Bad Days for Dissidents

While attention has focused in recent weeks on Soviet harassment of American Embassy employees in Moscow, the Kremlin has been pressing its campaign against domestic dissidents even harder. Last week there were these developments:

> Andrei Amalrik, 37, spent five years in prison and exile for the smuggling abroad of his book, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?--largely because the answer was an emphatic no. Last week Amalrik agreed to leave the Soviet Union and accept a permanent exit visa to Israel, although neither he nor his wife are Jewish. A tough and often eccentric loner, Amalrik yielded after nearly a year of harassment that began after his release. After finding the pressures "intolerable," he decided to accept the Soviet government's longstanding offer to give him a visa to Israel--but nowhere else. His decision, he said, "was not taken freely. I didn't want to emigrate to Israel or anywhere else --ever." Like many others who leave the Soviet Union, ostensibly bound for Israel, Amalrik will probably go directly from Vienna to the U.S., where he has teaching offers from George Washington University and Harvard.

> Andrei Sakharov, 54, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and nuclear physicist, last week made it a point to travel from Moscow to Omsk, 1,200 miles away, to attend the trial of another dissident, Mustafa Djemiliev, 31. The official Soviet news agency Tass claimed that Sakharov and his wife broke into the courtroom and "noisily" demanded seats. Tass went on: "The man, who turned out to be Sakharov, slapped the militia man in the face and then struck a militia major. [Sakharov's wife] joined in the fight and struck the commandant of the courtroom while Sakharov shouted, 'You bastards, here is something for you from Sakharov!' " The couple was taken to a police station. After his return to Moscow late last week, Sakharov confirmed that the courthouse incident had taken place. He said he had been provoked because the proceedings against Djemiliev were "an unbearable mockery" and "savage injustice," adding he hoped officials followed up their threat to prosecute him.

> Andrei Tverdokhlebov, 36, Moscow secretary for Amnesty International, the London-based organization that investigates political repression, was charged with slandering the Soviet state. Last week he was sentenced to five years of exile in a remote region. The sentence was reduced to two years because of the year Tverdokhlebov has already spent in prison awaiting trial. Said Valentin Turchin, chairman of the Moscow chapter of Amnesty: "It was public pressure from the West that made them cut the sentence, and nothing more."

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