Witnesses cross-examined in court testified as follows.

Prokhorov: “I worked with Dronzhevsky. Sometimes he would start unsuitable conversations. He’d say that there are too many bourgeois nowadays and that they are oppressing the workers. One time, during the elections, Dronzhevsky said that he didn’t want to vote, for he had served time and now his record had been cleared. He also said that in Canada, workers live better and own cows, and every worker has an automobile, and that his sister lives in Canada and owns her own restaurant, and if they let him, he would fly to America in the clothes he stood up in. He said that here we work like horses and over there even the homeless live better than we do. After piecework rates were lowered, he used swearwords when talking about the Soviet state.”

Mukhomedzianov: “[. . .] During a meeting on socialist competition, Dronzhevsky said that we workers are badly paid, while in America workers work for six months and then rest for six months. He also said that Soviet elections are just a formality and that the bosses nominate themselves as candidates. At lunch, Dronzhevsky said that it wasn’t lunch but pig fodder.” [. . .]

Ostrovsky: “In February 1958, during job assignments, Dronzhevsky said that there is nothing in the stores, that the government doesn’t care about workers, and that the miners’ management does not send them work clothes on time.” [. . .]

Maliutin: “Dronzhevsky often said that in America workers live better and own two-story houses, that our Soviet leaders travel to foreign countries too often, that they party and drink wine, and because of that workers are paid lower wages and live in worse conditions. He said that Jews should be destroyed—the Germans shot them. He often showed his dissatisfaction and said such things. He said that unemployed people live five times better in America than workers live in the USSR.”

At the trial, the accused testified as follows: “I work at a lumberyard and had a run-in with my manager because they pay me less than they pay other power saw operators. That is why I had a run-in with him, but they twisted it to make it sound as if I’d cursed the Soviet system and had a hostile attitude toward it. In October 1957, when they were allocating jobs, the lumberyard manager asked me how the voting had gone. I said that it had gone fine, because only one candidate had been listed on the ballot, and there hadn’t been anyone to strike out. The investigator wrote up the report on the interrogation inaccurately, but he said that he would put me in solitary confinement if I didn’t sign it. With regard to America, I said to my boss during a break that we are planning to catch up with America. I said that people live better in America, that American homeless people live better than we working folks do here. I said that my sister had gone to Canada with nothing but the clothes she had on, but now she owns her own restaurant. I said that I would have liked to go to America and take a look at how she lives now. [. . .] When I had a face-to-face confrontation with witnesses Prokhorov and Mukhomedzianov, they didn’t say anything on their own; they only confirmed whatever the investigator said. I have nothing against the Soviet system, only against shortcomings in the management of the lumberyard.”