Shcharanskii Convicted of Espionage

Pravda Editorial, Just Desserts. July 15, 1978

This account of Anatolii Shcharanskii’s trial shows the late Brezhnev-era state using espionage and “treason” charges to reframe dissent as a security threat. A prominent rights activist linked to Helsinki monitoring and Jewish emigration advocacy, Shcharanskii was portrayed in the Soviet press as connected to an admitted American spy, allowing prosecutors to graft the language of intelligence work onto what was largely political and civic activity. His harsh sentence signaled both the regime’s determination to deter organized human-rights work and its reliance on courts as instruments of intimidation rather than independent adjudication.

Original Source: Pravda, 15 July 1978, p. 6; Izvestiia, 16 July 1978, p. 4

This past week two trials, the openings of which were reported in the Soviet press, were held in Moscow. The USSR Supreme Court's Military Collegium examined the criminal case of A. N. Filatov, an agent of a foreign intelligence service. The Russian Republic Supreme Court's Criminal Cases Collegium heard the criminal case against A. B. Shcharanskii, who was accused of high treason in the form of espionage and helping a foreign state carry out hostile activity against the USSR, and also of conducting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.

Sentences in both cases were pronounced on July 14. The criminals - traitors to the homeland and spies - received their just deserts. Filatov was sentenced to death by shooting, Shcharanskii to 13 years' deprivation of freedom.

Filatov was recruited by a foreign intelligence service while he was on a business trip abroad. He systematically collected important information constituting USSR military and state secrets and transmitted it to representatives of a foreign state. He continued to spy after returning to the homeland; his bosses supplied their agent with all the espionage equipment, codes and special apparatus he needed to collect and store secret information and transmit it to the intelligence center. Filatov made wide use of all this.

Filatov's "services" were paid rather well. He received large sums in foreign currency, tens of thousands of Soviet rubles and even gold coins.

In examining Filatov's case, the judges considered and studied not only his crimes themselves but also the motives for them, and they made a thorough analysis of the path that led this man to the gravest crime -high treason. During the trial, an increasingly clearer portrait of Filatov was drawn overweening self-confidence, vanity, envy, a propensity for money-grubbing, moral unscrupulousness.

As a rule, the anatomy of any act of treason is similar to that of other such acts. This truth is confirmed by a comparison of the paths that led the two criminals to the defendant's dock. In Shcharanskii's case, we see the same excessively high opinion of himself, the same vanity, the same desire to be in the limelight at any cost and to keep getting more and more. At first this led to an attempt to win popularity among certain circles in the West who are-happy to have any occasion to whip up an anti-Soviet furor. Shcharanskii and his accomplices--he found several--fabricated malicious lampoons that brazenly and shamelessly slandered the Soviet land and our social system. They were not ashamed to present black as white, to give false addresses, and to sign slanderous statements, letters and appeals with the names of people who had not even seen these scribblings.

Anticommunists and opponents of detente, of whom the West has quite a few, gleefully snatched up Shcharanskii's malicious fabrications and made wide use of them in anti-Soviet and anticommunist propaganda. At the same time, they tried to transform the liars and slanderers into "fighters for the rights of oppressed Soviet people."

This is what Shcharanskii was striving for. The point is that he had long since decided to leave the homeland and go to the West. But who in the West needs a "green" specialist with an engineering diploma when thousands and thousands of their own unemployed diploma-bearers are walking the streets? Shcharanskii was not so stupid that he didn't understand this. The West needed a "public figure," and the traitor tried to pass himself off as one to his foreign bosses. It was only natural for the logic of treachery to throw this "public figure" and "fighter for human rights" into the arms of a special service, to turn him into an ordinary spy. Shcharanskii repeated the path taken by every other traitor. The fate of a traitor cannot be otherwise.

Shcharanskii and a Western intelligence service quickly found each other, and they even more quickly found a common language. There followed clandestine meetings and letters of instruction from abroad, which were sent through an embassy's diplomatic pouch, and then the rewards followed. It was established during the court session that Shcharanskii regularly received money from abroad.

Personally and through his accomplices, Shcharanskii collected secret information on the location and departmental affiliation of defense industry enterprises, on the nature of their output, on scientific research dealing with classified subjects, etc. In order to obtain this information, he interrogated many people, using questions he had been sent from abroad. Needless to say, those who answered these questions had no idea how all this information was going to be used.

Taking every precaution and using conspiratorial methods, Shcharanskii regularly transmitted to the West the intelligence information that he gathered, right up to the time of his arrest. Materials in the case make it evident that Shcharanskii regularly assisted an agent of a Western military intelligence service to arrange clandestine meetings with Soviet scientists and specialists who were privy to various kinds of secret information. Shcharanskii created conditions for confidential talks in the course of which this military intelligence agent extracted classified information ...

While the court collegium was hearing Shcharanskii's case, an anti-Soviet furor in this connection was raised in some Western countries. Anticommunists and enemies of detente have used the trial of the failed spy to sow enmity for the Soviet Union and dissension among peoples and countries. They are hypocritically shedding tears over the fate of a criminal who has been justly convicted by a Soviet court. However, those who shed these tears should remember that, in defending a spy, traitor and slanderer, they are smearing themselves with the filth into which Shcharanskii plunged up to his ears.

Source: Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. XXX, No. 28 (1978).