Reagan Salutes Orlov as ‘Hero for Our Time’

Still only days out of a Siberian village, Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov found himself the centerpiece of a meeting of human rights leaders at the White House on Tuesday and was praised by the President as “a hero for our time.”

Appearing somewhat amused and a little bewildered by the commotion around him as he was taken from a New York press conference to the White House and then to another encounter with television cameras, he was asked again and again for his views on the forthcoming meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Iceland.

The 62-year-old physicist, speaking through an interpreter, declared repeatedly that peace and security must be connected with the issue of human rights.

Orlov had served seven years in Soviet labor camps and two more years of exile in a Siberian village when he was brought to the United States on Sunday as part of the arrangement that freed U.S. journalist Nicholas Daniloff, who was jailed in Moscow on Aug. 30 and charged with espionage.

After a press conference in New York, Orlov was flown to Washington on Tuesday afternoon and was whisked to the Oval Office for a private meeting with the President before accompanying Reagan to the session with human rights leaders.

Later, Orlov disclosed that he had mentioned to the President the names of fellow dissidents left behind in the Soviet Union, hoping that they, too, will have their punishment lifted.

He spoke of the same men at his press conference in New York, calling them “knights of openness, knights in shining armor”--Andrei D. Sakharov, the Nobel laureate in internal exile in the Soviet city of Gorky for his criticism of Soviet policy; Anatoly Koryagin, once Orlov’s neighbor in a Siberian cellblock, and Anatoly Marchenko, who has been on a hunger strike since August.

Times staff writer John J. Goldman, in New York, contributed to this story.