The wife of Vladimir Markman of Sverdlovsk was detained today by Moscow police and sent back to Sverdlovsk under police escort, according to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Mrs. Markman was in Moscow to employ a lawyer to defend her husband, who is scheduled to go on trial in Sverdlovsk in about two weeks.
Mrs. Markman had sent messages to Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev, Prosecutor-General Roman A. Rudenko and Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny but received no answer. She was picked up by police shortly after announcing she would go on a hunger strike.
A petition signed by 113 people from various cities in the USSR was sent to the Moscow Bar Association protesting the government’s refusal to permit a Moscow lawyer to defend Markman even though six top Moscow attorneys expressed readiness to take his case. The authorities decided that a court-assigned lawyer from Sverdlovsk would defend the 34-year-old engineer who was forced to resign from his job after he applied for a visa to emigrate to Israel. He was arrested April 29 on charges of “systematic dissemination of anti-Soviet literature.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
