Echoes of the Tertz Affair

...A few parties, noted for their conservative loyalty to Moscow, reacted with cautious embarrassment...

...Whatever the reason, the lesson will not be lost on the Western parties...

...Significantly, though, the Finnish Communist youth organization, which has been acting as a revisionist goad to the sclerotic party, adopted on February 25 a protest denouncing the Moscow proceedings: "We cannot understand or approve the sentences...

...The revisionist Austrian CP, announcing its "consternation,' rebuked the Russians in milder terms for enabling the enemies of Communism to pose as champions of freedom...

...suggested bluntly that behind this trial lay "the vaster problem of relations between Soviet society and its intellectuals, between politics and culture, [to which] no adequate solution has yet been found.' L'Unit...

...The court has found the accused guilty, but the full evidence for the prosecution and defense which led the court to this conclusion has not been made public...

...Perhaps most interesting has been the very mild response of the Russians to this wave of criticism by fraternal parties...

...s editorial comment pointedly noted the divergence between Soviet and Western Communism: "It is historical reality and not abstract doctrinarism which has led the West European workers' movement, and the Communist parties which are its vanguard, to pose in a different manner [from the Russians] the problem of relations between the Socialist state and the civic Socialist society, between politics and culture...

...Parties which had already taken an independent stance generally reacted strongly and quickly...

...The Italian CP has now gone beyond such mild rebukes...

...Aragon had clashed with the Russians on such issues before...

...He also suggested that the trial represented a counterattack by "certain sectors in Soviet public life [which] have not yet shed their dogmatism completely," but added reassuringly that such incidents were "passing" phenomena, powerless to affect the anti-Stalinist "process of renewal...

...The little Norwegian CP, which had declared its independence from Soviet control in 1963, commented that such proceedings "should now be a thing of the past"-the Stalinist past, obviously...

...On the other hand, the Luxembourg CP, generally reckoned as being cautiously revisionist, reverted to the traditional pattern: An article in the Zeitung vum Letzeburger Voilek condemned the two writers and the trial's Western critics...

...His article also appeared in the Swiss party organ, Voix Ouvriere...

...If so, it was a good move...

...Earlier Le Drapeau Rouge's Moscow correspondent, Jean-Marie Chauvier, had questioned whether "the verdict was not a foregone conclusion from the beginning...

...The Danish cp daily Land og Folk, normally a staunch supporter of Muscovite dogmas, declared that the harsh sentences were "incomprehensible," and observed that "a public discussion [in the USSR] might throw new light on the case...

...Apart from these, one party that does not appear to have reacted at all is the Dutch CP...

...But that was different...

...Increasingly, the Western European parties are placing their own political advancement before the claims of "proletarian internationalism"-taking the path of reformism, electoralism, opportunistic (and doctrine-eroding) alliances with other parties, and a sensitive regard for public opinion...

...Above all, Western Communists insisted that they were not to be associated with such methods...

...A week later the Frenchlanguage daily, Le Drapeau Rouge, followed with an article by the theorist Jean Terve, who called the trial "a mistake abnormal and illegitimate...

...PERSPECTIVES Echoes of the Tertz Affair By Kevin Devlin Last month's trial and conviction of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli M. Daniel in Moscow, for publishing "anti-Soviet" materials abroad, has provoked a chorus of disapproval from the great majority of Western European Communist parties...

...the Kremlin's failure to meet the challenges of Sinyavsky, Daniel and others by free debate instead of by punitive judicial measures...

...Unfortunately, this cannot be said in the case of this trial...

...Writing from Moscow, Augusto Pancaldi, correspondent for the official Party newspaper, L'Unit...

...It does not correspond to my conception of democracy that various organs of the state or a political party should decide which views are permitted and which prohibited to the citizens...

...Their alarm, Pravda explained paternally, was needless...

...more conservative parties moved with caution...

...We are for freedom of expression even if [this] may lead to the publication of opinions which are not approved by all.' There were several surprises...

...Other West European Communist comment touched on recurrent themes-the unwarranted harshness of the verdict...

...it is to create a precedent more harmful to the interests of Socialism than the works of Sinyavsky and Daniel could be...

...Perhaps this was intended to spur the current Communist campaign for a Left-wing coalition dominated by the Party...

...the fact that even Communist correspondents from the West were excluded from the trial...

...Kevin Devlin is now a senior fellow at Columbia University's Institute on Communist Affairs...

...The British CP, preparing for this month's elections and eager to strengthen its recent appeal for Left-wing allies, also reacted with unusual vigor...

...In a statement in the Daily Worker, later endorsed by the Executive Committee, SecretaryGeneral Gollan expressed "deep concern" over the conduct of the trial...

...So did the Tass versions of what went on in court...

...Some of the smaller legal parties in Western Europe (like the Icelandic CP and the two Irish parties) have not yet been heard from...

...It is our duty to proclaim that it is not so, and could not be so, in France, at least so far as we are responsible...

...And their vigorous reaction has both underlined and strengthened the course of revisionist reassessment they are currently pursuing...

...There is no other way but that of free debate...

...Socialist (SFIO) spokesman Roger Quilliot promptly announced that Aragon's statement was "an important step forward in the dialogue between Communists and Socialists" -not a mere "tactical gesture," but "a mark of independence of spirit...

...the prejudicial and partisan reporting of Soviet media...

...This could hardly be much consolation to the Russians: The silence, if maintained, would represent not loyalty but the pattern of demonstrative independence, with anti-Soviet undertones, which the Dutch party has maintained for the past two years, often not silently...

...Among other things, this means that occasionally they must protect their public image by dissociating themselves from, and even deploring, events in Communist countries...

...By publishing Aragon's statement on the SinyavskyDaniel trial L'Humanit?©, instead of simply having it appear in the literary review he edits, Lettres fran?§aises, the party made his protest official...

...Thus, C. H. Hermansson, chairman of the ultrarevisionist Swedish cp, hastened to announce that he "fully dissociated" himself from the trial and the sentences, adding...

...In Belgium the Flemish party weekly, De Rode Vaan, took the lead with a strong editorial backing Aragon's criticism of this "unnecessary" trial...

...The declaration by writer and Central Committee member Louis Aragon, published in the party organ L'Humanit?©, was clear in its condemnation: "To deprive [these two men] of their liberty because of the contents of a novel or a short story is to make a misdemeanor of opinion into a crime of opinion...

...After ignoring the Western Communist statements for a full week (except for oblique references in a Tass foreign service commentary), a Pravda editorial noted on February 22-more in sorrow than in anger-that "the campaign organized on an unprecedented scale in the West in defense of the two subversive agents in literature has misled some honest people...

...This mildness may have been prompted by the approaching 23rd Party Congress, at which the CPSU will try to rally the support of the other parties to its anti-Chinese stand, emphasizing in return its respect for their individual sovereignty...

...The ultimate result can only be to strengthen their growing assertion of revisionist independence...

...Some progressive representatives in the West got alarmed...

...The line had been set for them in the spring of 1963 by their late chief, Palmiro Togliatti, who noted in his "Yalta Testament": "We [Communists] must become the champions of liberty of intellectual life, of free artistic creation and of scientific progress...

...He went on: "The Soviet press attacks on the accused before the trial assumed their guilt...

...Thus, the prominent Finnish Communist Peniti Saaikoski, editor of a party magazine, declared just before the trial ended that "as a sincere friend of the Soviet Union I can only regret the trial and I am discouraged by it...

...The next time criticism is called for, it will be that much easier to voice...

...This Italian criticism, however, coming from a party which has for several years maintained a revisionist position, was less significant than the strong stand taken by the usually more doctrinaire French Communists...

...In the latest case, as in the past, it was the Italian revisionists who took the lead in criticizing the Soviet wave of neo-Zhdanovism...

...Justice should not only be done, but should be seen to be done...

...In this area much assistance could come to us, but has not always come, from the countries where we already direct the entire social life...

...Speaking at Moscow University in January 1965, he called for an end to "literary dogmatism" and championed the book D'un r?©alisme sans rivages (Realism Without Bounds), in which-to the displeasure of the Soviet and East European literary establishments-his colleague Roger Garaudy had criticized the limitations of "socialist realism...

...Of course, the responses varied...