Appeal Hearings for Leningrad 11 Confirmed; Public Outcry Seen As Factor in Move

Western news sources today confirmed a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report received late yesterday that appeal hearings on the Leningrad sentences will be held tomorrow. The 11 defendants, two of them under sentence of death, are to appear before the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation at ten a.m. Wednesday, sources in Moscow said. The swift move for a hearing was unexpected inasmuch as the normal time for setting an appeal date in the Soviet Union is six to eight weeks after trial. The Leningrad trial ended last Tuesday and sentences were pronounced on Thursday. The news sources said that defense counsel for the accused were given no reason for the quick action. Sources here said that the move, which could result in clemency, was prompted by the outpouring of world protest against the harsh nature of the sentences. But they also speculated that it might boomerang against the defendants whose lawyers now have little time to prepare their appeal. Arnold Fleishmann, a Baltimore attorney who visited Leningrad a month ago, discounted this idea. He told the JTA that the court-appointed defense lawyers were simply “brokers” trying to get the sentences reduced and their appeal briefs would contain the same arguments already offered in court. Lawrence Speiser, director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union who also visited Leningrad recently and met with the families of the accused, thought the Soviet authorities might be responding to protests by various government heads, world religious leaders and others.

Speiser noted, in a telephone interview with the JTA that until the sentences were pronounced scant attention was paid the Leningrad trial, except in Jewish circles. He said that Soviet leaders appeared to have been taken aback by the sudden, arousal of world opinion out added that it remained to be seen whether clemency will be the result. Tass, the Soviet news agency, defended the severe sentences in a commentary published yesterday. It said they were “in the spirit” of the anti-hijacking convention endorsed Dec. 16 by the International Civil Aviation Organization at The Hague. The 11 Leningrad defendants, nine of them Jews, were convicted of plotting to hijack a Soviet airliner at Leningrad last June 15. Tass observed that The Hague convention endorsed by 77 nations, stressed that states that were parties to It “undertake to punish severely such crimes as hijacking of planes.” Tass also condemned what it called an “unbridled anti-Soviet campaign” around the world following the trial. The Tass comment was published before word came out that the appeal hearing will be held tomorrow. Commenting today on the quick appeal hearing, Rabbi Arthur Schneier, of the Park East Synagogue in New York who is president of the Appeal To Conscience Foundation, told the JTA that “it was a most unusual step to have the clemency board convene.”

Rabbi Schneier said “this does not mean there will necessarily be clemency,” but added that “there is no question that public outcry around the world is and has been effective and the Soviets are certainly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the outcry. We therefore have the right to assume that the clemency appeal may have been caused by this public outcry.” Speiser told the JTA that he got the impression during his visit to Russia that Soviet officials are sensitive to accusations of anti-Semitism. Fleishmann indicated that he had received the same impression from his conversation with a Soviet deputy attorney general in Leningrad four weeks ago, just before the trial began. He said the official, named Alexandrov, who is an aide of chief Soviet prosecutor R. Rudenko, assured him that “due process will follow this case.” Some observers here noted that Soviet authorities could not be unaware of the irony in Moscow’s condemnation of the death sentences meted out by the Franco regime in Spain to six Basque separatists after a Leningrad court condemned two Soviet Jews. The death sentences were pronounced on Mark Dymshitz, alleged ring-leader of the hijack plot, and Edvard Kuznetzov. According to reports from Moscow today, Kuznetzov, for unknown reasons, refused to participate in the clemency appeal but was entered nevertheless by the prosecution. The other defendants have received prison terms of four-15 years.