A number of leading Soviet writers and intellectuals made an unprecedented protest against the arrest and sentencing of a young writer, Josef Brodsky, of Leningrad, it was reported here today.
According to reports received from Moscow, Brodsky’s home was searched by the political police in 1962 because of charges he had been involved with two men arrested on charges of exerting “harmful influence on young people to whom they preached “yoga philosophy and anarcho-individualism.” Brodsky, 24, was not arrested.
However, last November, the evening paper, Vercherny Leningrad, attacked Brodsky as a “dissolute and cynical parasite. ” Last February, Brodsky returned to Leningrad from a Moscow psychiatric clinic where he was treated for reactions to the persecution. He was then “arrested in the street.”
The reports indicated he was tried on trumped-up charges and sentenced to five years’ exile at forced labor. He was sent with convicted thieves and murderers to a state farm in the Archangel province in the far north. During the trial such noted persons as poet Samuel Marshak, author Korney Chukovsky and composer Dimitri Shostakovich sent telegrams to the court to plead for Brodsky, asking that “young and still developing talent” should be saved from “undeserved and slanderous accusations.”
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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.
