Soviet Justice : A Homesick Defector May Be in Trouble

In 1970, when Lithuanian sailor Simas Kudirka tried unsuccessfully to defect to the United States by jumping aboard a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, he was returned to Moscow in chains, tried and sentenced to 10 years at hard labor for high treason.

Kudirka, who now lives in California, has called the four years he actually served “a living hell.” But his friends recall being delighted at his sentence--for they, and Kudirka, thought he might be shot.

The future of Vitaly Yurchenko, the KGB officer who reportedly defected to the United States last summer only to return to Moscow this week after announcing that he had “escaped” from his CIA “kidnapers,” may be equally grim.

The Soviet Union views unauthorized departures from its territory with little mercy--and still less when the citizen who flees is a KGB officer who possesses Soviet state secrets, according to diplomats in Moscow, officials in Washington and successful defectors in the United States.

The consequences may be as severe for the Soviet merchant seaman who jumped ship in New Orleans last week or the Soviet soldier in Afghanistan who walked into the American Embassy in Kabul. But the Western public may never know for certain; the Soviet authorities make it difficult or even impossible to discover the fate of returned defectors.

If Yurchenko was a double agent who tricked the CIA into believing he was a defector--as some U.S. officials suggest--he may have arrived home as a secret hero, presumably to resume a successful career concealed somewhere in the vast structure of the KGB, Moscow’s security and intelligence service.

But if Yurchenko was a genuine defector who underwent a change of heart and decided to go back home, as most American officials believe, he will soon face a long and arduous prison term--or, at worst, a KGB firing squad.

“I . . . find it incredible that a senior KGB official would think that he could defect, then redefect, and the dacha (summer home) would still be there at the Black Sea,” said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), vice chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. “He’d be under it, not on it.”

Death in a Flaming Oven

In past years, defectors from the Soviet intelligence services who returned home were usually tried for treason and sentenced to death; in the Stalin era, one turncoat reportedly was pushed alive into a flaming oven.

But more recent leaders have used a more sophisticated approach, promising the returning defector easy treatment and using him for propaganda advantage--and sending him to prison only later, Western analysts said.

They said that Yurchenko fit this pattern when he appeared at a news conference at the Soviet Embassy in Washington and charged that the CIA had drugged and tortured him. The U.S. government denied the charges.

“He’ll have a press conference back in Moscow where he’ll repeat all that. . . . ,” former CIA Director William E. Colby said. “What they want to get across to others (KGB agents) is that you can’t afford to go over to America.

“And if he goes through this charade, maybe they’ll lighten his sentence,” Colby said. “He might not wind up in the ovens, because he did what they wanted him to. But I doubt he’ll ever have a very high position in the KBG hierarchy--he’ll wind up parking cars for the motor pool, or something like that.”

‘Nothing Will Happen to Him’

“Right now, nothing will happen to him,” said Yelena Mitrokhina, who defected to the United States from the Soviet Embassy in Washington in 1977.

“He got so much world publicity they can’t do anything to him,” she said. “After all, there are quite a few reporters in Moscow who may request to see him. They will keep him around. He will go on television, go to newspapers, things liked that.

“Then, eventually, gradually, he will be eased into retirement--maybe something else. It really depends on how much of his story they believe, how successful he is in convincing them he did not give out any really important information.

“Eventually, it is possible he will be court-martialed,” she said. “The KGB is not stupid. They know he wasn’t kidnaped. He had a lot of sensitive information.”

Yurchenko’s lurid tale that he was an innocent diplomat who was kidnaped in Rome and held captive by the CIA until he managed to escape was worthy of a James Bond thriller, but it had a familiar ring.

In essence, the same story was told last year by Oleg Bitov, a Soviet journalist who spent nearly a year in Britain and declared publicly that he wanted to live in the West.

Drove Own Car

Bitov charged that he was drugged and tortured by British secret agents and only made anti-Soviet statements to win their confidence. Yet he also said that he drove his own car around Britain and even traveled to New York during the time he supposedly was under tight restraint.

The byline of Bitov, who was cultural editor of Moscow’s weekly Literary Gazette, has appeared infrequently since his return more than a year ago. But a Western scholar who visited Moscow to investigate his case said Bitov is still alive and living in the capital.

The fate of other Soviet defectors who return home is rarely clear. “There is very little contact with them after they go back,” said Roy Godson, a Georgetown University scholar who specializes in intelligence issues. “I don’t know precisely what happens to them and I don’t know anybody who does.”

Two Soviet soldiers captured by Afghan rebels, for example, later went to Britain and then returned to the Soviet Union recently. When a London newspaper reported that one of them had been executed, Tass issued a general denial, saying only that both were “safe and doing well” without giving any details.

A few cases are publicly known, however. They suggest that returning defectors are treated differently depending on their station in Soviet society and on whether they divulged any state secrets to the West.

Stalin’s Daughter

Svetlana Alliluyeva Peters, daughter of Josef Stalin, went to the United States in 1967 and came back to the Soviet Union only last year. In an extraordinary decree, the Supreme Soviet restored her citizenship and granted citizenship to her American-born daughter, Olga, 16.

Alliluyeva declared at a news conference that she was never happy a single day in the United States and Britain, where she lived immediately before coming to Moscow.

She was treated like a VIP at first, living in the elegant Sovietskaya Hotel, but she apparently quarreled with relatives and eventually moved to Stalin’s hometown of Gori in the southern Republic of Georgia.

Clearly, her father’s name protected her from any possibility of prosecution, despite her renunciation of Soviet citizenship and sharp criticism of Stalin and other Communist Party leaders.

But Kudirka, a simple merchant seaman, served three years and nine months in Soviet prison camps for attempting to defect. He was released before finishing half his sentence on the ostensible reason that his mother was found to be an American citizen, and he was allowed to go to the United States. He said that during his imprisonment he met other inmates who had defected successfully and then returned home because Soviet officials told them that their families would suffer reprisals if they did not.

Mother’s ‘Plea’

In the case of Viktor Shchibalkin, an official who defected in Spain in the late 1960s, Soviet diplomats tracked him down “and showed him letters from his mother imploring him to return home,” Kudirka told a congressional hearing Thursday.

“They even paid for phone calls to his mother,” he said. “The Soviets guaranteed him freedom from any prosecution, if only he would return home.”

But when Shchibalkin flew back to Moscow, Kudirka said, he was arrested at the airport, tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison. “He never saw his mother,” Kudirka said.

“An ordinary Soviet citizen (who defects) knows that he never can come back and is cutting himself off from his family, who may suffer because of his action,” an experienced Western diplomat said.

Yuri Stepanov, a ballet dancer who defected to the United States in 1980 but returned to Moscow less than three months later, said he came back only because of reprisals against his wife, mother and brother. The government newspaper Izvestia, however, said that Americans tried to turn him into a spy.

Used As an Example

Stepanov told Western correspondents in Moscow that the KGB, the state security police, wanted to make an example out of him in hopes of preventing future defections.

Arkady Shevchenko, a Soviet diplomat who formerly was a high official at the United Nations, defected in 1978. At first, the Soviet Mission in New York said he was being “held under duress,” but later, when his defection became known, he was denounced as a traitor. His wife later killed herself in her Moscow apartment.

The acts of a father also may affect his children. Mark Nashpits, a Moscow dentist, was denied permission to leave the Soviet Union for 15 years. His father had defected in 1956, and Nashpits said that a Soviet official told him in 1970, “For reasons of state we cannot permit you to be reunited with your father, who is a traitor.” Nashpits finally got an exit visa this year, after his father died.

A famous poem by Fyodor Tyutchev sums up the feeling: “Russia’s status is special: No attitude to her other than one of blind faith is admissible.” Tass, the official news agency, recently said that for a Soviet citizen to emigrate to the United States was to “betray your motherland.”

As for Yurchenko, he left the United States on Wednesday on a special Soviet flight. Soviet officials presented him with two large bouquets of flowers and he smiled and waved for reporters’ cameras, the picture of a happy man. But as he walked across the runway to the Aeroflot jet, the Soviet officials neatly surrounded him--apparently taking no chances.

William J. Eaton reported from Moscow and Doyle McManus from Washington.