This Is Glasnost?

Antenne-2, a French television network, recently gave the Western world its first authorized glimpse inside a Soviet “gulag” penal camp. A production crew for the network’s human-rights program, “Resistances,” was allowed to spend 50 minutes inside the labor camp near Ryazan, southeast of Moscow. The program also included interviews with Soviet citizens who had served time in such camps--including Heiki Ahonen, an Estonian who was released under an amnesty last February.

The program was a remarkable example of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s loudly proclaimed glasnost policy in action. Unfortunately, it turns out to be one of those good-news/bad-news situations. The bad news is that, according to information received by Antenne-2 from sources inside the Soviet Union, Ahonen has been arrested for remarks that he made in the documentary--and has been given a choice of going back to prison or working at the irradiated site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

In the telecast, Ahonen--an Estonian nationalist--called for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and characterized the Soviet Union as “the last colonial empire in the world.” The Kremlin couldn’t be expected to enjoy such criticism from one of its own citizens, but after 70 years is the Soviet system really too weak to tolerate this sort of dissent?

The incident is a shocking and depressing reminder of the real-life restraints on free expression that still remain in force in the Soviet Union-- glasnost or no glasnost .