Rybakov Named to Lead Moscow Chapter of PEN

Leading writers here have elected liberals to head the Soviet Union’s first branch of PEN, an international literary organization that for years has denounced by Moscow as anti-communist, members said Friday.

The president of the new group--to be known as the Russian Soviet PEN center--will be anti-Stalinist novelist Anatoly Rybakov and among its seven vice presidents are poets Andrei Voznessensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

“This is a vital moment for literature and the intelligentsia,” the 78-year-old Rybakov told reporters. “Our center will work for freedom of creation, for the rights of writers and against censorship everywhere.”

About 50 founder-members of the group, a product of the freer cultural policies followed under Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev program of glasnost (openness), gathered Thursday night for the elections after sending a delegation to a recent Pen congress.

Efforts by dissenting writers to form a PEN chapter in Moscow in the 1960s and 1970s were quickly squashed by the authorities, although the international organization includes some of the best-known figures in world literature.

Arkady Vaksberg, a specialist on the Soviet legal system and one of the vice presidents, said the Moscow center will take part in international campaigns in support of persecuted or threatened writers like Salman Rushdie or Vaclav Havel.

Rybakov and Vaksberg, with other founder members, issued protests earlier this year over the Prague’s jailing of Havel, a leading Czechoslovak playwright, and of a death sentence against British author Rushdie by Iran’s late revolutionary patriarch, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

“We regard it as very important for Soviet writers to publicly express their support for writers in similar situations everywhere, not just in the Soviet Union itself,” Vaksberg said.