Soviets Spring Surprise, Free Dissident Poet

Soviet dissident and poet Irina Ratushinskaya said today she was unexpectedly released from a Kiev jail halfway through a seven-year sentence for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.

“I am going to get my health back and write some poetry,” Ratushinskaya told reporters by telephone from Kiev.

Her release came Thursday, two days before the Iceland summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

She said she did not know why she was released.

‘I Love My Country’

Asked if she intends to leave the Soviet Union, Ratushinskaya said, “No, I have no such intention at the moment. I love my country and it would be very hard.”

But she said she doubted that the Soviet authorities would stop her if she did decided to emigrate. “I need time to think,” she said.

Her husband, Igor Gerashchenko, said that his wife was on a poor diet in labor camp but that there appeared to have been an improvement in her treatment since Gorbachev took over as Soviet leader in March, 1985.

The 32-year-old dissident, praised in the West for her poetry, was arrested on Sept. 17, 1982, and sentenced in March, 1983, to seven years in a labor camp followed by five years of internal exile.

Transferred From Labor Camp

She was transferred from a labor camp to a jail in Kiev in July.

Reports in the West said she had come under pressure recently to appeal for clemency but had refused to do so, contending she was wrongly convicted. She was sentenced for illegally circulating poetry considered to be critical of Soviet history.

It is unusual but not unprecedented for a Soviet dissident to be released midway through a sentence. Peace activist Vladimir Brodsky was released and allowed to emigrate in September after serving just more than one year of a three-year sentence for hooliganism, one of the standard charges for anti-Soviet activity.