Shcharansky may be freed in spy-swap

Press, 17 July 1978, Page 9

Shcharansky may be freed in spy-swap

NZPA Bonn i American officials have said the United States is considering a possible exchange involving the jailed Soviet dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky and two Soviet United Nations employees who face spy charges in |New Jersey. A Moscow Court on Fri- ] day sentenced Mr Shchairansky, who is 30, to three years in prison and 10 in a I labour camp on charges of] betraying Soviet military I and scientific secrets' to the] West. Mr Shcharansky de-; nietf the charges. Reporters in Bonn werb told that negotiations for a swap were “in a delicate] stage” and that no details 1 could be divulged now. The officials confirmed I that the United States had' been in contact with the ' Russians. Soviet officials in Geneva, had told newsmen that Russia was interested in secur-1 Tng the release of twoli [ United Nations employees of Soviet nationality who are being held in New Jersey on ; spying charges. The Soviet officials said . that the conviction and sen- , tence to death by a . Soviet i

I Court of a confessed spy, Anatoly Filatov, was meant as a signal to the United States. In his condemnation; of present Soviet dissident trials, President Carter pointedly did not mention ] the Filatov trial. • One Soviet diplomat said ] that this was the kind of case- that used to be handled, quietly between the two! countries, but that the United States had changed : • the ground rules ./ith the arrest of the two Soviet! United Nations employees. United States officials said! that one possible exchange ; would be a complex set of negotiations involving j Shcharansky, Alexander Gin- ; zburg, and' perhaps several ! alleged American agents, being held somewhere in | i eastern European jails. i The American officials i said the cases of these other!' American agents have not|i been publicised by either I side. it

The Soviet labour camps where dissenters serve prison terms are w’orse now than in the Stalin era, the Soviet Nobel prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has said in a letter.

'I Solzhenitsyn, himself a former political prisoner, commented on the trials of Shcharansky and Ginzburg lin a letter to the Rome magazine, “Prospettive nel Mondo.” “Unfortunately the Gulag Archipelago still exists and continues to swallow victims as in the past,” wrote Soljzhenitsyn, who has been extiled from the Soviet Union and now' lives in the United States. ; “The special camps in which those convicted will certainly be imprisoned are worse than in the Stalin period. j “I found this out on the [basis of testimony from former prisoners and their relatives. : “Living conditions are (intolerable: suffice to say that food is less than half of what an adult needs to live. Work is above the forces of |a human being, and that kind of camp is a continuous torture.

“Believe me, I can state this before God: Even though the number of prisoners in special camps is lower today compared with the past, their treatment is much more cruel.”