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Zand Threatened with Expulsion from Moscow for Being Jobless; Daughter Harassed

April 27, 1971
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Dr. Mikhail Zand, the Soviet Jewish professor and activist who was fired last month by the Institute for Eastern Studies in Moscow, has been threatened with expulsion from the city by the police there for being unemployed, reliable Jewish sources reported here today. Soviet police have the authority to expel persons who are “unproductive,” the sources said. Zand. 44, was arrested with other Soviet Jews on March 26 at the office of Prosecutor General Roman A. Rudenko; all were sentenced to 15 days in prison. Zand was subsequently released after staging a two-week hunger strike that left him in a state of total exhaustion. He has explained his situation to the police and stated that he is an invalid. Meanwhile, Zand’s daughter Ina, a third-year medical student at the Moscow Institute of Medicine, has been expelled from the school’s Komsomol (Communist youth organization) for the “treasonous” activity of applying for emigration permission, the sources said. Additionally, the Komsomol asked the institute to expel her from her classes, but she pleaded for permission to complete the school year so that she could be better able to earn a living. She noted that the Zand family was now living on the salary of her sister, a nurse. The Jewish sources said the institute’s administrators found her request laughable; but there is no word as yet on their decision. In a related development, another of the Jewish activists arrested at Rudenko’s office, Viktor Bolsky, has lost his job for signing emigration petitions. Also, a first-year philology student in Kharkov, Marina Kanzburg, has been dropped from classes for seeking an emigration visa, the sources reported.

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