Bold Outcry

Public outcry is as uncommon in Russia as borsch without sour cream, but something very much like it has been triggered by last month's sentencing of four young intellectuals to terms in labor camps. Soviet writers, scientists and university teachers, who once quaked in fear of the Kremlin's displeasure, have drawn up petitions, loudly condemned the sentences and fired off a spate of letters not only to Russia's newspapers but to the Soviet Supreme Court, the Politburo and several other government agencies. In an unusually bold campaign, they have accused the Russian press and government of deceiving the people about the facts of the case and demanded a new trial for Yuri Galanskov, 29, Aleksandr Ginzburg, 31, Aleksei Dobrovolsky, 29, and Vera Lashkova, 21, who were all convicted of anti-Soviet agitation.

Libel Suit. One protest, signed by 52 Soviet intellectuals, decried the fact that no impartial observers had been allowed into the Moscow courtroom. "A legally conducted and organized court," they said, "need not fear the glare of publicity, but should actually welcome it." Two brothers, Biologist Yuri Vakhtin and Writer Boris Vakhtin, denounced the trial's "abnormal atmosphere" and "court violations." Noting that their father had been killed in a Stalinist purge in the 1930s, they said that they could not accept a return to that "terrible time of lawlessness and bestiality." Evgeny Kushev, one of those who took the stand at the trial, complained in a letter about Komsomolskaya Pravda's distortions of his testimony. Writer Ginzburg's mother has threatened a libel suit against that newspaper for describing her son as a "paid agent" of a foreign organization--a charge never made at the trial.

Soviet writers and intellectuals have been further upset by the long-rumored ill treatment of writers in the Ukraine, where the party does things much more quietly. In a manuscript that reached the Western press last week, Ukrainian Television Newsman Vyacheslav Chornovil, who is now in a Soviet labor camp, detailed the repressive methods of the Ukrainian secret police, who have hustled at least 15 top intellectuals off to labor camps. The police invaded their homes without search warrants, confiscated their manuscripts, and, after endless interrogations about supposed anti-Soviet writings, had them convicted at secret trials.

Broken Promise. Soviet writers also had another cause for rage. Last week, at the last possible moment, the Kremlin vetoed the printing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's long-suppressed novel Cancer Ward. The literary community has long regarded the Kremlin's promise to publish the novel in the December issue of the journal Novy Mir as a test of the regime's avowed good intentions. But Solzhenitsyn, author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, last summer denounced censorship in a widely circulated letter and recently was attacked by the editor of Pravda as a "psychologically unbalanced person, a schizophrenic."

Novy Mir's publication was long delayed, and when it finally came out last week, Cancer Ward--a record of life in a Central Asian cancer hospital--was missing. As a result of the intellectuals' disappointment at its absence, a number of smuggled works by liberal authors are likely to appear soon in the West, including Cancer Ward.

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