Sinyavsky and Daniel were convicted of the offense of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda in a Moscow court for publishing their satirical writings of Soviet life abroad under the pseudonyms Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak.
Sinyavsky and Daniel's works were smuggled out of the Soviet Union as samizdat (illegal self-published writings) to the West and published in foreign editorials under pseudonyms to protect their identities.
The publication of Daniel's This is Moscow Speaking and Sinyavsky's The Trial Begins in the West between 1959 and 1962 caught the attention of the KGB, the main security agency and secret police of the Soviet Union.
[5]: 222–223 In October 1965, Sinyavsky and Daniel's detention became publicly known when Giancarlo Vigorelli, the Secretary General of the European Community of Writers, raised the question at a meeting of the organization in Rome.
[9]: 153–154 Sinyavsky and Daniel's works published abroad were considered to consciously intend to subvert and weaken the Soviet system and constitute anti-Soviet propaganda – the first time that the article was applied to fiction.
[3]: 309 Citing their works, the prosecution claimed Sinyaysky and Daniel had purposefully attempted to make the Soviet state look corrupt and immoral on the world stage.
In 1991, the Supreme Court of the RSFSR rescinded the verdict and sentences against Sinyavsky and Daniel, and ordered the case closed for lack of the elements of a crime.
Although the trial remained closed to the Western press, the defendants' wives smuggled out their own handwritten transcripts, which became some of the earliest samizdat documents to reach the West.
Lifelong communist Louis Aragon published his concerns in a declaration in L'Humanité, and, together with Jean-Paul Sartre, subsequently refused to participate in the Tenth Congress of Soviet Writers.
Then-recent Nobel laureate Mikhail Sholokhov called the two writers "werewolves" and "thugs with a black conscience" who would deserve a significantly more severe punishment "in the memorable twenties".
[22][14][23] In response, Lidia Chukovskaya accused Sholokhov of betraying the centuries-long tradition of protecting fellow literators from unfair persecution and asserted that his "shameful speech will not be forgotten by History".
Among the signatories were Korney Chukovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Viktor Shklovsky, Venyamin Kaverin, Bella Akhmadulina, Bulat Okudzhava and Arseny Tarkovsky.
Stalin bears responsibility not only for the numerous deaths of innocent people, for our lack of preparation for the [Second World] war, for the divergences from the Leninist norms of the party and the state life.
Among them were the academicians Andrei Sakharov, Vitaly Ginzburg, Yakov Zeldovich, Mikhail Leontovich, Igor Tamm, Lev Artsimovich, Pyotr Kapitsa and Ivan Maysky, writers Konstantin Paustovsky and Viktor Nekrasov, composer Dmitri Shostakovich, actors Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Maya Plisetskaya, Oleg Yefremov and others.
[26] Vladimir Semichastny, the Chairman of the KGB, wrote the following in his notes: Beginning in December 1965, speeches were held in Moscow in defense of Sinyavsky and Daniel and in memory of the victims of Stalinism.
The participants demanded a revision of laws and certain articles of the Criminal Code, and the release from custody of distributors of anti-Soviet documents detained by the KGB.
Snegov, Henri, Petrovsky, Balter, Kosterin, Nekrich, Chukovskaya, as well as some scientists and cultural figures who signed a number of dubious documents, played an unseemly role in this matter.
In this regard, the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR and the KGB prosecuted the following: Ginzburg, Galanskov, Dobrovolsky, Lashkova, Radzievsky, Kushev, Khaustov, Bukovsky, Delaunay, and Gabay.
Critics of the trial protested the harsh sentences meted out to Sinyavsky and Daniel and emphasized issues of creative freedom and the historical role of the writer in Russian society.
On Soviet Constitution Day, December 5, 1965, supporters of Sinyavsky and Daniel protested on Moscow's Pushkin Square with the call for a fair and open trial.
The encounter with foreign journalists during the course of the trial also helped foster a type of dissident-journalist relationship which became increasingly important to the emerging dissident movement.