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The other victim of Soviet justice was Alexander Ginzburg, 41, a veteran hu man rights activist who has already spent seven years in the Gulag. He pleaded not guilty to charges of anti-Soviet propaganda in a courtroom in Kaluga, 100 miles southwest of Moscow. When the judge asked the routine question, "What is your nationality?" Ginzburg gave the insolent reply, "Zeka" (prisoner). Like Shcharansky, he had also resisted pressure to confess, but 17 months of pretrial isolation and interrogation had taken a fearful toll.
His wife Irina, who was admitted to the courtroom, was appalled to see that his dark hair had turned completely gray and he looked 60. Many of his friends believe he is unlikely to survive the eight-year term of hard labor imposed last week, following the terms of two and five years he has already served for producing an un official poetry magazine and an under ground book on the 1966 trial of Dissident Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.
The principal charge against Ginzburg this time was that he had administered a fund set up by the exiled Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn to help political prisoners and their families. Since 1974 Ginzburg has distributed a sum equivalent to $360,000, of which $76,000 was contributed by individuals inside Russia.
Last week, Ginzburg, who is known to be a retiring, compassionate and pious man,* was charged with using the Solzhenitsyn fund to pay for "sex orgies," finance his drinking and purchase "stolen icons." He was also accused of using the fund to finance "the hostile activities of criminal elements." His calm answer in his final statement to the court: "I do not consider myself guilty and I am not asking for leniency." Before being taken away, he declared: "I am seizing this last opportunity to express my feeling of solidarity and my regard for my friend Anatoli Shcharansky."
When Ginzburg's sentence was announced, a crowd of Russians who were hostile to the dissidents shouted, "Not long enough!" and "Shoot them all!" But when the van carrying him to prison departed from the courthouse, his supporters pelted the vehicle with flowers, crying, "Alec! Alec!"
Upon hearing the verdict, Sakharov commented, "It has nothing to do with justice. We consider the sentence very cruel—a threat to his life." At a hastily organized press conference for Western journalists in his tiny Moscow apartment, the revered father figure of the human rights movement declared that the harsh sentence meted out to Ginzburg was an "act of vengeance" for his connection with Solzhenitsyn. The Shcharansky trial, he said, had been an attempt to stir up anti-Semitic feelings within the country. "The Soviet authorities are trying to break up the movement for Jewish emigration," he warned. "They are threatening the Jews."