Eight Leningrad Jews arrested last June for allegedly attempting to hijack a Soviet airliner will be subjected to a “show trial” intended to intimidate other Jews from seeking emigration and an end to cultural repression in the USSR, according to documents recently smuggled out of the Soviet Union. The documents were released here today by the Institute of Jewish Affairs, a research organization associated with the World Jewish Congress. According to Dr. Stephen J. Roth, director of the institute and Jack Miller, its senior research officer, the documents were received from travellers returning from the Soviet Union. They indicate that the charges against the Leningrad eight are completely false and based on evidence manufactured by the KGB, the Soviet secret police, Dr. Roth said. The documents also include copies of “Exodus,” an underground publication of the Jewish protest movement in Russia. According to published reports, the hijack trial will open on Nov, 20. The defendants, two of them women, were arrested at Smolny Airport in Leningrad on June 15. AN are between 21 and 31 years of age.
The released documents contain biographical data on them but do not mention non-Jews arrested at the airport at the same time. The documents say that the arrests occurred at 8 a.m., yet less than an hour later on the same day, KGB agents had visited some 40 Jews in their homes, offices and at resorts as far away as Odessa and carried out searches which yielded articles on Jewish or Israeli subjects. The eight arrested Jews turned out to be active members of the Jewish protest movement. According to Dr. Roth, the documents make it clear that they were the targets of an official plot. One copy of “Exodus” contained in a letter from Victor Boguslavsky to R.A. Rudenko, the Soviet prosecuting attorney, charging a conspiracy against the Leningrad Jews and demanding their immediate release. Another letter in “Exodus” signed by Gregory Vertlib and Hillel Shure, compared the forthcoming Leningrad trial with the Bellis ritual murder trial of the Czarist era, the Dreyfus trial in France and the doctors’ plot of the Stalin era.
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