Russia: Orderly Public Procedures

The interrogation scene could have been lifted directly from a macabre novel by Abram Tertz. In a grim government building off Pushkin Square, two Russian plainclothesmen pounded away at their prisoner with 2½ hours of questions. Why, they asked, had the young logician from the Academy of Sciences been carrying a poster that read “Respect the Soviet Constitution”? Replied the prisoner: “Is it wrong to demand respect for the constitution?” Next question: “Are you directing your demand at the Soviet rulers?” Answer: “That is your suggestion. If you feel they need this advice, let them have it.”

The exchange was reported last week in a New York Times dispatch from Moscow. The prisoner was Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin, 41, the son of flamboyant Revolutionary Poet Sergei Esenin, who committed suicide in 1925. Himself a poet of prominence, Esenin-Volpin had been arrested as a ringleader of the short-lived demonstration in Pushkin Square that demanded a public trial for Andrei Sinyavsky, generally believed to be the pseudonymous Abram Tertz, and Yuli Daniel, who wrote under the name Nikolai Arzhak (TIME, Dec. 17).

In Nikita Khrushchev’s day, such a public protest might have landed Esenin-Volpin in the Lubyanka. In fact, he was released with nothing more punishing than a lecture on “orderly public procedures” and a warning that he could expect to be denounced in the press. What is more, it seemed that Sinyavsky-Tertz and Daniel-Arzhak would indeed receive a public trial, probably next month in Moscow. That did not mean the pair would get off scot free, but it was progress of a sort.