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.
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
