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France's Communist Party, which is somewhat more Moscow-oriented than Italy's, dispatched a message to the Soviet embassy asking for the release of Shcharansky and Ginzburg and an end to all "repressive acts" against them. The next day the French capital was treated to the surprising spectacle of a mass demonstration on the dissidents' behalf that brought together French Communist officials and Jewish groups, such as the Youths for Zionism. Arms linked, they marched through the street to the rhythmic chant UPI of "KGB equals Gestapo" and "Socialism, yes—Gulag, no."
The ordeal of Shcharansky, who had repeatedly been denied permission to emigrate to Israel, was compelling evidence of Soviet efforts to put down Jewish dissidence and of the persistence of traditional antiSemitism. Together, though, the three trials revealed the Kremlin's increasing alarm over the growth of libertarian movements among the Soviet Union's other ethnic minorities and religious groups. It was hardly a coincidence that all three men tried last week were members of unofficial Helsinki Watch Committees that had been formed to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki agreements. Such groups, which have sprung up in the Baltic states, the Ukraine and Georgia, as well as in Moscow, have served as umbrella organizations, sheltering disparate dissident groups under the aegis of human rights. Shcharansky was simultaneously an advocate of the Jewish struggle for free emigration and of various ethnic groups that seek to reform Soviet society from the inside. (Jews are the only national group that has been allowed to emigrate abroad in substantial numbers, on the ground that their homeland is Israel.) Ginzburg was not only an active Helsinki committee member but also a champion of the Soviet Union's estimated 10,000 political prisoners. Pektus, a longtime Roman Catholic activist in his native Lithuania, represented both the religious and national aspirations of Russian-dominated minorities inside the U.S.S.R.
The setting was more reminiscent of Franz Kafka than of Karl Marx. Shcharansky's trial took place in an unprepossessing three-story courthouse on Moscow's Serebrennicheski Pereulok, a quiet back street about a mile from the Kremlin. Although the trial was billed as "open" by Soviet authorities, gray-uniformed militiamen and civilian volunteer policemen stood behind iron barriers, blocking entry to the courtroom to all but a specially selected few. Pleading vainly to be let through was Shcharansky's mother, who may never see her son again. She wept openly, saying, "Not to be allowed into the courtroom is a mockery of a mother; it is sadistic torture."