A dozen Jewish activists in Moscow appealed to Leonid Brezhnev today to end the harassment they say they have been subjected to since he left the USSR on his trip to the U.S. two weeks ago.
In a cable to the Soviet Communist Party Secretary who is in Paris for two days of talks with French President Georges Pompidou, the activists said they have been arrested almost daily by the KGB (secret police) and detained briefly each time.
Soviet authorities apparently feared the activists would stage demonstrations during Brezhnev’s summit talks in the U.S. (In Paris today, 112 French scientists petitioned Brezhnev to “put an end to the sanctions taken against the Levich family.”
(The scientists referred to the dismissal of Prof. Benjamin Levich, a prominent physicist, from the Soviet Academy of Science and the abduction last month of his 24-year-old son Evgeny who was sent to a military camp in Siberia. The Levich family has applied unsuccessfully for exit visas.
(The signers of the petition include mathematics Prof. Louis Leprine Ringuet; Andre Lwoff, Nobel Prize Laureate for medicine; sociology Prof. Maxime Robinson and members of the Spectrophysics Laboratories in Grenoble and the astronomical observatory in St. Maur. A similar petition was sent by the National Union of Scientific Researches.)
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