ribes, France; Thomas J. Dodd, U.S.A.; Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, Great Britain; Roman Rudenko, U.S.S.R.; Telford Taylor, U.S.A.

Some of the American attorneys who have been working to help Soviet Jewish prisoners. Left to right: Eugene Gold, Melvin Stein, George Fletcher, Telford Taylor, Alan Dershowitz, Leon Lipson, Nicholas Scoppetta. (Wagner International Photos)

Contents

This book is not a study of a general subject, but the story of a project. The purpose of the project was to obtain relief for a number of Jewish (and two gentile) citizens of the Soviet Union who had fallen afoul of Soviet criminal law, and been convicted and imprisoned, in the course of their efforts to emigrate to Israel. The means used by the group of American lawyers engaged in the project comprised a presentation to the Soviet authorities of violations of Soviet law committed by law-enforcement officials during the trials and in the prisons, in the hope that such a showing would induce those in higher authority to reconsider the sentences and alleviate the conditions of confinement.

Thus, although the book involves both Soviet criminal justice and Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, it does not deal with either as a general subject. We consider here only a handful of the hundreds of thousands of criminal trials held annually in the Soviet Union. The victims of the abuses perpetrated in these particular proceedings number less than a hundreda wholly insignificant figure even in terms of todays diminished stream of Jewish emigration.

Nevertheless, in both of these dimensions the significance of the trials far transcends the numbers directly involved. In any country espousing the rule of law, the true quality of a judicial system is best measured by its resistance to stress, whether caused by community, racial or other prejudice, or by the pressure of State political policies and interests. In these cases the Soviet State had a strong interest in condemnation and punishment, and it applied pressures which badly fractured the rules for the conduct of trials and the confinement of prisoners. The consequence inverted the old saw; bad law made hard casesindeed, scandalous miscarriages of justice.

The reason why the trials were conducted as they were was exemplary. It was State policy to discourage Jewish emigration without appearing to prohibit it. Loss of jobs, apartments, and other privileges or necessities of Soviet life discouraged some but by no means all would-be emigrants. Use of the criminal law was another and more drastic means to the same end.

Some Jews gave the authorities the opportunity by unlawful attempts at flight, as in the Leningrad case involving the attempted seizure of a small airliner in order to escape to Sweden. In other cases, where there was no such excuse, criminal charges were fabricated. Whatever the basis of the accusations, the State had a governing interest not only to ensure conviction and punishment of the accused, but to warn other potential emigrants that they might meet a like fate.

For this latter purpose, unfair trials were more effective than fair ones. If Soviet Jews came to realize that for them the legally established procedural safeguards were meaningless, and that once charged conviction was a matter of course, the deterrent effect would be that much greater.

Accordingly, this book may be regarded as an account of the prostitution of Soviet justice to serve State ends. Since we hope it will interest lawyers professionally as well as the public generally, we have included generous extracts from the individual petitions and the full text of memoranda on four legal issues which were common to a number of the cases. All these were submitted to and accepted by the Soviet legal authorities.

Many people, some of whom prefer anonymity, joined me in the project, which provides the core of the narrative, and some of these have also contributed to its text. All of us hope that this story is not yet ended, and that its publication may in some way aid or comfort the victims of these abuses, and their friends and relatives who trusted us to do our professional best in their behalf.

T ELFORD T AYLOR

New York, October 1975

The Trials

In Ryazan, an old Russian town 125 miles south of Moscow, there is a university which has for some years been an educational haven for minority nationalities of the Soviet Union who have difficulty gaining admittance to institutions in the larger cities. The University of Ryazan includes the Institute of Radio Engineering, and during the late 1960s two young Jewish brothers from the Ukraine, Yuri and Valery Vudka, and a slightly older youth from Lithuania, Shimon Grilius, were part of its student body.

Yuri, the elder brother, had an unusually bold and far-ranging mentality. He soon became the leading spirit of a small group, including these three, which initially interested itself primarily in political and economic questions. In time, their activities and interests became increasingly dominated by their Jewish heritage, and they began studying and circulating Hebrew textbooks and encyclopedias, tape recordings of Leon Uriss Exodus, Randolph Churchills The Six Day War, and other works of primarily Jewish concern, and essays by Yuri Vudka on various issues of the day, including anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. In 1969 the Vudkas and Grilius obtained invitations from relatives in Israel, the prerequisite for applying for permission to emigrate.

In August 1969, shortly after these efforts to emigrate had they took not only Yuri Vudkas memorandum favoring emigration rather than assimilation for Soviet Jews, but also records of Jewish songs, a typewriter, and a painting of a Jew.

The six were charged with violation of Articles 70 and 72 of the Criminal Code of the R.S.F.S.R., which proscribe anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda and participation in anti-Soviet organizations. Their trial before the Ryazan District Court was conducted by Judge Matveyev; the heavy atmosphere was lightened by a touch of low comedy when the prosecutor (a man named Dubtsov) introduced a copy of Bertrand Russells attack on Soviet anti-Semitism, which had been found in the possession of one of the defendants. Ignorant of the illustrious authors identity, Dubtsov misread the name, and vehemently castigated the defendants for their contact with those anti-Soviet scoundrels Bertrok and Rossel, to the better-informed judges great embarrassment.