Kremlin OK for Koryagin Exit Reported

A dissident support group said Saturday that it has a report that Anatoly Koryagin, a prominent Soviet psychiatrist, will be allowed to emigrate to Switzerland with his family.

A friend of Koryagin’s reported Saturday in a telephone call from the Soviet Union that the dissident and his family would probably receive their passports within a week, Robert van Voren, a spokesman for the Dutch Bukovsky Foundation, said.

The friend, speaking from the Koryagins’ hometown of Kharkov, said the family expected to leave the Soviet Union by the end of the month, according to Van Voren. He declined to identify the friend, saying only that the person was “100% reliable.”

There was no immediate confirmation from Soviet authorities on the report.

Koryagin, 49, a psychiatrist who publicly reported that the Soviet authorities were sending dissidents to mental institutions, was sentenced in 1981 to seven years in prison and five years of internal exile on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and anti-Soviet propaganda. He was released last Feb. 17.

Upon his release, Koryagin said he wanted to emigrate to Switzerland as soon as authorities freed his 19-year-old son, Ivan, held for nearly two years in a labor camp on charges of hooliganism. Ivan was released March 23.

Koryagin will be traveling with his 48-year-old wife, Galina; his mother; Ivan, and two other sons, Van Voren said.