Soviets Resort to Arrests and Issuing Exit Visas to Remove Jews from Scene

Soviet authorities are resorting to two methods–arrests and stepped up issuance of exit visas–to remove Jewish and other dissidents from the scene while the 24th Soviet Communist Party Congress is in session next week, reliable sources reported today from Moscow. The purpose is to avoid incidents that could embarrass the Soviet government while it plays host to Communist delegates from all over the world, the sources said. The Congress opens in Moscow on Tuesday. A group variously estimated at 12-31 Jews and other dissidents was arrested in Moscow last Thursday and sentenced to 10-15 day jail terms on charges of “petty hooliganism.” They had been demonstrating at the office of the chief Soviet prosecutor. Roman A. Rudenko, for the release of 20 Jews under detention and reportedly awaiting trial in Leningrad, Riga and Kishinev in connection with last June’s alleged aerial hijack plot. Most of them have been in detention for more than nine months without trial–the maximum period allowed under the Soviet penal code–and without access to family or friends. On the other hand, reliable sources in Moscow reported that more than 100 Jews who staged a sit-in for emigration rights at the offices of the Supreme Soviet on March 10, have been promised by Soviet authorities that they would be allowed to emigrate soon to Israel.

Other reports said exit papers have been issued to many of the 17 Jews who signed a letter to the Soviet Interior Minister in February warning that they would defend themselves unless the authorities protected them from physical harassment which they claimed to have suffered after applying for visas. But one of the signers. Vladimir Slepak, was jailed for 15 days after Thursday’s demonstration at Jewish religious and lay leaders in Moscow’s Great Synagogue last week. Zand told Western newsmen at the time that the participants in the meeting who spoke bitterly against Israel and Zionist interference in Soviet Jewish affairs did not represent the majority of Russian Jewry. The reports from Moscow indicated that Soviet authorities were being selective, jailing the most overt trouble-makers and issuing or promising visas to other Jews who have publicly demanded them. The jailings will remove agitators from the scene for the duration of the Party Congress. The visas will remove many Jews from the country and quiet those preparing to leave who are not likely to demonstrate and run the risk of arrest and loss of their visas. According to some sources, more than 700 Soviet Jews have left for Israel since the first of the year, compared to 1,000 during all of 1970. But some Jewish sources believe Soviet authorities will revert to their restrictive emigration policies after the Communist Party Congress adjourns.

The fate of the Jews being held for trial is still in doubt. Reports were revived last week that nine Jews will go on trial in Leningrad early next month and four in Riga on April 5 or 6. All have been accused of complicity in the June 15, 1970 hijack plot for which 11 persons, all but two of them Jews, were convicted in Leningrad last December and sentenced to prison terms of 5-15 years at hard labor. A second Leningrad trial opened last Jan. 6 but was immediately adjourned, reportedly because one of the defendants was ill. The trial was never resumed. The documents in both the Leningrad and Riga cases were brought to Moscow last month for an unusual pre-trial review by a higher court that was supposed to have ended March 20. The higher court had the options of proceeding with the trials, cancelling them or postponing them pending further investigation. The latest reports indicated that the decision was to go ahead with the trials. (The Washington Post carried yesterday a detailed and dramatic account of the secret trial last Dec. in Leningrad. It stated that “this Russian-language account makes explicit that the fundamental accusation against the nine Jewish and two non-Jewish defendants was not hijacking as commonly believed but attempting to leave the Soviet Union without permission.” The account received by the newspaper was apparently assembled by friends of the defendants admitted to the courtroom, because of “the emphasis it gives to the defendants’ own statement of their case,” the Washington Post stated.)