Birthday Brings No Joy to Soviet Family

For Ludmilla Yevsukova, who turned 26 today, there is not much to celebrate on her birthday.

Luda, as she is known to friends, is extremely worried about her father, who has been languishing in a psychiatric hospital for nearly six months. She also worries about her brother, now in a prison camp north of the Arctic Circle, where the weather and the prison administration are both severe.

She and her mother demonstrate their concern every Saturday night in Pushkin Square, standing silently together, wearing a name badge like the one her brother, Serafim, 24, wears in prison.

On a recent Saturday, the two women were dragged away by police, pulled by the hair as they screamed in protest at their unexpected arrest. They were released without any further punishment.

Yevsukova said their troubles began almost nine years ago when they all applied to emigrate. Since they are ethnic Russians, rather than Jews, their chances of getting permission to leave the country are considered to be extremely slim.

Family’s Story ‘a Horror’

Andrei D. Sakharov, the human rights activist recently released from seven years of internal exile in the closed city of Gorky, has labeled the family’s story “a horror.” Sakharov’s promise to try to help was a big gain for Yevsukova and her mother, but the condition of her father, a retired airline navigator on internal flights for Aeroflot, has almost nullified her joy.

Yevsukova says she tries to visit her father every second day, although it takes seven hours to make the round trip to a remote psychiatric clinic south of Moscow known as Yakovenko.

“He has had 50 injections since Dec. 4. He has severe pains, his teeth are bleeding, he can’t eat or raise his arms,” she said after her last visit.

“He is very thin, very pale, and there are bruises on his face,” she added. “The doctors are inattentive--I think they’re killing him.”

She said her father, whose name also is Serafim, was healthy when he was put into a psychiatric hospital in Moscow last July 19. He was transferred to the Yakovenko clinic about three months later.

Refused Military Service

She says that her brother, known as Sima, is in prison for the second time for the same offense--refusing to serve an obligatory two-year term in the Red Army.

Sima has said he refused military service because he and his entire family applied to emigrate and he might be barred from leaving the country on grounds he had learned military secrets during his tour of duty.

He was confined in prison camps in Siberia after his first conviction. Now he is in Labytnangy, in the Tumen region, just north of the Arctic Circle, where winter temperatures often drop to 35 below zero (Fahrenheit). His term is three years.

Yevsukova and her mother recently traveled 54 hours by train to see Sima, whom his sister described as being about 6 feet 7 inches tall. She said he hasn’t been issued winter clothing because the prison doesn’t have his size.