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His father was a Communist Party member in the Ukraine who worked for a time on a party newspaper. A chess enthusiast, Anatoli had a talent for mathematics that led him to study computer programming at the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute. When he applied for a visa to go to Israel, he was refused on the ground that he had been privy to state secrets while working for an oil and gas company that promptly fired him. His fiancee Natalya Stiglitz, who had applied to leave with him, received her visa. They decided to marry before she left for Israel to wait for him. Natalya, who has since adopted a Hebrew name, Avital, is still waiting.
Shcharansky's widespread contacts with foreign journalists proved to be his downfall. Anxious to cut off the dissidents' opportunities of gaining publicity for their cause in the West, the Soviets arrested Toth on a Moscow street last June as a Soviet scientist handed him a paper on a seemingly harmless topic, parapsychology. During four menacing interrogations, Toth was repeatedly asked about his meetings with Shcharansky; he strongly denied receiving any sensitive scientific material from Shcharansky. Before his release from prison, Toth was obliged to sign a protocol, or transcript of his interrogation, whose accuracy he could not verify because it was written in Russian. Last week the protocol was produced in court as evidence that Shcharansky had passed defense secrets to Toth.
One of the prosecution witnesses was Dr. Sanya Lipavsky, a KGB agent provocateur who had apparently worked a classic frame-up on Shcharansky. First, Lipavsky had volunteered his services to CIA agents at the American embassy in Moscow. U.S. intelligence sources have conceded that Lipavsky worked for the agency for nine months, providing information about dissidents. After he was dropped by the Americans, who belatedly suspected his KGB connection, Lipavsky shared a flat with Shcharansky for a short time. He thus provided the link the KGB sought to establish between the hapless Shcharansky and the CIA.
Soviet authorities clearly tried to make an example of Shcharansky, hoping that his fate would serve as a warning to other dissidents who might seek to air their hopes and grievances to foreigners. Despite the KGB'S best efforts, Shcharansky refused to cooperate in his own humiliation. The secret police failed to get a confession from him during 16 months of pretrial imprisonment. He was held incommunicado and presumably was unaware that his case had provoked world wide protest. Even knowing that he risked the death sentence by not yielding to his interrogators, Shcharansky pleaded not guilty on the first day of his trial.
The KGB also failed to break the spirit of the two other dissidents tried last week. Viktoras Pektus, who has served 16 years in prisons and camps for his religious convictions, was arrested after helping to organize a Lithuanian Helsinki Watch Committee last year. He was put on trial in the Lithuanian capital of Vilna on charges of anti-Soviet agitation, homosexuality, corruption of minors and drunkenness. Outraged by the accusations, Pektus lay down in the witness box, closed his eyes and refused to take part in the proceedings. The verdict: ten years' imprisonment and five years of Siberian exile.