The Moscow Subway Crime
HOPKINS, MARK
EXECUTING INNOCENTS The Moscow Subway C^rime bymarkhopkns Saturday evening, January 8, 1977. The Moscow subway train slowed as it approached the May First station on the city's east side. The cars...
...Finally, on January 31, 1979—two years and 23 days after the explosion—Pravda and Izvestia tersely stated that the Soviet Supreme Court had reviewed the case of "Zatikyan and his two collaborators" and had concurred with the previous verdict of guilty...
...The KGB similarly attempted to use the case to smear human rights activists...
...The next chapter of the story begins in Yerevan, capital of the Armenian Republic...
...And she holds up their executions to the Soviet public as a gross example of the consequences of a politically controlled press and court system...
...Zatikyan's fingerprints were said to have been found on the glass of the timing mechanism...
...Not until May 1978, however, did the Communist Party newspaper Pravda report the arrests—and only later were the formal charges publicly revealed: The three were charged under Article 68 of the Russian Republic Criminal Code, which makes "terror and diversion" a capital crime...
...After Zatikyan's arrest in November 1977, the KGB spread the word that he was not only guilty of the Moscow subway bombing, but had been planning another as well...
...The full story of what happened that night is therefore still unknown, but three men were arrested and executed for the crime...
...Suddenly, without warning, an explosion roared through one coach...
...The allegations alarmed Andrei Sakharov...
...Paruir Airikyan had already spent four years in labor camps and was serving a seven-year term for his United Party activities when the KGB got in touch with him a few weeks after Zatikyan's arrest...
...Victor Louis, a Soviet journalist who has unusual access to high-level information, wrote in that day's London Evening News that a "terrorist bomb" was responsible...
...Then, the KGB planted rumors with the dozens of persons it interrogated that Zatikyan was anti-Semitic and that his target in Moscow had been Jews...
...All three had already been shot, as was duly reported in the paper...
...On January 14, he issued a statement suggesting that the KGB itself had planted the bomb in a macabre plot to discredit the dissident movement...
...Most important of all, she maintains that Stepan Zatikyan was not even in Moscow the night of January 8, 1977...
...He is now in Labor Camp No...
...Activists have often been sent to labor camps or exiled to Siberia after being convicted of non-political crimes...
...In the Soviet Union, such incidents are not only extraordinarily rare, they are shrouded in extreme secrecy...
...Supported by Sakharov, she traveled to Yerevan and began probing into a KGB investigation so sensitive that it was surely ordered by the security agency's chief, Yuri Andropov, and perhaps by the Politburo itself...
...The first indication that the Kremlin would try to make political capital out of the explosion came on January 10, 1977...
...His passport, sent with the statement, was soon returned to him via KGB channels...
...Realizing that the KGB hoped to link the Moscow bombing to the National United Party of Armenia and thereby prove that it was a terrorist organization, Landa says, Airikyan refused the deal...
...In an infrequent mention of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate that underlined the gravity of the developing situation, the government news agency tass accused him of making "deliberately false and slanderous" remarks, punishable under Soviet law...
...In 1975, he sent the Supreme Soviet in Moscow a formal declaration in which he renounced his Soviet citizenship and requested permission to emigrate...
...For the following nine months the subway blast incident sank into the Mark Hopkins, a past contributor to these pages, is a specialist in Soviet and East European affairs...
...35 in the Urals...
...It is this development that has led Sakharov 10 describe the Armenia case as "one of the most ominous" in years...
...The bulk of her samizdat report focuses on how Stepan Zatikyan, who was accused of being the ringleader, and his two fellow Armenians found themselves arrested for a crime that they did not commit...
...The so-called "fighter for human rights," the newspaper said, "has now become a murderer of Muscovites...
...This was out of character for the agency, she notes, for it generally displays the apparatus of crimes when it has a solid case...
...On January 25, the regime responded by summoning Sakharov to the office of the Procurator of the USSR, where he was warned that he was treading on dangerous ground...
...What distinguishes Landa's report from other accounts of KGB persecution is its documented assertion that the Soviet secret police engineered the deaths by firing squad of innocent political dissidents...
...In all, six passengers were reported killed and 20-30 wounded...
...The general outlines of the case are of course known...
...Zatikyan was a devoted nationalist who talked openly about Armenia seceding from the USSR, as provided for in the Soviet Constitution...
...An honors graduate from secondary school, he became involved in politics while attending a technical institute in Yerevan...
...The newly-installed Carter Administration, scarcely aware of the intricacies of the case but eager to test its human rights policy, promptly and publicly cautioned the Kremlin against trying to silence Sakharov...
...Released in 1972, he continued to preach Armenian independence, but no longer took an active role in the United Party...
...She points out, too, that the KGB did not produce the bomb mechanism supposedly bearing Zatikyan's fingerprints, or any other evidence that would be persuasive to a skeptical public...
...Landa, one of Moscow's long-time dissidents, suspected injustice from the outset...
...As he walked down the street, he was grabbed by KGB agents...
...In subsequent months—during which Air-kyan was moved to Moscow's Lefor-tova prison, a KGB interrogation center, and eventually put into solitary confinement for 10 days—the KGB offered him his freedom in exchange for information...
...According to Landa's report, the KGB, in an effort to strengthen its case against Zatikyan, zeroed in on one of his compatriots...
...The cars were packed with Muscovites finished with the day's shopping, bundled against the January frost and looking forward to their Sunday off...
...Zatikyan was sentenced to four years in a labor camp...
...On November 3, 1977, Ste-pan Zatikyan, 32, left his house to buy some milk at a nearby store...
...Parts of seats were hurled through the air...
...Allegedly, vigilant citizens discovered the second bomb in a Moscow railway station suitcase locker...
...But the KGB was mounting a major investigation...
...Along with exposing such KGB tactics, Landa's report pokes holes in official accounts of the crime and the trial...
...It was there that he helped organize the underground National United Party of Armenia, dedicated to winning independence...
...A few days earlier, the KGB had also picked up Akop Stepanyan, 30, and Zoven Bagdasar-yan, 25...
...In 1968, his third year at the institute, he and two other United Party activists were arrested by the KGB in an apparent campaign to crush the organization...
...Windows were shattered...
...The Voice of the Motherland, a newspaper published in the Soviet Union for Russian emigres, claimed in a September 1978 article that one of the suspects in the subway bombing previously had been sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda...
...subterranean world of official secrecy and silence...
...Once the men were in custody, scores of KGB agents from Moscow descended on Yerevan to conduct house searches and question hundreds of their relatives, friends and acquaintances...
...She discovers, for instance, that although the press had "hundreds" of people attending the trial, relatives of the three accused men did not even know where or when it was held...
...But until now, no dissidents have been executed...
...The blast was so powerful that it ripped off people's legs, according to one horrified witness who saw the blood-spattered coach as it pulled into the station...
...In a legal sounding, understated concluding analysis of the whole affair, Landa argues that the civil rights of the three Armenians were repeatedly violated by the KGB...
...Now, in a 24-page samizdat report, Moscow human rights activist Malva Landa shows that the KGB, under pressure to silence dissidents and to suppress Armenian nationalists, killed three innocent men...
...Official sources," he continued, "hinted it may have been planted by a Soviet dissident group...
Vol. 62 • October 1979 • No. 19
