The “Guardian” reported here today that the Russian-Jewish poet, Josef Brodsky, who was sentenced last March to five years’ hard labor by a Leningrad court on the charge of being “a parasite, ” has been released.
The harsh sentence evoked strong protests on the part of Soviet intellectuals and writers who claimed that Brodsky had, in reality, been punished for “anti-Soviet” attitudes. Copies of the appeal voiced by the writers on behalf of the young poet were circulated throughout the Soviet Union.
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