Citizenship May Be Restored to Soviet Notables

The Soviet Union announced its intention Friday to review the cases of dissidents, among them some of the country’s greatest living writers, artists and musicians, who were stripped of their Soviet citizenship for their criticism of the regime.

The move could open the way for the political rehabilitation and possible return of such figures as Mstislav Rostropovich, a renowned cellist who now conducts the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington; Joseph Brodsky, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature for his poetry, and Yuri Lyubimov, the most revered Russian theater director.

Yuri Reshetov, director of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s humanitarian cooperation and human rights section, said that the government will review the reasons for which Soviet nationals can lose their citizenship and the legal procedures for doing so.

Way to Silence Critics

Soviet authorities will then consider the cases of those who were stripped of their citizenship when then-leader Leonid I. Brezhnev found that exiling prominent dissidents, depriving them of their citizenship and then deporting them to the West, was a more effective way of silencing many of them than by imprisoning them in Siberian labor camps.

“We must review the cases of those who have been denied a homeland due to the biased red tape of stagnation,” Reshetov told a news conference, referring to the 1964-82 Brezhnev Era, now characterized as the “period of stagnation.”

“It cannot be ruled out that some legislative acts (depriving individuals of their Soviet citizenship) will have to be changed,” he said.

The list of those who might be permitted to return, although most may only want to come back for visits, reads like a Who’s Who of the Soviet arts world--Brodsky, Vladimir Voinovich, Vasily Aksyonovo, Viktor Nekrasov and Andrei Sinyavsky among writers, film director Andrei Mikhailov-Koncharlovsky, painter Mikhail Chemiakin and Zhores Medvedev, a biologist turned political writer.

Lyubimov, who was stripped of his citizenship while working abroad and eventually settled in Israel although he is not Jewish, has already returned to the Soviet Union to stage a play in the Taganka Theater, which has offered to reinstate him as director.

The Soviet Union has “resumed and restored relations with this talented director,” Reshetov said. “Everything now depends on him and on his good will.”

Most of those government decrees, many of them signed by Brezhnev himself, justified the action on grounds that the person’s political activities--often simple declarations--were “discrediting the high status of citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and damaging the prestige of the Soviet Union.”

No trial or administrative hearing was involved, no appeal was possible because the decrees had the effect of enacted laws--and the subject was already abroad and unable to return to mount a defense.

Seeks to End ‘Brain Drain’ Leonid Shkarenkov, deputy director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Institute of Scientific Information on the Social Sciences, told the same press conference that the government wants to encourage emigres to return home, even for a brief time, in order to reverse the severe “brain drain” it had suffered over the years.

“It is high time to call in Moscow or some other city a forum of representatives from compatriots abroad, of scientists and cultural figures, who could pool their efforts in the struggle for peace and mankind’s freedom,” Shkarenkov said.

His proposal followed a policy change ordered by Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, who in late December told the country’s diplomats to take a friendly, open posture toward the 150,000 Soviet citizens living abroad and perhaps 20 million other persons overseas whose roots remain here and not consider them “class enemies.”

“We know a lot of people who have been described in the past as class enemies who are doing a great deal of good for our country,” Shevardnadze told the newspaper Moscow News last month.

“Life is stronger than dogma. Many people left here during the years of stagnation,” he said. “We are merciful toward them. Perestroika (the Soviet reform program) opens the door to them to come home.”

Groups are being organized for establishing contacts with expatriate scientists and engineers and other specialists now living in Western Europe, Israel or the United States.

The practice of depriving dissidents of their citizenship and forcing them into exile began in 1966 when writer Valery Tarsis was stripped of his citizenship after being permitted to travel abroad.

The 1974 deportation of Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, became the model for removing those considered by the authorities as troublemakers but too important simply to imprison.

When Solzhenitsyn would be permitted to return--and whether he would be--is hotly debated here, and even many liberals make a point of saying, “everyone except Solzhenitsyn” or that he is a “special case.”

As Soviet authorities increasingly used the method against dissidents in the late 1970s, scores of people were left stateless.

Yet even with the country’s liberalization under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the government acted the same way last year when police arrested Paruir Airikyan, an Armenian nationalist and longtime dissident, for alleged involvement in the struggle for autonomy for the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Airikyan, who had been under detention since March, was stripped of his citizenship and deported in July as the government sought to end the strife in that region.