Dissidents are being freed, say Soviets

Press, 19 February 1987, Page 8

Dissidents are being freed, say Soviets

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The Soviet Union says 150 dissidents have been freed this month from labour camps, jail or exile and a further 140 cases are under review, including that of the Jewish rebel, losif Begun. A Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov, announcing a decision of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet, said yesterday a psychiatrist, Anatoly Koryagin, would be freed from prison and religious activist, Alexander Ogorodnikov, had been released from a labour camp.

The case of Mr Begun was likely to be resolved “in a positive way,” Mr Gerasimov added.

He had said last week that about 140 political dissenters had been pardoned under a Kremlin decree, after pledging to halt their activities.

Mr Koryagin, aged 48, who charged the Soviet authorities with interning fellow activists in psychiatric hospitals, had been one of the leading dissidents still held. “A decision was taken on Friday to spare him further imprisonment. Today or tomorrow he will be released,” Mr Gerasimov told a news conference.

He said certain formalities had to be completed before Mr Koryagin left the Kiev prison to which he was moved recently from a strict labour camp in Perm in the Ural

mountains. Mr Koryagin’s wife was quoted by the Bukovsky Foundation human rights group in the Netherlands as saying she was delighted, but there was ho news on whether he had been freed yet Mrs Koryagin said the Soviet authorities had been refusing her access to her husband, sentenced in 1981 to seven years in a labour camp followed by five years internal exile.

Mr Ogorodnikov, aged 36, a Russian Orthodox believer, was sentenced to six years hard labour and five years exile for “parasitism” in 1978, but in 1985 was given another three years in a camp near Khabarovsk, in the Soviet Far East, for violation of camp rules. Mr Begun, a 56-year-old mathematician and Hebrew teacher, was sentenced in October, 1983, to seven years in a labour camp and five years internal exile for publishing and distributing literature officially considered anti-Soviet Mr Gerasimov declined to say why Mr Begun’s release had been reported in an interview on United States television last Sunday by a Communist Party Central Committee member, Georgy Arbatov. “I do riot know what has been said by Arbatov on American television,” Mr Gerasimov said.

“Now the case is being considered and most likely it will be resolved in a positive way,” he added.