Jewish-born Soviet dissident Pavel Litvinov said today he left the Soviet Union because the authorities threatened to send him to Siberia for a second time. Litvinov left Vienna after a two-day stopover for Rome to meet some friends before going to Amsterdam and afterwards to his new home country, the United States.
“The KGB (secret police) told me they would send me to Siberia again–and this time it might be worse” the 33-year-old physicist told journalists at Vienna’s South Railroad Station. The grandson of Stalin’s former Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, was exiled for four years after his protest against the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Litvinov was detained time and again afterwards and last Dec. 5 KGB officers told him he had either to leave the country or to go back to the prison camps.
“After my residence permission for Moscow expired I saw no legal chance to stay on in the Russian capital. Therefore I asked for emigrant visas for me and my family,” the physicist said. Litvinov said his departure from the Soviet Union was “voluntary,” only in the lexicon of the Kremlin leadership. “They call it ‘voluntary,’ when you are not accompanied by security officers to the plane or train as they did with (Alexander) Solzhenitsyn,” the dissident said.
“But they practically forced me to leave when they hinted they had some more rooms to let in Siberia,” Litvinov stressed. The physicist was accompanied by his wife Maya, his four-year-old daughter Larissa and his 12-year-old stepson Dima from a former marriage of his wife.
Litvinov was granted visas for the United States only one day after he arrived in Vienna Monday. U.S. Embassy sources said they were informed beforehand to give his application all possible consideration. Litvinov has no final plans where to settle in the United States but said he wanted to teach physics at a college or a high school. “I will continue to help my friends I left in Russia.” Litvinov said. “Some of them, like Vladimir Bukov-sky or Pyotr Grigorenko are in real danger for their lives and their health. I chose the United States because they granted immigrant visas to so many of my friends. But my mind is still back in Russia,” Litvinov said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
