THE TRIAL OF SERGEI KOVALEV

...potentials and the electrical coupling of cells...

...The four-day trial that began last December 9, after a year of "pretrial arerst," was unusual in several other respects...

...It focused instead on the words of conscience that cost him his position in 1969, when he helped organize the Initiative Group for the defense of Human Rights in the USSR...

...It was not open to the public...

...For the next five years, he was only able to work at applied biology in a fish hatchery...

...In the January 1976 issue of the Soviet journal New Times, Alexander Sukharev, First Deputy Minister of Justice of the USSR, contends the trial was "held in the biggest hall in the courthouse" and was "attended by the public, needless to say, within the limits imposed by seating capacity...

...The Soviet Union agreed with 34 other states last summer to "recognize the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for which is an essential factor for the peace, justice and wellbeing necessary to ensure the development of friendly relations and cooperation among themselves," Clearly, as a Cornell spokesman conceded, cashing in on the promises in the humanitarian "Basket Three" section of the Helsinski treaty is a long shot...

...government to demonstrate that the words of Henry Kissinger can alter the fate of one man: "Human rights must be cherished regardless of race, sex, or religion...

...Kovalev pleaded not guilty to a catalog of charges based on samizdat documents seized at his apartment and the testimony, later recanted, of fellow activist Kiktor Krasin, now in New York...

...The court denied Kovalev's motions to call witnesses except for Krasin, who was, of course, unavailable...

...Attempts by Kovalev to intercede for embattled dissidents led him to sign petitions for Alexander Solzhen-itsyn, Pyotr, Grigorenko, Vladimir Bukovsky and a half dozen other victims of detente-era repression...

...It gives a hollow ring to Soviet pledges at Helsinki to "recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience...

...It simply cites Kovalev's research on "the electrophysiology of muscle and the control of heartbeat, as well as on the development of membrane HARVEY FIRESIDE is chairman of the Department of Politics at Ithaca College and a fellow of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute...

...The Cornell invitation will clear the obstacles in the dissident biologist's path...

...And they decided to give an object lesson to restive Lithuanians by having the court deliver the maximum sentence of seven years at a "strict regime" camp followed by three years' internal exile...

...The trial was blatantly unlawful...

...American colleagues, it notes, have followed with interest publication of this work in such noted scientific journals as as Biofiuka and Tsitologiia...

...After further denials of motions to conduct a truly public trial, Kovalev declared a hunger strike...

...In Kovalev's thoughts on liberty as expressed in the documents he signed, one thing is clear: he is trying to portray liberty as something independent from society...

...We know that liberty is the product of the historical development of society and that each society has its own particular character...

...Still, the dissidents' grapevine was able to convey the proceedings, including the prosecutor's final charge: "The Soviet authorities don't care about a man's opinions if only he keeps them to himself and does not engaged in criminal activity...

...Later that year, Kovalev became a charter member of the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International, a human rights group headquartered in London...

...The statement, cosigned by Tatyana Velikanova and Tatyana Khodorovich, concluded, "We are convinced that truthful information about violations of basic human rights should be available to everyone interested...

...According to an informed State Department source, who was not allowed to attend the supposedly "open" trial, the Soviets are supersensitive to challenges from religious and national movements, particularly in territories annexed during World War II...

...They staged Kovalev's trial in the remote courtroom at Vilnius, off limits to correspondents and friends who would have attended in Moscow...

...Among those excluded from the courtroom was the noted Soviet physicist and Nobel peace prize winner Andrei Sakharov, who considers Kovalev "my close friend, a man of great spiritual beauty and force, of limitless altruism, dedicated to the defense of human rights and the struggle for publicity against illegality...

...The eleven numbers of that publication to reach the West constitute a tragic record of the repression of church and national life in Lithuania under Soviet rule...

...There can be no double standard...

...the trial was conducted without defense counsel, and it was completed in the absence of Kovalev and without his final plea...

...He also issued a statement in October, with Velikanova, Khodorovich and Grigory Podyapolsky, concerning conditions in the labor camps in Mordovia and the Perm region that had provoked inmates to prolonged hunger strikes...

...More than twenty witnesses were called and a large number of documents confirming his criminal anti-state activity were examined and verified...

...The final act of courage that proved Kovalev's undoing was to help prepare another samizdat journal, the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church (obtainable in English from Lithuanian Catholic Priests' League, 64-14 56th Road, Maspeth, Long Island, New York 11378...

...Finally, it puts responsibility on the U.S...

...He was removed from the courtroom and the trial continued in his absence...

...The official account thus totally contradicts what has become known about the case privately...

...Agents of the KGB secret police, who had detained sympathizers trying to board a Moscow train bound for Vilnius, restricted access to persons with "special passes...

...Our state forbids actions which are foreign to its nature...

...Cornell University's Division of Biological Sciences has invited him to accept an appointment as visiting scholar at his "convenience...

...The Lithuanian Supreme Court that tried Kovalev in Vilnius last December, however, paid scant attention to the scientific career that led from a candidate's degree (equivalent to a PhD) to a post of senior researcher at Moscow State University...

...Although Kavolev's behavior during the trial greatly complicated the work of the court, his case was subjected to a thorough and objective examination...

...Charges that these reports purveyed "anti-Soviet propaganda carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime," under Article 70 of the Russian Criminal Code, formed the nub of the indictment...

...In May 1974, he took the bold step of handing a statement to foreign correspondents admitting joint authorship of the Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat (underground) bimonthly record of trials and imprisonments (obtainable, in English translation, from Amnesty International, 212 Broadway, New York, N.Y...

...there was no debate between the parties...

...Rather than accept a court-appointed counsel, Kovalev chose to defend himself...

...10023...

...It is a long way from Ithaca, New York, to the "corrective labor colony" at Perm, 700 miles southeast of Moscow, which the regime reserves for "especially dangerous state criminals...

...The Cornell offer deliberately ignores the political aspect of the case...

...At the end of the trial, Sakharov charged, "The prosecution did not prove that Kovalev's aim was the sub-sersion of the Soviet regime or that his activity was slanderous in character...

...But, in view of recent expulsions of other dissidents- the Ukrainian cybernetician Leonid Plyushch, the Moscow historian Andrei Amalrik and a few longtime Jewish "refuseniks"-early release of the 44-year-old Kovalev with his wife and child remains a distinct possibility...

...It further denied his request for defense attorneys Kaminskaya or Kallistratova, who had handled similar cases...

...It all depends on a number of intangibles, such as the Soviet regime's need for exchanges with western scientists and the persistence of outside pressure on Kovalev's behalf...