Soviets to Free 2 Dissidents, OK Emigration

Two leading imprisoned dissidents--a psychiatrist nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the head of a charity fund set up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn--will be freed and allowed to emigrate, rights activist Yelena Bonner said today.

Bonner’s husband, Nobel Prize laureate Andrei D. Sakharov, himself freed from internal exile in December, had appealed for the freeing of Anatoly Koryagin, 49, a psychiatrist imprisoned since 1981, and Sergei Khodorovich, 45, jailed in 1983 while managing Solzhenitsyn’s fund.

Koryagin’s wife was summoned by the KGB “several days ago” and told if she filled out emigration forms for herself and her family, her husband would be freed and the family would be allowed to emigrate, Bonner told UPI by telephone.

“Yesterday, the (KGB) told the wife of Sergei Khodorovich the very same thing,” she said.

Koryagin, nominated in 1986 for the Nobel Peace Prize and again today for 1987, was sentenced in 1981 to seven years in prison and five years internal exile for anti-Soviet agitation after criticizing Soviet abuses of psychiatry for political purposes. He is jailed in the infamous Chistopol prison, 600 miles east of Moscow.

Khodorovich, a computer programmer who ran the fund to aid the families of political prisoners, was sentenced to three years for anti-Soviet slander in 1983 and is serving an extended term in a camp north of the Arctic Circle.