From Nuremberg assistant prosecutor to chief justice of the USSR, the Supreme Court chairman who presided over political trials
In February 1966, RSFSR Supreme Court Chairman Smirnov personally sentenced writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel to seven and five years of hard labour for anti-Soviet agitation — they had published satirical fiction abroad under pseudonyms.
A Leningrad University law graduate who joined the procuracy in 1934, he served as assistant to chief Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko at Nuremberg (presenting the case for Nazi crimes against civilians across occupied Europe) and as deputy prosecutor at the Tokyo tribunal, establishing Japanese aggression at Lake Khasan and Khalkhin Gol. As chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Court he personally presided over the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial (1966), sentencing two writers to hard labour for publishing satirical works abroad, and in 1972 he became chairman of the USSR Supreme Court, leading the Soviet judiciary through twelve years of the Brezhnev era. He embodied the duality of the Soviet legal establishment: a jurist who prosecuted fascism at international tribunals while enforcing political conformity at home.
Career Timeline
- 1934–1941Senior investigator, Leningrad/Murmansk procuracy; military investigator, Leningrad Front
- 1942–1946Investigator for especially important cases, USSR Procuracy; assistant to chief prosecutor at Nuremberg
- 1946–1948Deputy prosecutor from USSR, Tokyo International Military Tribunal
- 1949State prosecutor, Khabarovsk trial (Japanese biological warfare)
- 1957–1962Deputy Chairman, USSR Supreme Court
- 1962–1972Chairman, RSFSR Supreme Court
- 1972–1984Chairman, USSR Supreme Court
- 1976–1986Member, CPSU Central Committee
The Sinyavsky–Daniel Trial (February 1966)
In September 1965, writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested. The KGB had discovered that Sinyavsky (as Abram Tertz) and Daniel (as Nikolai Arzhak) had been publishing satirical fiction in the West. The trial, with RSFSR Supreme Court Chairman Lev Smirnov presiding, opened in Moscow on 10 February 1966 and concluded on 14 February. Smirnov convicted both writers under Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code (anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda), sentencing Sinyavsky to seven years and Daniel to five in a strict-regime labour camp.
The trial marked the first time in Soviet history that writers were convicted solely for works of fiction. Sinyavsky pleaded not guilty, an exceedingly rare act in a Soviet political trial. The shock was immediate: the roughly sixty Soviet writers and intellectuals who attended the proceedings were appalled by Smirnov's severity, and Aleksandr Ginzburg compiled and distributed a samizdat white paper of the trial transcript, for which he was later arrested. Historian Fred Coleman called the trial "the birth of the modern Soviet dissident movement."
By presiding over this trial, Smirnov performed the symbolic act by which the post-Thaw Soviet state drew a line against 'ideological coexistence'. That the same jurist who had prosecuted fascism at Nuremberg two decades earlier now presided over the criminalisation of literary creativity distills the arc of the postwar Soviet legal establishment.