Gorbachev’s Record Is Spotty : Moscow Moving Forward and Backward on Rights

For a generation of Soviet dissidents, Article 70 is as familiar as their telephone numbers or their birth dates: It is one of the key provisions in the Soviet penal code used to silence critics of the state.

Article 70 bans “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” and provides for sentences of up to seven years in prison followed by five years of exile for anyone who circulates, prepares or even possesses what the authorities deem to be “slanderous fabrications which defame the Soviet state and social system.”

Of the 700 “prisoners of conscience” identified by Western human rights organizations as being locked up in Soviet jails, camps or psychiatric hospitals at the start of this year, about 200 were originally sentenced under Article 70.

So it was regarded as significant news when Soviet officials announced during a live, televised human rights debate with two U.S. senators last month that the infamous provision would soon be changed.

What those Soviet officials failed to tell viewers, however, is that in redefining anti-state activity, the latest proposed draft of Article 70 eliminates certain obscurities only to introduce a new one so glaring that even the dullest prosecutor could fashion an open-and-shut case against Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The text of the draft, revealed publicly for the first time by officials at the Soviet Union’s Institute for State and Law in an interview with Times reporters, makes it clear that the ban applies only to the spreading of seditious views by the mass media, not through private action.

But then it defines as anti-state any advocacy of “the overthrow or change of the Soviet constitutional system.”

The institute officials conceded that the new wording is inconsistent with Gorbachev’s call for “openness” and the “restructuring” of Soviet life. And they said it may be revised further before the overhaul of the 25-year-old penal code is completed.

What the rewriting of Article 70 demonstrates is the spotty Soviet record on traditional human rights issues, considered by many in the West as a vital test of Gorbachev’s sincerity and good faith.

The Soviet Union has made a number of important and well-publicized moves on human rights since Gorbachev came to power in March, 1985.

The Soviets have freed dissident Natan Sharansky and some 200 other political prisoners, allowed Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei D. Sakharov to return to Moscow from internal exile, loosened travel restrictions for Soviet citizens and permitted a significant increase in the rate of emigration for Soviet Jews and Armenians.

Moscow also has volunteered to be the site of an international conference on human rights next year under the auspices of the 1975 Helsinki Agreements on Security and Cooperation in Europe. And Soviet rulers also have agreed to make human rights--long said to be an internal affair and not subject to negotiation--a legitimate topic of discussion with the West.

‘Mutual Compromises’

“We are considering human rights not as a ground for confrontations and mutual accusations against each other but as a ground for searching mutual compromises and mutual dialogue for tackling all issues which have accumulated between the countries over the past years,” Vladimir Kartashkin, the Soviet spokesman on human rights questions, said at a press conference in July.

But the record is negative in some respects. Although 200 dissidents have been released this year, another 400 are believed to be still languishing in prisons and camps. Compared with the few dozen well-known activists allowed to emigrate, an estimated 200 Soviet Jewish families that for 10 years or more have been refused permission to emigrate are still waiting to have their cases reviewed.

While the regime has shown a new tolerance toward public demonstrations, it also has imposed important new limits. And while there have been no known political arrests in recent months, the police have briefly detained some activists--including, ironically, the editors of a new journal called Glasnost--and harassed others.

Most of all, the leadership so far has done little to alter fundamentally the mechanisms of repression; as long as they exist, the new, more humanitarian face of the Soviet Union can always revert to what it was.

Sakharov’s Reservations

Sakharov, a physicist who was once the dean of Soviet dissidents, has welcomed much of Gorbachev’s program, but he says he fears that many of the measures “are not sufficiently decisive.” The problem of transforming Soviet society into a more open society, which Sakharov says is “absolutely necessary” if the Soviet Union is to play a constructive role in the modern world, has been compared to the challenge of leaping an abyss, Sakharov noted in an interview.

“It can’t be done in two hops,” he said. “This is a very elegant metaphor. We can’t stop midway or we slide back. We shall see.”

The human rights issue is considered by many, here and abroad, as a vital test of Gorbachev’s intentions. Internally, according to an East European expert on Soviet affairs, Gorbachev has been “forced to review his human rights policy to give credibility to the whole policy of glasnost. “

The word is usually translated as openness, and the policy characterized by it is the major tool with which the Soviet leader hopes to overcome widespread public apathy and alienation from the regime’s goals.

“Glasnost is not believable if you have people sitting in prison because they criticize,” a Western diplomat said. As long as people are still in prison, he said, the editors who are supposed to be in the forefront of glasnost will instead “sit on the edge of their chairs wondering when this will happen to them.”

Important to Intelligentsia

Widening the traditional boundaries of dissent is seen as particularly important to the Soviet intelligentsia, whose active support appears to be critical to Gorbachev as he tries to push his reforms through a recalcitrant Communist Party leadership and state bureaucracy.

The Soviet leadership also hopes that dramatic gestures in the human rights field will ease tension in its relations with other countries and provide breathing space for economic restructuring. It also hopes for improved access to foreign equipment and technology.

But as attractive as it may seem as a way to advance the regime’s goals, human rights is also one of the trickiest issues for Gorbachev to deal with, for it goes to the heart of the differences between the Soviet and Western socio-political systems.

The Soviet system is dedicated ostensibly to the collective good, but the collective will is, by definition, identical with the Communist Party’s vision. Gorbachev would like to see more Western-style initiative among his people, but not so much that it represents a challenge to one-party rule.

Power Monopoly Threatened

“Glasnost, taken to its logical conclusion, means that you have to countenance a pluralistic society,” a European intelligence source said. “In five years, the intelligentsia will be saying, ‘Who needs censorship?’ If you are going to elect factory managers, then how about local party leaders? Then why not the top leadership? Where does it stop? The implication is that the Communist Party is going to lose its monopoly on power. But is there any instance in history where a reformer oversees the collective suicide of the tool that brought him to power?”

Another Western analyst of the new relationship Gorbachev is trying to forge between the citizen and the state put it this way: “They want his creativity, but not his individuality.”

Human rights appears to offer little opportunity for Gorbachev to achieve another of his goals--recapturing the initiative lost to the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s.

The Soviet leader has proved adept at stealing the spotlight on issues such as arms control. But he stands little chance of making such gains on an issue where the West is so firmly staked out as it is on human rights.

The Kremlin’s argument that Western-style political rights have little meaning without such basic social and economic entitlements as the right to food, housing, employment and medical care has found little response outside the socialist bloc.

Short of Perfection

And, under Gorbachev’s glasnost, Soviet officials now openly admit that to date, at least, their system has fallen well short of perfection in those areas.

What Gorbachev has been doing on human rights appears to be more of a holding action, skillfully timing the resolution of some of the best-known human rights cases to muffle Western criticism and bolster the Soviet image abroad while proceeding cautiously at home.

Indicative of the Soviet approach is the case of Yevgeny Yakir, a longtime Jewish refusenik who did not get official word that he had permission to emigrate until 15 days after the announcement was circulated by the English-language service of Tass, the official Soviet news agency.

“Gorbachev doesn’t give an amnesty for all political prisoners,” said Ludmilla Yevsukova, a dissident recently allowed to emigrate to France. “He says one day, ‘OK, Mr. K., you can leave today,’ and ‘OK, Mr. L., you can leave tomorrow.’ And every day the West applauds. If he said he was releasing all political prisoners, the West would applaud only once.”

More Dramatic Gestures Seen

Moscow is expected to make more dramatic human rights gestures leading up to the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on Saturday and the summit meeting in Washington scheduled for Dec. 7. Soviet officials have indicated in meetings with Westerners that most of the remaining political prisoners will be freed starting this month.

Britain’s Keston College, considered to be authoritative on the subject, counts nearly 300 people still in jail or camps here under two articles of the Penal Code--142 and 227--that are used to punish religious offenses such as conducting unauthorized services or teaching religion outside the home.

A dozen other political prisoners were members of “Helsinki Watch” committees that were set up in several Soviet republics soon after the 1975 human rights agreements were signed. Most of the other political prisoners are Ukrainians and representatives of other nationalities who agitated for independence.

Of the religious prisoners, about 100 are members of unregistered Baptist congregations, about 30 are Muslims, about 30 are Pentecostals and about the same number are Hare Krishnas.

Softer Line on Religion

The officially atheist Soviet leadership has been trying to soften its public line on religion, recognizing, as Josef Stalin did on the eve of World War II, that when a massive national effort is required, it is foolhardy to ignore Russia’s deep spiritual roots.

The Rev. Gleb Yakunin, a Russian Orthodox priest imprisoned in 1980 for “anti-Soviet slander” because of a committee he founded to defend believers’ rights, was recently given a new parish near Moscow. He was allowed to return to the capital from exile under an amnesty last March.

In August, Moscow welcomed Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Dimitrios.

However, another religious activist, Alexander Ogorodnikov, has been unable since his release from prison early this year to acquire the permanent residence permit that is necessary for everything from finding a job to getting medical care.

Unauthorized Journal

Ogorodnikov has joined other dissidents in forming a Moscow branch of the Frankfurt-based International Society for Human Rights and is trying to publish an unauthorized journal, Bulletin of the Christian Community. He was detained briefly in early October after meeting a Canadian visitor at a Moscow hotel.

The last Jewish political prisoner here, Hebrew teacher Alexei Magarik, was released in September after serving two years in a camp on what he described as trumped-up drug charges.

Starting that month, the authorities began issuing emigration visas for a number of the most prominent Jewish activists--Yosef Begun, Viktor Brailovsky, Evgeny Yakir, Ida Nudel, Vladimir Slepak--and the trend is expected to continue in the buildup to the summit conference in Washington.

Veteran activist Alexander Lerner, who is still waiting for permission to leave, said in an interview that conditions for Soviet Jews have improved in other ways under Gorbachev.

In early September, three refuseniks were invited to the Moscow prosecutor’s office--not to be threatened but to be given refunds averaging more than 2,000 rubles ($3,200 at the official rate of exchange) for books, tape recorders, typewriters and other possessions confiscated from them in police searches up to six years ago.

Hebrew Teacher Harassment

The authorities have reportedly stopped harassing teachers of Hebrew, and enrollment of Jewish students is reportedly up at Moscow University.

Jewish emigration, which fell from a peak of 51,320 in 1979 to a low of 896 in 1984, is averaging about 550 a month this year. Soviet Armenians and ethnic Germans, two other groups that have traditionally enjoyed at least limited opportunity to leave, are now doing so in increasing numbers.

Fears that a new emigration law, effective last January, would be used to block all new applicants except those with a “first-degree relative” (child, mother, father, sister or brother) living abroad have so far proved unfounded--at least in Moscow.

Thousands Still Can’t Leave

Nevertheless, there are still thousands of Jewish would-be emigrants, unable to leave because the authorities say they have had access to “state secrets”--secrets that in some cases are three decades old.

Meanwhile, other groups not traditionally allowed to leave are agitating for the same emigration rights. A small band of Pentecostals from Estonia announced formation in September of an organization to agitate for religiously motivated emigration. Two ethnic Russians were detained in Moscow a month later after demonstrating for the “freedom to emigrate for all.”

Sakharov commented: “The emigration question can’t be confined to Jewish emigration alone. It’s necessary to have a general legislative resolution of the question. Otherwise all the long-term refuseniks will be allowed to leave, but other people will apply and be refused. And the problem will not be resolved.

“Only with the right of free emigration will the state be bound to have an interest in raising living standards inside the country. Only then will there be an incentive to create economic opportunities comparable to those abroad.”

Pre-Summit Action Expected

Pre-summit action is also considered likely on some of the nine remaining cases in which a Soviet citizen is forbidden to leave the country to join a spouse in the United States. About two-thirds of the divided-spouse cases have been resolved since the 1985 summit meeting between Gorbachev and President Reagan in Geneva.

On issues that have less of an international dimension, the Soviet leadership appears to have an even more mixed record.

The authorities have allowed a number of political demonstrations, including a well-publicized sit-in by Crimean Tatars in Moscow’s Red Square and nationalist demonstrations in the Baltic republics last summer.

But then the government adopted new rules forbidding such gatherings at a number of central Moscow sites and requiring city permits for other demonstrations.

Moscow Jews Get Permit

In September, the city gave Moscow Jews a permit for an outdoor ceremony to commemorate the slaughter of Jews by German soldiers at Babi Yar, in the Ukraine, during World War II. The activist Lerner said it was the first public, non-religious Jewish gathering in his memory that was given official Soviet sanction.

When the demonstrators gathered, however, they found that the authorities had invited Samuel Zivs, deputy chairman of a semi-official anti-Zionist committee, and a Soviet journalist considered by Jewish activists to be anti-Semitic, to address the crowd.

Later, the police broke up an unauthorized demonstration by Jewish activists on the eve of the Oct. 15 televised human rights discussion.

Alexander Podrabinek, a dissident spokesman on Soviet psychiatric abuses, said he knows of about 15 cases of people committed to special psychiatric hospitals for their political views since Gorbachev took office.

Last month, a political dissident just released from a Soviet psychiatric hospital, Vladimir Titov, said he believes that dissidents are still singled out for harsh treatment in such hospitals and are often given strong psychotropic drugs that cause fever, pain and slurred speech. Titov, who was released on the condition that he emigrate to Israel, had been hospitalized for 12 of the last 18 years.

Well-informed Soviet sources say the authorities have discussed shifting the network of special hospitals from the authority of the Internal Affairs Ministry to the Health Ministry, but no such action is believed to have taken place.

Psychiatry as Punishment

Soviet officials deny that psychiatry is used to punish political dissents, although, in what was seen as a breakthrough, the government newspaper Izvestia published a long and revealing critique of Soviet psychiatry in July.

The article conceded that its theme was “long counted among the forbidden subjects.” It spoke of “the door without handles” that slams shut on the patient and complained that “the straitjacket spirit has not been driven out of psychiatry” despite the discovery of miracle drugs.

Izvestia reported on two specific cases in which officials had engineered the commitment of people who had exposed or simply annoyed them. Zoya Petrovna, a Moscow mathematics teacher, was confined for her “litigious activeness” after campaigning for sanctions against incompetent doctors she said had failed to diagnose a malignant tumor. Anna Ivanova was committed as a schizophrenic after complaining about her fellow tenants in a communal apartment.

Mental Illness Protection

The government newspaper called for a new law to protect citizens from being maliciously or mistakenly diagnosed as suffering from mental illness. Under present regulations, it noted, simply being registered as a psychiatric patient means that a person is unable to drive, hunt or travel abroad, and his or her choice of work is limited.

“A circle is drawn around a person and, like his shadow, he cannot get rid of it,” the article said. “A person’s fate is decided in a 15-minute interview.”

Izvestia revealed that a draft law on the protection of mental patients was produced a decade ago but was blocked by public health officials who said that since Soviet physicians were the most humane in the world, they were in no need of such supervision.

There have also been recent calls in the more open Soviet press for fundamental reforms of a basic legal system that the critics say inadequately protects the rights of the accused.

According to a survey reported in the newspaper Moscow Pravda, 43 of more than 700 judges questioned said they are certain that the defendant is guilty before the trial begins. (Under the Soviet system, verdicts are handed down not by a jury but by a judge and two laymen who serve as “peoples’ assessors.” The Izvestia article said the assessors usually “behave passively.”)

Defense Attorney Useless

Another survey showed that two-thirds of the law students at Tbilisi University believe that the defense attorney can have virtually no effect on the outcome of a trial.

A law professor identified as G. Anashkin noted in a forum put on by the newspaper Literary Gazette that the principle of presumption of innocence “was once declared to be bourgeois.”

Judges frequently dictate what portions of a trial should be included in the official record, permitting them to tailor the transcript to their verdict. Soviet prosecutors directly supervise criminal investigations--”a type of coexistence that has repeatedly been subjected to sharp criticism,” Anashkin said.

The Soviet press has also criticized forced confessions and other “unlawful methods” that are sometimes used in pre-trial investigations, arguing that they are possible in part because defendants have no access to a lawyer until the charges are drawn up.

Articles like these demonstrate a dramatic change in the standards of press censorship since Gorbachev took over. Yet some editors complain that they are operating almost totally in the dark because a promised new law on the press dealing with such issues has been indefinitely delayed.

Timing Still in Doubt

Similarly, the timing of the new penal code is still in doubt. Five separate commissions, each composed of about 20 people, are working on various aspects of the draft, according to Galina Kriger, a senior member of the team at Moscow’s Institute of State and Law.

She said in an interview that the main goal of the project “is the maximum humanization of penal legislation.” Among 20 minor offenses that would be decriminalized under the latest draft code is “parasitism,” or habitual joblessness, which in the past has been used to imprison political dissidents.

The death sentence, now provided under 31 different articles of the general and military criminal codes, would be eliminated for all but “exceptional cases, such as first-degree murder and for particularly dangerous state crimes,” Kriger said. It would be specifically prohibited for women and men older than 60.

The infamous Article 190-1, which, like Article 79, prohibits anti-Soviet slander and has been used frequently against political dissidents, “will hardly be kept in its present form,” Kriger said, adding that there is discussion of decriminalizing such offenses provided there is no intent to overthrow the system.

Draft Is Controversial

But as in the case of the proposed new but still-menacing Article 70, which would make it illegal to advocate “change” of the system, the draft is admittedly still controversial.

“This causes considerable difficulty and controversy,” Kriger said of the draft language on sedition.

Alexander Nikiforov, another senior member of the institute staff, agreed.

“You see,” he said, “there is a conflict between the regulations dealing with political demonstrations on the one hand and the ban on these speeches or documents aimed at changing the Soviet constitutional system.”

Kriger also said the draft code would do away with an ancient, characteristically Russian form of punishment--exile to remote parts of the country such as Siberia or inaccessible parts of Soviet Central Asia.

In response to questions, however, she conceded that a new sanction, called “limitation of freedoms,” is to be introduced which will include new limits on an individual’s right to decide where to live.

Half-Hearted Reforms

Such reforms are seen as half-hearted, at best, by many Soviet dissidents, and this is why they say they remain pessimistic about the long-term prospects for significant change in the Kremlin’s attitude toward individual rights.

But for however long it lasts, they are clearly enjoying the new atmosphere of tolerance. Soviets even talk much more freely on the telephone without fear of reprisals.

“We are full of hope,” a Jewish activist told friends who called him from the West recently. His wife, listening, immediately scolded him, as if to express such optimism might somehow bring down a jinx on them both.

“Everybody is very much afraid of being deceived,” the activist explained.

“It’s like being at the front,” another said, referring to the number of long-time refuseniks suddenly getting permission to leave. “You look around and there’s another empty foxhole.”

Refuseniks Remain Calm

At a recent press conference called to invite Soviet officials to a debate on emigration, a group of refuseniks showed none of the anxiety that used to attend such events. They had wall charts with pertinent quotes from officials and graphs depicting the history of emigration. Everyone wore a name tag, and there was simultaneous translation of all presentations into English, press releases and the door of the apartment where the session was held remained open throughout.

When an associate of Sergei Grigoryants, a former political prisoner now editing the unauthorized, typescript journal called Glasnost, was detained at a Moscow subway station recently, the activist hurried to the scene along with a Times reporter.

When a policeman demanded his identification, Grigoryants said he did not have it with him. Then he reached into his briefcase, retrieved a tape recorder, turned it on demonstratively, and demanded the same of Senior Sgt. Igor A. Levchuk, who complied.

The authorities are clearly watching Grigoryants closely, perhaps because his newsletter is copied and receives relatively wide circulation here. On Friday, he and another editor of Glasnost, Andrei Shilkov, were detained again but were released over the weekend.

When Grigoryants, who has sought official permission to publish Glasnost, was asked how long he thinks he will be able to continue his activities, he responded:

“I expect for at least several months we’ll be able to hang on. At least we’ll do all we can. And we have plenty of material to keep going until the end of the year.”

Emigration From the Soviet Union

Soviet citizens trying to leave the country and resettle abroad consist largely of Jews, ethnic Germans and Armenians. Emigration was a relatively simple matter in Czarist Russia, but after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Soviet officials effectively sealed the borders. Today any Soviet citizen wishing to leave the country, whether to relocate or for a holiday, must have official government permission.

The Jews

The first wave of Jewish emigration came in the 19th Century, driven by the violent, anti-Semitic pogroms that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II. The emigration, like the pogroms, continued into the early 20th Century. Another wave was touched off by a combination of Jewish euphoria and a flare-up of Soviet anti-Semitism following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Between October, 1968, and the end of 1985, almost 265,000 Jews left the Soviet Union.

Jewish emigration peaked in 1979, after seven years of detente between the United States and the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities granted exit permits more freely in part because of U.S. laws linking trade concessions with emigration policies in Communist countries. With the end of detente and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979, emigration declined sharply.

Some 1.5 million to 2 million Jews live in the Soviet Union today, and about 400,000 of them are thought to have taken steps to leave, though the actual number who now want to emigrate is not known.

Ethnic Germans and Armenians

The U.S. State Department reports that about 71,000 Germans and 18,000 Armenians left the Soviet Union between 1970 and 1986, and that the levels for both groups have increased sharply this year. The Helsinki Commission, set up by the U.S. Congress in 1976 to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki accords of 1975, estimates that thousands of the 4 million or so Armenians still in the Soviet Union have applied to emigrate. Of the country’s nearly 2 million ethnic Germans, it is believed that between 60,000 and 200,000 have sought permission to leave.

A team of Times reporters spent a month traveling through the Soviet Union, interviewing scores of Soviet citizens, for this portrait of the world’s other superpower on the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The reporters are William J. Eaton, The Times’ current Moscow bureau chief; Robert Gillette, Moscow bureau chief from 1980 to 1984; Dan Fisher, Moscow bureau chief from 1977 to 1980, and Stanley Meisler, The Times’ Paris bureau chief.