The Trial Ends
H, I.
Andrei Sinyaysky and Yuli Daniel, who published fiction and essays in Western periodicals under the pennames of Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak, have been sentenced to seven and five years...
...Our hearts go out to Sinyaysky and Daniel, to their families, to their friends, to all Russian writers who struggle for the free word in their dungeon-society...
...It is a sickening thing—this brutal sentence of writers who have shown themselves to be gifted, courageous and devoted to human freedom...
...And what is especially appalling is that the "evidence" accepted in the court consisted of literary works, fantasies and satires that were treated like political documents...
...They were convicted—it is important to note —not because they allowed their manuscripts to be smuggled abroad, but because they wrote what could, in the words of the court, "be used profitably by enemies of Communism...
...It comes at a time when another heretic in the Communist world, Milovan Djilas, begins his ninth year of imprisonment, locked in a freezing cell because he had dared to challenge the Titoist one-party dictatorship...
...The Russian state-party dictatorship thereby announces that, despite the softening of its rule these past years, it persists in thought control and will maintain its monopoly of political and intellectual expression...
...Andrei Sinyaysky and Yuli Daniel, who published fiction and essays in Western periodicals under the pennames of Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak, have been sentenced to seven and five years in forced labor camps by the Russian Supreme Court...
Vol. 13 • March 1966 • No. 2
