Chastising a Scion

In the wake of labor-camp sentences meted out to four youthful critics of the Soviet regime two weeks ago, the Kremlin last week cracked down on the man who had done the most to dramatize the plight of the dissenting quar tet to the outside world. The Soviet government fired Pavel Litvinov, 30, a physicist, from his post as a lecturer at the Moscow Institute of Precision Chemical Technology. It charged that his absence from the institute during the trial was "an infringement of work discipline."

The burly, leather-jacketed Litvinov was a conspicuous figure during the closed-door trial. Not allowed inside the courtroom, he talked outside with foreign correspondents and signed a statement branding the proceeding a "wild mockery." He has managed to avoid arrest so far only because he is the grandson of the late Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, and thus the scion of an old Bolshevik family. "I am definitely not a revolutionary, but neither am I an organization man," he says. "I must do what my heart tells me." Still uncowed after his dismissal, Litvinov announced that he would fight to get his job back by appealing his case to the local trade-union council.

The Kremlin also moved to stanch the flow abroad of increasingly defiant statements from the "underground" set of young intellectuals. Officials of the Soviet Foreign Ministry's press section telephoned Western correspondents to warn them against attending a news conference planned by the mother of Aleksandr Ginzburg and the wife of Yuri Galanskov, two of the four sentenced intellectuals. Both men were sent to labor camps after the trial, and the two women had invited the newsmen to hear details of what had gone on inside the courtroom.

The head of the press section, Leonid Zamyatin, warned newsmen that "serious measures" would be taken against anyone who went to talk with the two women. Four American and three Swedish journalists, who had not been delivered the official warning but heard it secondhand from their colleagues, decided to go anyway. At the door, they found a phalanx of Soviet security men, who first took their pictures, then turned them away. Inside, the two women waited in their secondfloor apartment in vain.

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