Justice Russian Style 1967 UkSSR Trial Of Vyacheslav Chorn

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Ukraine justice - Soviet style

1968 Pittsburgh Press article about the trial of Vyacheslav Chronovil that took place in Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR), 1967

Justice-Russian Style

Journalist's
Courage Rips Curtain from Cultural Revolt

By SID GOLDBERG

NEW
YORK

Event:
The secret trial of a noted Soviet journalist.

Time: Nov. 15, 1967.

Scene: A grim, bare, Improvised courtroom in a KGB (secret police) prison
"isolator."

Protagonists: The defendant, KGB men, the judge, and a squad of bayonet-bearing
soldiers.

The defendant protests his innocence, and cites the law to prove the trial is
illegal.

The
judge sentences him to three years in a prison camp.

Some
Old Story

It's
a familiar story by now, repeated with numbing frequency throughout Soviet
history in dreary, make-shift courts.

What's
different about this one, however, is that it is fully documented, and rips the
curtain from the ferment taking place in the Ukraine, the largest non-Russian
republic in the Soviet Union.

This
trial was in Kiev, capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR).
The journalist was 30-year-old Vyacheslav Chornovil, arrested for protesting
the arrests of other Ukrainian intellectuals.

Although
the Chornovil trial and others like it have received scant and belated
attention in the Western press, experts rank them in importance with the the
highly publicized Sinyavsky-Daniel trial in Moscow.

Their
significance lies in the flood of light they shed on Soviet abuse of its own
laws, and on the Ukrainians' persisting struggle to maintain their national
identity,

The
Ukrainian trials are documented by letters smuggled to the West, all of them
desperate appeals by condemned Ukrainian intellectuals- including a remarkable
71-page document written by Chornovil himself before his arrest.

Dr.
Zbignicw BrzezinskI, director of Columbia University's Research Institute on
Communist Affairs, calls these documents "remarkable" and "of
monumental importance "

Intellectual
Talk Back

One
of the encouraging developments in the recent trials is that Soviet
intellectuals not only in Russia and the Ukraine, but in many other Soviet republics
are talking back to the prosecutors and to the judges. Soviet youth is no
longer cowed, as it was under the Stalin terror.

Ukrainian
intellectuals, for example, have frequently cited the Soviet Constitution's
Paragraph 126, which guarantees freedom of the press, the right to hold public
demonstrations, and the right to organize.

The
intellectuals Insist that these laws be obeyed; the KGB officials insist they
won't be intimidated by "legalists."

The
new ferment does not exist in a vacuum. There has been great unrest in the
Soviet Union since the lid was taken off when Stalin died. In 1962, food price
rises triggered riots in Moscow itself, while in Novocherkassk on the Don
River, KGB troops battled rioters for several days, killing hundreds.

On
June 10 last year at Chimkent, an industrial center in Soviet Asia, riots were
sparked when police beat to death a taxi driver. The disorders ended only when
tanks and armored cars opened fire against the mobs.

In
the forefront of the Ukrainian ferment are the intellectuals, who seek not only
individual freedom but also a more authentic nationhood for their people. They
cite laws guaranteeing not only freedom of speech and press, but also laws
purported to safeguard the Ukrainian language and culture.

Despite
this, there has been for years a relentless Russification of the Ukraine.

Since
1965, the KGB has arrested several hundred of these Ukrainian intellectuals.
The sentences have ranged from three years in prison to death by firing squad.
There I I Si in u xraine have been at least two executions.

He
Was Shocked

What
he saw there shocked him deeply. "The lawlessness and arbitrariness that
are permitted today as a kind of experiment," he wrote in his letter,
"may tomorrow become a terrible and all-pervading epidemic."

On
April 16 of that year he found himself personally involved. The Lviv
authorities called him to testify as a witness in the secret trial of four
people.

Consequently,
on April 19, Judge Rudyk and prosecutor Antonko of the Lviv regional court
filed charges against Chornovil, accusing him of "disseminating anti-Soviet
propaganda with the purpose of weakening the Soviet regime."

In
his letter, Chornovil wrote, "The court did not have any evidence of such
propaganda and agitation. This was their revenge for my refusal to
testify."

Chornovil
appealed. On May 17 the Ukrainian SSR's Supreme Court overruled the charges
against him as groundless. But the all-powerful KGB, which is a law unto
itself, kept working diligently to catch Chornovil.

Letter
Captures Drama

On
May 22, Chornovil boldly wrote the 71-page letter to the First Secretary of the
Communist Party of Ukraine, Petro Shelest. The letter, flashing with sarcasm
and with the human drama of the trials Chornovil had witnessed, arrayed
powerful arguments against KGB procedures. Ii appealed to Shelest to protect
all the arrested Intellectuals.

Shelest
ignored it,

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