Plans U.S. visit to Express Thanks : Shchransky Tells How He Survived ‘Moral Torture’

Using a lively sense of humor and an unerring feel for the telling anecdote, freed Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky treated 200 journalists and supporters Thursday to a vivid verbal picture of a man locked in a sometimes Kafkaesque nine-year struggle with a system designed to destroy him.

As he described it during a wide-ranging, 90-minute press conference, it is a struggle in which the prisoner tries to put his guards at ease, where the “darkest hour” comes when the promise of freedom for collaboration must be weighed against the threat of execution and where even after the immediate threat of death is past, each man must fashion his own mental defense against physical, moral and psychological breakdown.

The press conference was Shcharansky’s first with members of the foreign press since he arrived here Tuesday night, eight hours after walking across the Glienicke Bridge to West Berlin as part of a major East-West prisoner exchange.

The Reagan Administration played the leading role in arranging the swap, and Shcharansky said he plans to express his gratitude with a visit to the United States “as soon as I have enough strength and time.”

Shcharansky, who first applied to leave the Soviet Union in 1973 and who became a leading spokesman for both Jewish and human rights activists in Moscow, was arrested in March, 1977, and sentenced in July, 1978, to 13 years in prison and labor camps on charges of being a spy for the United States. He and two American presidents have repeatedly denied those charges.

Earlier Thursday, he underwent three hours of medical tests at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital, after which Dr. Marvin Gottesman described him as a man of “extreme psychological and physical power.”

Gottesman said that nearly nine years in Soviet prisons and camps have left Shcharansky with a minor heart problem and a tremor in one hand but that all he needs now is rest, dental treatment and exercise.

Speaking mostly in English, Shcharansky told the press conference that the Soviets had begun preparing him for his freedom last Christmas Day, when he was transferred to a prison hospital and put on a regimen of food and vitamin shots that was to add more than 20 pounds to his slight frame in less than seven weeks.

“It’s a tradition of the Soviet system that when they produce some goods for export, they put them in much better covering,” he quipped.

Asked if he had been tortured during his years in jail, he responded: “If you mean by the word torture beating, physical, no, I wasn’t.” However, he said, there are other forms of torture--the hunger and cold of a solitary punishment cell or the “moral torture” of absolute isolation.

His most difficult time was in his first months of imprisonment when the Soviets “were trying their best to persuade me that, as they had declared to all the world already, that I am a spy, they had nothing to do but sentence me to death if I wouldn’t change my position and wouldn’t agree to collaborate.”

Idea of Execution

At the same time, he said, the authorities promised “to let me go to Israel if I would cooperate. It was a short period--I think of some months--to get accustomed to this idea that you could be sentenced to death.”

Shcharansky, who spent more than 400 days of his nearly nine years’ imprisonment in solitary confinement, said that in order to survive such an ordeal “you must have a special kind of psychological exercises.”

“It’s very individual,” he explained. “Everybody must invent it for himself. You must choose the things which are the most important for you and to repeat to yourself these things every day, like a prayer, in order not to forget what is the world like. . . . Because it’s just their aim to isolate you so fully, and to create such an image of the outer world that you simply forget--that the system of values, the system of priorities will change.”

He said he tried to remember everything he could, including what he knew of Jewish heritage and Jewish songs. “I remember how surprised were those prison guards when the first time they put me in the punishment cell, and almost all the day I was singing.”

Shcharansky said he hopes that his 77-year-old mother and older brother, who are still in the Soviet Union, will be able to join him shortly. But he added that he will not remain silent in order to “buy” their freedom.

“I saw many times that when people start negotiating with (the Soviets), they inevitably fail,” he explained. “I continued saying whatever I think before the trial, during the trial and in prison, and I’m not going to refuse to do so now.

“I think that as soon as the Soviet authorities will feel that I am more cautious because I don’t want to make trouble for my relatives, my relatives will have no chance to leave the country.”

Four KGB Guards

Describing the final hours before his release, Shcharansky said that he was flown in a special plane from Moscow to East Berlin last Monday, guarded by four KGB agents.

As the aircraft crossed the Soviet border “one of the KGB men came and said that he had the authority to tell me that the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union has deprived me of Soviet citizenship for my very bad behavior . . . and that as an American spy, I am sent away from the Soviet Union.”

In response, Shcharansky related, “I said that first of all, I am deeply satisfied that 13 years after I asked to deprive me of Soviet citizenship, my demand is already met.” He said he also denied once more that he had been a spy.

Noting that he had never before been outside of the Soviet Union, Shcharansky said that he was unsure where he was when the plane landed. “I thought maybe Holland.” But then he noticed the East German airliners--a discovery he found “a little disappointing.”

Started Asking Questions

Turned over to East German security, Shcharansky said that he found “some tension” among his new custodians. So he started asking questions about Berlin and East Germany to put them more at ease.

Shcharansky stressed repeatedly how isolated he had been during his years in jail, frequently out of touch with other prisoners and even more so with events in the Soviet Union and the outside world.

Asked about the desire of various Israeli political parties to recruit him to their cause, Shcharansky joked that “as far as I know, many people in Israel cannot choose for whom to vote, even having all the possible information.”

“As for me,” he added, “the Soviets didn’t deliver me enough information. From the Soviet press, there is absolutely no difference between any parties except Communists. That’s why what I can tell you for sure is that the (Israeli) Communist Party wouldn’t be able to recruit me.”

He said that he first heard of a possible connection between his release and freedom for the jailed South African black nationalist leader, Nelson Mandela, on Wednesday. While he said he knew little about Mandela, “I think that political prisoners must be released whatever their beliefs are.”

South African Denials

Israeli sources have said they expect Mandela to be released within days as an adjunct to the East-West swap that freed Shcharansky, but the South African government has denied the reports.

Shcharansky sidestepped many questions about the current situation among Soviet Jews for lack of recent contact, although he made it clear that he believes the West must continue to support the struggle for free emigration and other human rights in the Soviet Union.

Asked if he was grateful to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev for his freedom, he responded: “Frankly speaking, not. Though on the other hand I think it’s important to make Mr. Gorbachev know that if this step isn’t a separate (isolated) one, if it is only the beginning of a long process of improving the situation with emigration and human rights in the Soviet Union, then such a policy will bring fruit. It will really give the Soviets new opportunities in other fields.”

He quoted an unnamed fellow prisoner on the subject of why the Soviets consider the relatively tiny band of human rights activists there such a threat. “Before, I thought dissidents are the people who think different from the others,” Shcharansky quoted the man as saying. “But now I see . . . that these people think exactly the same as others do. But they speak about what they think--and that’s the difference.”

Examples of the Few

The Soviet system makes examples of the few in order to cow the many, Shcharansky said. It’s a system that works in the camps, as well, he said, citing a political prison for 60 to 70 inmates which had only two or three isolation cells. “Keeping these two or three is enough to keep the 60 quiet,” he said.

Nevertheless, in a remark made originally in Russian for broadcast back to the Soviet Union and repeated in English, Shcharansky stressed that he is “optimistic” about the future for Soviet Jews.

He recalled the campaign against him in the Soviet Union and the one on his behalf in the West and noted: “If after that, they were compelled to release me without getting any concessions, absolutely, it proves that our struggle can be really successful in spite of all pessimistic or skeptical news which we can sometimes hear.”