Soviet Underground Article Suggests That Kochubievsky Was Victim of Frame Up

An article in an underground publication of Soviet intellectuals suggests that an official frame up was the basis of the imprisonment of Boris Kochubievsky, the 33-year-old Kiev Jewish engineer now serving a three-year term in a labor camp on charges of slandering the Soviet society and Government, according to a report today in the Washington Post. Its United Nations correspondent Robert H. Estabrook cited material assembled by the Academic Committee on Soviet Jewry which had appealed to Soviet Communist Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev to allow the engineer and his wife to go to Israel before news became known in New York of the engineer’s trial and conviction. He was arrested last December after he and his non-Jewish wife had been promised permits to go to Israel. He was sentenced last May 26.

The indication that a Government provocateur trapped the Jewish engineer appeared in Khronika, the underground publication, the Post correspondent reported. Some of the publication’s sponsors are among the 55 persons who signed a petition to the United Nations last May about human rights violations in the Soviet Union which specifically mentioned the engineer’s trial.

The reported entrapment occurred at a memorial ceremony last September at Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev where the Nazis killed 100,000 Jews. The official speakers did not mention the fact that virtually all the victims of the Babi Yar massacre were Jews but did denounce Israel. According to the underground publication, the engineer was approached by an acquaintance who reported overhearing a conversation in which a woman remarked that the Nazis had killed 100,000 Jews and a man nearby had replied “not enough.”

The angered engineer was said to have told his acquaintance that Russians would naturally talk in that way when official speeches denounced Israeli “aggression” and ignored the fact that most of the Babi Yar victims had been Jews. In an argument with the purported provocateur, according to the Khronika report, the engineer asserted that the Jews had been killed for being Jews.

According to Mr. Estabrook, Mr. Kochubievsky’s troubles with the Government began in June, 1967 when he arose at a meeting at the radio factory where he worked to defend Israel which had been charged with “aggression” by a lecturer. Censured by his union, he quit his job in May, 1968 and applied to go to Israel with his new wife. Permits were initially refused on grounds that the Soviet Union had no diplomatic relations with Israel and that his wife would be leaving her “old parents,” the Post reported. On Nov. 28, the engineer was informed that exit permits for him and his wife had been approved but on the same day their apartment was searched and on Dec. 7, he was arrested on charges of slandering the Soviet State.

The Khronika article said that one of the principal witnesses at Mr. Kochubievsky’s trial was the unnamed person who approached him at the Babi Yar ceremony and provoked the argument. The publication also reported that an assistant dean at a teachers college had sought to persuade the engineer’s wife to divorce him, telling her that she had “a girl friend who is married to a Jew and she says all Jews smell bad. You are in love with him, you don’t mind but once you get” to Israel, “the whole country smells bad,” she reportedly said.

The engineer’s remark at the Babi Yar service that “here lies a part of the Jewish people” was cited by the prosecutor at his trial as “Zionist propaganda,” The trial judge reprimanded the engineer’s pregnant wife for preferring her husband to membership in the Communist Youth organization from which she had been expelled for “Zionism.” That information, Mr. Estabrook reported, was based on documents provided to the Academic Committee, some of which were based on eyewitness accounts of the trial. Twelve Kiev residents wrote to the prosecuting attorney, complaining they had been excluded from the nominally open trial on instructions of the Soviet secret police. The engineer’s brother also was barred from attending, the Post reported.