Dissident flies to West for medical treatment

Press, 20 December 1986, Page 13

Dissident flies to West for medical treatment

NZPA-Reuter London Soviet poetess and dissident, Irina Ratushinskaya, will see British doctors today after Soviet authorities allowed her to fly to the West with her husband to seek medical treatment for heart trouble and bronchitis.

Miss Ratushinskaya, aged 32, told journalists at Heathrow airport; London: “I am very pleased. This is the first land on which we are both really free... I am very thankful for all people of good will from different countries who helped me get out of prison. “But I remember my Russian friends who must

stay in prison and who will meet this Christmas in prison without meals and in the cold.” .

Miss Ratushinskaya was sentenced in April, 1983 to seven years in a labour camp and five years of internal exile for “antiSoviet agitation and propaganda.” She was released in October.

A British pastor who has campaigned for Miss Ratushinskaya’s release, the Rev. Richard Rogers, said she would have check-ups at a London teaching hospital. “The surgeons there have offered her free treatment,” he said. When she was freed on October 9, Miss Ratushin-

skaya said she wanted to seek medical treatment in the West for bronchitis and heart problems contracted while in the labour camp. Her husband, Igor Gerashchenko, looking tired and under strain, appealed through ain interpreter for the release of political prisoners around the world.

Mr Rogers said Miss Ratushinskaya was weak but she had put back on some of the weight she lost in prison. “I am delighted that she is free,” said the pastor, who spent 90 days in a cage eating prison rations this year to protest against her detention.