Poc Zunshain to Be Released Early, Given an Exit Visa

Prisoner of Conscience Zachar Zunshain is scheduled to be released from a Siberian labor camp, six weeks before his three-year term for “anti-Soviet slander” is completed, and allowed to leave for Israel three days later, according to the Union of Councils of Soviet Jews and the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ).

Zunshain’s wife, Tatyana, said last week that Soviet authorities told her she should submit an exit application for herself and her husband. The couple has been denied visas since 1980.

Zunshain’s sentence to a labor camp followed his arrest March 6, 1984, for “circulation of fabrications known to be false which defame the Soviet state and social system.” The charges were based on letters he himself wrote to Soviet authorities asking them to revoke his Soviet citizenship and allow him to leave for Israel with his wife.

According to the SSSJ, he was also arrested following a five-minute demonstration in front of the Boshoi Theater in Moscow asking for emigration visas.

Zunshain is a 35-year-old physicist from Riga who has been imprisoned in the Irkutsk labor camp in Siberia.

OTHER RELEASES IMMINENT

In a related development, the SSSJ reported that two refuseniks who are also involved in the unofficial peace movement in the Soviet Union are also said to be about to be released: Yuri Chekanovsky, 42, a five-year refusenik, married and the father of three children; and Yuri Rozensweig, 40, refused seven years, also father of three. In May 1986, both families demonstrated in Red Square in Moscow for exit visas.

Another member of the unofficial peace movement, Vladimir Brodsky, was released in September 1986 after serving only one year of a three-year sentence for “hooliganism” and allowed to leave for Israel with his wife, Dina.