Dear Editor
SOVIET JUSTICE Two recent articles by prominent American visitors to Russia seem to me to betray a dangerous gullibility and ignorance about the legal and judicial system of the USSR. Former...
...And he is especially indignant about the so-called "parasite" laws, by which committees of laymen exercise great power over their fellow citizens...
...Leibowitz...
...But there is no doubt that the gullible visitor was ready to take at face value anything shown to him...
...Leibowitz makes several other serious mis takes in his article...
...It is hard to believe that an intelligent judge would put his faith in the words of a Soviet official and not even try to find out whether criminal records actually are expunged, but apparently he did not...
...The Tsarist tradition had a lot wrong with it, but the monolithic dictatorship of the Communists is much worse...
...Thus...
...of expunging a man's criminal record, once he has served his time," a custom described to him by a Soviet prison administrator...
...and that America should copy certain features of the Russian penal system...
...Leibowitz also gives a vague and incorrect picture of the history of Russian jurisprudence...
...Harriman and Leibowitz are both guilty of a strange kind of naivety in their appreciation of one of Russia's model prisons, the Kryukovo Correction Colony...
...Former Governor Averell Harriman, writing for the North American Newspaper Alliance, and New York Judge Samuel S. Leibowitz, writing in Life magazine, report enthusiastically on many aspects of the handling of justice in the USSR...
...after discovering that "archaic Soviet court methods grant shockingly few rights to defendents," goes on to make the mistake of saying that in the USSR "good prisons are far more advanced than any in the U.S...
...But Judge Leibowitz is guilty of an even more serious misunderstanding of the Russian system of justice- He consistently fails to realize that the penal system of any country is inextricably bound up with its general legal system...
...But for all the personal satisfaction Leibowitz may have gained from these arguments with Soviet officials, the practical results are likely to be very unsatisfactory...
...In reading Harriman's description, I could not help remembering the famous "Potemkin Villages" which were shown to Catherine II as proof of the well-being of her people...
...The Russian people will learn nothing about the sharp criticisms which Leibowitz made, but the compliments the judge gave to the penal system, and his consequent degrading of the American sys tem will probably be reported in full...
...It must be said to Leibowitz's credit that he successfully argued with the Russian judicial officials about the inadequacies of their system...
...He praises the "Russian custom...
...For example, he says that the "Soviet inequities in some degree stem from the old basis of Russian law, which grew out of the despotic Tsarist tradition," completely overlooking the famous laws of 1864 which formed an era in Russian history comparable in many ways to the practices of the most advanced countries...
...We cannot know with certainty, of course, just what the Russians at Kryukovo added to or subtracted from the flowers, the prison-made tea kettles and the chafing dishes which were set before Harriman...
...New York City MARK VISHNIAK...
...He objects to the fact that "a Russian suspected of a crime can be "detained'—seized and held incommunicado for as long as a year—without any charge being formally made against him, without being allowed to consult a lawyer...
...This is a strange and inconsistent position, even stranger when one considers that presumably no prisons except the Kryukovo showcase were shown to the judge...
...model villages and model prisons are not new propaganda methods for the Russians...
Vol. 42 • July 1959 • No. 28
