Irina Orlov ‘Couldn’t Believe It’--but the Waiting Isn’t Over

Irina Orlov, wife of Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov, said Wednesday she is overjoyed at the news that he will soon be released from internal exile but that she is still waiting to hear from him in the remote Siberian village where he has been exiled.

She told Western reporters in her suburban Moscow apartment that she first heard that her physicist husband was being freed when Ina Meiman, wife of another Soviet dissident, telephoned her at her mother’s house Tuesday night.

“At first I could not believe it because I have lived without hope for so long. I did not sleep all night,” she said.

She added that she is still waiting to hear from Orlov, 62.

He has lived in the village of Kobyai in the Yakutia region of eastern Siberia for the last 2 1/2 years since completing a seven-year labor camp sentence for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”

Group’s Co-Founders

Along with internally exiled physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, Jewish activist Anatoly Shcharansky, now living in Israel, and Prof. Naum Meiman, still living in Moscow, Orlov was a founder of the dissident group that monitored Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords in the 1970s.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz said Tuesday that Orlov would be freed by Oct. 7 and allowed to go with his wife to the United States.

Orlov’s wife, slightly built and in her early 40s, said she had made her seventh visit to the village this last summer, taking three different planes to reach the roadless wilderness of hunters and a few farmers, where temperatures can fall as low as 40 degrees below zero.

‘Very Funny Conversation’

She said Orlov had telephoned her from the village post office three weeks ago and, in a “very funny conversation” described how he was picking some potatoes he had planted.

She had sent him a telegram only Tuesday but, since she did not then know the good news, it merely asked him if he had received her latest letters and gifts.

Perching on a stool in the tiny front room crammed with books and a grand piano, Irina Orlov held up three photographs she had taken of her husband when he was transferred from the prison labor camp to exile in 1984.

He looked years older than in the photograph of him on the bookcase, taken just before he was arrested in 1977.

When he first arrived in Kobyai in handcuffs, local people were afraid of him and some even beat him up, but later they became kinder, his wife said.