Five more Russian defendants, three of them presumed to be Jews, have been sentenced to death by the Soviet Supreme Court, after being found guilty of alleged “economic crimes, ” Moscow dispatches to the French press reported here today. The three presumed Jews were listed as I. Zinger, Y. Kazakevitch and S. Koruptkin.
The five men were convicted of having made “illegal profits” from the sales of office equipment, according to the Sovietskaya Rossiya, which charged that the “several dozen defendants” made more than $2,000,000 in such profiteering during the past five years.
Western observers in Moscow cited by the French press were quoted as saying that the trial was one of the most important recorded by the Soviet press since 1961, when the big Judicial “anti-terror” campaign was launched, and death sentences were handed out. So far, observers here have noted, at least 75 percent of the approximately 100 Russians given the death sentence in the campaign against “economic crimes” have been persons bearing Jewish names, all widely publicized in the controlled Russian press.
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