The Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry reported today that Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Laureate in physics, charged that by detaining Anatoly Sharansky, the “Kremlin is attempting to blackmail the West before (Secretary of State Cyrus) Vance’s visit.” Vance is scheduled to meet with Soviet officials in Moscow at the end of the month.
Sakharov also reported that both Jewish activists and non-Jewish dissidents gathered today in Moscow to protest the detention of Sharansky, the leading press spokesman of the Soviet Jewish activists and a member of the unofficial Helsinki watchdog commission in Moscow set up to monitor Soviet compliance with the humanitarian provisions of the Helsinki accords signed in 1975.
Bronx Borough President Robert Abrams, Conference chairman, called the Sharansky detention “yet another brutal attempt to suppress the Jewish freedom movement inside the Soviet Union. But we must remember Sharansky’s own words of only a few days ago: ‘Whatever happens to us, we remain in the same position: that Western pressure is the only possible way of saving the movement.'”
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