Soviets No Longer Freeing Political Prisoners, Ex-Captives Say

A group of former Soviet political prisoners, freed over the last three months, said Thursday that the releases have stopped and conditions for those still in camps and prisons remain unchanged.

“Many expected that the first group of releases would be followed by a second, a third, a tenth,” the former prisoners said in a statement. “Today it can be said: Our hopes have not been justified.”

The three-page statement, signed simply by “a group of former political prisoners,” expressed disappointment at the pace and depth of Communist Party leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s program of democratization.

“As long as even one political prisoner stays in a camp, all talk of restructuring, of democratization, of openness--all this talk means nothing, it is all empty,” the statement said.

According to the prisoners’ unofficial lists, 127 political prisoners were freed this year by special orders of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. In February, Soviet officials said 140 prisoners were being released, and the same number of cases was under review.

The informal group of former prisoners said about 10 political prisoners, who had been taken from camps to urban holding cells, have been sent back to the camps after they refused to sign documents asking for pardons.

“Not only has the process of releases stopped,” said Sergei Grigoryants, a literary critic who was released from Chistopol Prison in February, “but the situation in the camps has not changed.”

At Thursday’s gathering in a Moscow apartment, the former prisoners pleaded the cases of about two dozen men and women still in prisons and camps, on hunger strike or living in internal exile.

The press conference Thursday by Grigoryants, author Lev Timofeyev, Hebrew teacher Josef Begun, other former prisoners and their friends was a sign that the human rights movement, dormant after systematic arrests in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is gathering new strength inside the Soviet Union.

Since the releases began in February, some individuals, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei D. Sakharov, released from internal exile in December, have lobbied publicly for the remaining prisoners. Jewish activists have kept up pressure on the issue of emigration.

But most former prisoners, many of them veterans of the human rights movement of the 1970s, have been reluctant to criticize Gorbachev’s reforms, holding out hope that they would be broadened to include a general amnesty for political prisoners and changes in the laws prohibiting what is called anti-Soviet activity.