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By Root 1471 0

1966, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel also went on trial. Both were well-known writers, both had published their work abroad, and both were found guilty, under the terms of Article 70, of “Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda.” Sinyavsky received seven years of hard labor, Daniel received five.20 This was the first time anyone had been put on trial not just for vagrancy, but because of the actual content of their literary work. A month later, in significantly greater secrecy, more than two dozen Ukrainian intellectuals went on trial in Kiev. One was accused, among other things, of owning a copy of a poem by the nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, after whom streets are named in Moscow and Kiev. Because the poem had been printed without the author’s name, Soviet “experts” classified it as an anti-Soviet poem by an unknown author.21

In a pattern that would soon become familiar, these trials spawned other trials, as other outraged intellectuals began to use the language of the Soviet legal system and the Soviet constitution to criticize the Soviet judiciary and the Soviet police. The case of Sinyavsky and Daniel, for example, made a great impression on another young Muscovite, Aleksandr Ginzburg, already active in “unofficial” cultural circles. He compiled a transcript of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, the “White Book,” which he distributed around Moscow. He and three alleged collaborators were arrested soon afterward. 22

At about the same time, the Kiev trials made a great impression on a young Ukrainian lawyer, Vyacheslav Chornovil. He compiled a dossier on the Ukrainian judicial system, pointing out its internal contradictions and establishing the illegality and absurdity of the Ukrainian arrests. 23 Afterward, he was quickly arrested.24 In this manner, an intellectual and cultural movement, begun by writers and poets, became a human rights movement.

To put the Soviet human rights movement in context, it is important to note that Soviet dissidents never started a mass organization, as did their Polish counterparts, and they cannot receive full credit for bringing down the Soviet regime: the arms race, the war in Afghanistan, and the economic disaster wrought by Soviet central planning must receive equal credit. Nor did they ever manage more than a handful of public demonstrations. One of the most famous—staged on August 25, 1968, to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia—involved only seven people. At noon, the seven gathered in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square, and unrolled Czech flags and banners marked with slogans: “Long live free and independent Czechoslovakia,” “Hands off Czechoslovakia, for your freedom and ours.” Within minutes, a whistle blew and plainclothes KGB rushed at the demonstrators, whom they seem to have been expecting, shouting, “They’re all Jews!” and “Beat the anti-Sovietists!” They tore down the banners, beat up the demonstrators, and took all but one—she was with her three-month-old son—straight to prison. 25

But small though they were, these efforts caused a great deal of trouble for the Soviet leadership, particularly given its continued commitment to spreading world revolution and its consequent, obsessive concern about the USSR’s international image. In Stalin’s era, repression on a massive scale could be kept secret even from a visiting American Vice President. In the 1960s and 1970s, news of a single arrest could travel around the world overnight.

In part, this was thanks to improvements in mass communication, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and television. In part, it was also because Soviet citizens found new ways to transmit news as well. For 1966 also marked another milestone: the birth of the term samizdat. An acronym which deliberately echoed the term Gosizdat, or “State Publishing House,” samizdat literally means “self-publishing house,” and figuratively refers to the underground press. The concept was not new. In Russia, samizdat was nearly as old as the written word. Pushkin himself had privately distributed manuscripts of his more