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Among those at the barricades were a number of Western journalists and diplomats, including Second Secretary Raymond F. Smith, who was sent by the U.S. embassy as an observer but was refused admission. Also gathered outside were about 50 activists and other supporters of Shcharansky. One was an old friend, Irina Orlov, wife of Physicist Yuri Orlov, who was sentenced to twelve years last May for having founded the first Helsinki Watch Committee. Two of the Soviet Union's best-known "refuseniks," who have been denied visas to Israel, came to show their sympathy for Shcharansky. They were Alexander Lerner, the former head of a cybernetics institute, and Veniamin Levich, one of the world's leading physical chemists. Both men were fired from their posts for seeking to emigrate to Israel. Near by stood Yelena Bonner Sakharov, one of the few members of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Committee who have not been arrested or deported, and her husband Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel-prizewinning physicist and human rights advocate.
A guilty verdict has been a foregone conclusion since March 1977, when the government newspaper Izvestiya—just before Shcharansky's arrest—accused him of spying for the CIA. According to Shcharansky's brother Leonid, who was admitted to the courtroom, the defendant's first action was to dismiss the lawyer who had been assigned to him by the KGB in place of the attorney he had requested and been denied. Conducting his own defense, Shcharansky made a one-hour opening statement to the presiding judge and two lay assessors who constituted a jury. During the five-day trial, his brother later reported, Shcharansky was frequently interrupted by the judge, prohibited from calling defense witnesses and forbidden to question government witnesses.
The Soviets clearly attached considerable importance to the trial; twice a day a court official held unprecedented press conferences for Western correspondents. According to the briefings, Shcharansky was charged with turning over to the West "classified data on the location, staffing and role of a large number of defense-industry installations." Specifically, he was accused of providing scientific secrets to a Western military-service agent masquerading as a journalist.
The alleged agent was Robert Toth, 49, the Los Angeles Times's bureau chief in Moscow between 1974 and 1977 and now a member of the newspaper's Washington bureau. Like many other American correspondents in the Soviet Union,
Toth, whose knowledge of Russian is limited, had several times used Shcharansky to contact Jewish refuseniks—many of whom have been barred from emigration because they are scientists. Shcharansky, whose English is excellent, acted as an unofficial public relations man for his fellow Jewish activists, as well as for members of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Committee, which he had helped found.
At the time Shcharansky seemed an improbable candidate for the his toric role he was destined to play.