Was Shcharansky a spy? (Anatoly Shcharansky) (Beat the Devil) (column)

Nation, The, March, 1986 by Cockburn, Alexander

Was Schcharansky a Spy?

The suffocating piety with which the Schcharansky affair has been treated in the press was at least temporarily disturbed by an interesting Valentine's Day column by Lars-Erik Nelson, Washington bureau chief of the New York Daily News. Now that Anatoly Sccharansky has been released, Nelson wrote, we can "dry our eyes" and concede that "by some standards of evidence--certainly by Soviet standards--he was guilty" of spying for the United States, for which activity he got a fifteen-year sentence in 1978.

As one of the most energetic "refuseniks" of the mid-1970s, the English-speaking Shcharansky had particularly close contact with Robert Toth, at that time Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Eager to demonstrate that...

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