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Courts of Terror: Soviet Criminal Justice and Jewish Emigration. By Telford Taylor et al. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. xii, 187 pp. $6.95, cloth. $1.95, paper.

This book is the story of a project aimed at obtaining relief for a number of Soviet citizens whose attempts to emigrate to Israel ended instead in Soviet labor camps. Professor Telford Taylor of Columbia University Law School, in collaboration with a number of other specialists in American and Soviet law, prepared briefs on behalf of these prisoners. The briefs were submitted without publicity to the procurator general of the USSR, R. A. Rudenko, who, along with Professor Taylor, had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. When this approach failed, the participants turned to publicity as an alternative approach toward their goal. This book represents part of their attempt to put pressure on the Soviet government to free the prisoners involved and to provide better treatment for other would-be emigrants. The book must be viewed for what it is, a lawyer's brief for the defense, not an objective scholarly work. The high quality of the legal team put together by Professor Taylor is reflected in the excellent writing and argument. Despite the disadvantage of lack of access to the trial records and the inability to interview the prisoners, it proved possible, with the aid of relatives and acquaintances who had already emigrated to Israel, to develop a detailed and convincing reconstruction of the alleged violations of Soviet law. Many of the actions criticized appear to be contrary both to the principles of individual rights traditional in American law and to those guaranteed by published Soviet legislation. However, a major question unavoidably left open is whether the actions of lower level Soviet legal authorities are purely arbitrary with respect to prospective emigrants or whether they are in strict obedience to unpublished rules of Soviet law, such as those described in recent papers by Soviet emigre lawyer Yuri Luryi.