As the one-year anniversary of Soviet cyberneticist Viktor Brailovsky’s exile approaches, participants at the 10th IMACS World Congress on Systems Simulation and Scientific Computation joined in stepped-up activities by Western colleagues aimed at securing his early release.
Noting that on September 4 Brailovsky will have served one year in exile and will be eligible for parole, conferees from around the world called upon the Soviet Minister of the Interior, Nikolai Shchelokov, to facilitate Brailovsky’s return to Moscow, and optimally, his emigration to Israel.
Brailovsky, well-known for his role as one of the founders and leaders of the Moscow Sunday Scientific Seminar designed to keep ostracized scientists abreast of new developments in their fields, was the object of an official campaign of harassment since he first applied to emigrate in 1972. These reprisals culminated in June 1981, when Brailovsky was sentenced to five years internal exile for “defamation of the Soviet State.”
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