Soviet Psychiatrist Gets OK to Emigrate

Anatoly Koryagin, who disclosed how the Soviet regime abused dissidents by confining them in psychiatric hospitals and who is now a candidate for the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, will be allowed to emigrate, his government announced Thursday.

Tass, the official Soviet news agency, broke precedent by announcing that Koryagin, one of the best-known dissidents, will fly today to Switzerland, where he will make his home.

In most cases, Soviet citizens who leave the country are either ignored or denounced. According to prevailing orthodoxy, anyone who wants to move away from the motherland is a traitor.

Koryagin, a 48-year-old psychiatrist, was pardoned by the Supreme Soviet last February after being imprisoned since 1981 on charges of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” His offense was to have written an article for a British medical journal documenting cases in which individuals who dissented politically with the Soviet regime were punished by confinement in psychiatric hospitals and by the administration of mind-altering drugs.

Western governments have been pressing for Koryagin’s release, and he is also on a list of political prisoners whom dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov has asked to be released. His Nobel nomination for this year’s peace prize follows a similar nomination last year.

Koryagin apparently was granted an exit visa along with his wife, Galina, their three sons and his mother.

He was sentenced in 1981 to seven years in a labor camp and five years in internal exile for accusing Soviet authorities of using psychiatric hospitals to punish dissenters.

Koryagin’s case was complicated because his 18-year-old son, Ivan, also was serving a prison term after being convicted of “hooliganism,” a charge his family denies.

On March 25, however, in the midst of the younger Koryagin’s three-year sentence, Soviet authorities released him from a labor camp near Kharkov.

Anatoly Koryagin, unlike most of the political prisoners who were released in the opening months of the year, was freed without asking for a pardon or acknowledging any guilt.

The announcement of his departure and his direct flight to Switzerland--bypassing Vienna, the usual gateway to the West--also indicated his special status.

Koryagin has said he would like to work eventually as a psychiatrist in the West.

His time in confinement was harsh, according to statements he made in letters smuggled out of confinement.

For example, in a document made public late last year, he said he was placed in solitary confinement for three years and put in a punishment cell for six months.

He quoted a prison camp commandant as saying, “You are going to drop dead here.”

His permission to emigrate was apparently part of a trend initiated by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to show some leniency toward dissidents who have big followings in the West. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, have been released from their sentence of internal exile in the remote city of Gorky, and dissident scientist Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky was freed from prison and allowed to emigrate to Israel.

Koryagin’s wife reportedly told friends that her husband was released from prison on condition that he leave the Soviet Union immediately.