Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial

SINYAVSKY-DANIEL TRIAL

In September 1965, Soviet authorities arrested a well-known literary critic, Andrei Sinyavsky, and a relatively obscure translator, Yuly Daniel, and charged them with slandering the Soviet system in works published abroad pseudonymously. The works in question were often satirical but in no sense anti-Soviet; in his essay On Socialist Realism, for example, Sinyavsky (or "Abram Tertz") advocated nothing more radical than a return to the adventurous style of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Nonetheless, following a January 1966 press campaign of vicious denunciations, the pair was convicted at a show trial in February. Sinyavsky received seven years, and Daniel five, in a strict-regime labor camp.

Conservative elements in the Leonid Brezhnev–Alexei Kosygin regime, determined to crack down on the intellectual experimentation of the Nikita Khrushchev years, presumably intended the affair as the signal of a stricter cultural line and as a warning to intellectuals to keep quiet. But the signal was ambiguous—the conservatives were not yet firmly in control—and the warning ineffectual. Sinyavsky and Daniel refused to play their assigned roles, pleading not guilty and defending themselves in court vigorously. A public Moscow protest against the arrests in December 1965 was followed by a petition campaign, an increase in open protest and samizdat, and, ultimately, the appearance of the Chronicle of Current Events in April 1968. In fact, the Sinyavsky-Daniel case is widely viewed as a

spark that galvanized the dissident movement by raising the specter of a return to Stalinism and by convincing many intellectuals that it was futile to work within the system.

See also: dissident movement; mayakovsky, vladimir vladimirovich; show trials; thaw, the

bibliography

Hayward, Max, ed. and tr. (1967). On Trial: The Soviet State versus "Abram Tertz" and "Nikolai Arzhak," revised and enlarged edition. New York and Evanston, IL: Harper & Row.

Jonathan D. Wallace