Changes in USSR Mean Little Yet for Soviet Jew Accused of Murder

The aborted Soviet coup that changed the course of history has had no discernible effect on the case of Dmitri Berman, the Jewish man from the Ukraine who stands accused of murdering a Moldavian soldier.

Berman, whose case was reopened in Moscow after being dismissed by the Ukrainian procurator, still sits in quasi-asylum in the Canadian Embassy in Moscow.

“Not a word has been heard,” said his Canadian lawyer, Bert Raphael.

The turmoil in government ranks could result in greater ambiguity concerning the status of the man, who claims he did not commit the crime.

“I don’t think it is the right climate, because we don’t know who the authority is,” Raphael said in a telephone interview last week.

In fact, Berman’s case has been murky since it began in 1988, when he was first arrested. He has undergone some nine court appearances, torture, imprisonment in three psychiatric hospitals and forced administration of drugs, say people who have met with him.

Berman, a 26-year-old Jew from Nikolayev, was tried for the murder of a soldier, exonerated by the Ukrainian prosecutor and then told, just days before he was to immigrate to Israel in December, that his case was being reopened on orders from Moscow.

Berman ran to the Canadian Embassy, and there he remains. The Canadians, while stopping short of granting him asylum, have indicated they will not ask him to leave.

SOVIETS PRESSED BY CANADIANS

In July, President Mikhail Gorbachev was apprised of the Berman case by Canadian Jewish businessman Albert Reichmann, as well as by Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, when the two heads of state met following the meeting of industrialized nations in London.

It is not believed the case was brought up during the summit meeting between Presidents Bush and Gorbachev in July, although the U.S. State Department has also been following it.

Ousted Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh had also been involved. Canada’s external affairs minister, Barbara McDougall, wrote a letter to Bessmertnykh about Berman and promised Raphael that she would “get back to me,” the attorney said.

“I have had no further word from our government,” Raphael said last week.

At this point, Raphael fears that even trying to take Berman out of the Canadian Embassy could expose him to unknown dangers in an uncertain climate.

Still, Berman has not been forgotten. Last month, during commemorations at Toronto’s Congregation Beth Tzedec for the “Murdered Poets,” the Soviet Jewish intellectuals who were imprisoned and ordered killed by Joseph Stalin, hundreds of people signed a petition asking for Berman’s release,.

Canadian leaders have been among an international array of jurists and political leaders who have interceded on Berman’s behalf. Mulroney was urged to do so by B’nai Brith Canada and other Jewish groups, as well as by Soviet human rights activist Yelena Bonner, whose late husband, Andrei Sakharov, monitored the case.

Bonner had reportedly told Gorbachev about Berman in May. But the Soviet leader seemed unaware of the case when told about Berman in July. He said then that he would look into it.

‘FRAMED FROM THE BEGINNING’

David Leopold, an attorney from Cleveland who spent last winter in the Moscow office of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, said: “There actually is no evidence that Dmitri was in any way involved in the death of the soldier.

“This was never a murder case. This is a human rights case. Dmitri was framed from the beginning.”

Raphael conceded that Gorbachev and other government figures “seem to have more pressing things to deal with” at the moment.

However, a Soviet Jewry leader in the United States believes there is room for optimism.

Pamela Cohen, president of the Union of Councils, said a clear danger to Berman was removed when Interior Minister Boris Pugo committed suicide last month as he was about to be arrested for his part in the coup against Gorbachev.

“Boris Pugo was his main nemesis,” said Cohen in a telephone interview from Chicago. “The Ukrainian government basically had said that they had nothing against him and they did not know where it was coming from. And every time we raised the issue, it basically came to the Interior Ministry wanting to move ahead with it.”

Cohen remembered Pugo not just for Berman but “because of the problems he caused with Tatyana and Zakhar Zunshain,” a former prisoner of conscience from Riga, when Pugo was KGB chief in Latvia.

Pugo “made their lives additionally miserable,” Cohen said.