Behind the Headlines Soviet Anti-Semitism is Official

Yevgead Yevtushenko, Soviet post-playwright. told "a terrible lie" when he asserted there is no official anti-Semitism in he Soviet Union, says Dr. Yuri Glazov. Philologist and Odontologist who recently emigrated to New York from Moscow Via Rome. "Yevtushenko knows he is not speaking the truth." Glazov said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in Washington. "He contradicts what he himself said at Baki Yar ten years ago. "Yevtushenko deplored anti-Semitism in a celebrated poem after visiting the site of the massacre of Jews and others outside of Kiev by the Nazis in World War II. Recently. however, in a widely publicized interview in Playboy Magazine, he said anti-Semitism doesn’t officially exists in the Soviet Union.

Glazov was interviewed immediately after he had participated last Sunday in a panel discussion on the "Democratic Movement in the USSR" at George Washington University before an audience of about 1000, mostly academidictians in the Washington area. With him on the panel were Alexander Esenia-Volpin, Mathematician and sociologist, and Natalia Belinkov, edition of Novyj Kolokol 1972, a literary-political journal. They also are recent arrivals from the Soviet Union.

Glazov is Jewish, Esenia-Volpin’s mother is Jewish, and Mrs. Bellokova’s husband was Jewish, according to Professor Helen Yacobson, at the GWU facility who is a member of the Greater Washington Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East-European Languages which sponsored the gathering. Although the discussion lasted more than two hours, and reference was made by the panelists to Soviet Jewry except for a fleeting mention by Glazov that it was among several dissident movements in the USSR.

Nor was there any mention about reports received here that Pytor Yakir, a leading dissident arrested last June, has been providing Soviet authorities with information about former association. According to these reports, a score or more of dissidents have been questioned by the KGB (secret police) on the basic of Yakir’s information. The consequences are not yet clear.

JEWS NOT ANTI-SOVIET GOVERNMENT

An extremely heavy drinker, Yakir is said to be an alcoholic and began cooperating with the authorities after being deprived of alcohol in prison and forced into hospitals twice. Yakir. 49, is the only child of the famous Soviet Jewish General Youn E. Yakir, who was shot on June II, 1937, on Stalin’s order during the purge of Jews in that era. The young Yakir and his mother were exiled to Siberia where they remained 17 years before the late Premier Khrushchev rehabilitated them and allowed their return to Moscow.

Several local knowledgeable leaders of Soviet Jewish emigration said privately to JTA that they refrained from questioning the panel on the Soviet Jewish situation because they Salt their questioning might be interpreted as tying the Jewish appeals for emigration to Israel with the dissident political movement. "Jews are not anti- Soviet government; all they want is to get out," one local sympathizer told JTA.

Two-thirds of the Russian dissidents are "of Jewish origin" and "Jew liberation" has increased in the last two years, Glazov said. "Everyone with Jewish blood–half-Jews, quarter-Jew–is the object of that treatment." The citation of the Jew "is now underside." Glazov added. "They are not allowed to leave or live. Not all Jews are eager to leave immediately although they know they will face that crucial point. I don’t know any Jew who is not thinking of leaving. Anti-Semitic policy is on the state level. Jews are breaking their brains on what to do."

Glazov, who is 42 and speaks English well, left Moscow with his half-Jewish wife and their children last April with visas to go to Israel, he told JTA. Following their arrival in Rome, Glazov said. "I thanked the Jewish Agency" and after three months in Italy he and his family left for the United States. The scholar said he and his family are "under the care of the International Rescue Committee," which is a private organization aiding Eastern European emigrants.

USSR USES DOUBLE-BOOKKEEPING

Glazov warned against under-estimation the "cleverness" of Soviet officialdom on Jewish emigration. "They use double bookkeeping," he said, nothing that the Soviet "makes one step towards the demand of international public opinion" on freedom for Jews and then imposes education taxes "that make it impossible for Jews to leave."

"I consider myself to be Jewish," Glazov said in response to a direct question on his identity, "that my approach is synthetical" toward Soviet affairs. Asked why he did not go to Israel, he replied that he does "not exclude the possibility that in several years I will go to Israel. I am now deeply interwoven with the democratic political movement and I want to acquaint myself with Western culture."

Glazov described himself to JTA as a "half assimilated Jew" who was expelled from the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1968 and banned from any employment in Soviet institutions for political reasons and also for his Jewish origin. He had signed several protests including the Appeal of 12 Soviet intellectuals against the Suppression of Human Rights in the Soviet Union. "At the end of everything I understand that I am a Jew," he said. "I was ready for exile when I got the visa to Israel."

Six French winners of Nobel Prizes issued a protest yesterday in Paris that France was "the only member of the European Council and of the Common Market" not to have ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, drawn up in 1950. They expressed hope that ratification would come during the next Parliamentary session "in order to put an end to a situation unworthy of our country." The Israelites are Rene Cassin ( Peace, 1968); Francois Jacob, Andre M, Lwoff and Jacques L. Momod (Physiology and Medicine, 1965, 1965 and 1966), and Alfred Kastler and Louis Neel, (Physics 1966, 1970). Their appeal was endorsed by 13 other French intellectuals.

A court in Arasberg, Germany, has handed down sentences from 2-5 1/2 years on five former members of the Gestapo for complicity in the murder of 5000 Jews in Poland in 1942. Hans Willbeina Bartsch, 64, and Joseph Liebenthal, 63, received 5 1/2 years; Walter Augustin, 60. 5 years; Albert Krischok, 62, 4 years, and Ludwig Romeis, 73, 2 years. The trial lasted 15 months and more then 100 witnesses were questioned.

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