Gorbachev Reported Misled on Prisoners

Two American congressmen who visited a notorious Soviet prison camp said Thursday that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is being misled by officials who tell him there are no longer any political prisoners in the Soviet Union.

In fact, the congressmen said, most of the prisoners they interviewed Wednesday at Perm Camp 35, 1,000 miles from Moscow in the Ural Mountains, told them they had been imprisoned for such offenses as trying to emigrate or to form groups to monitor human rights abuses in the Soviet Union.

“We spoke to 24 of the 38 prisoners held in Perm, and most of them declared they were political prisoners,” Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) said.

He said prisoners told them that as punishment, they were placed in isolation cells with cement platforms for beds and denied sheets or blankets, even though the cells were icy cold in winter. Some said that for years, they were denied mail or visits from relatives.

“They ought to close the camp down,” Wolf said. “It’s a terrible place and ought not to be in existence.”

Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) said that Gorbachev, who told the United Nations in November that all political prisoners had been released, was probably speaking in good faith but “may have been misled by his own people.”

Smith said he was told that Gorbachev had never personally visited Perm. It appears, he said, that many prison officials “have not yet been de-Stalinized”--a reference to the dictator Josef Stalin, who sent millions of political opponents to prison camps or into exile.

The congressmen, the first American lawmakers to visit the prison camp, declined to specify how many of the inmates of Perm they believe are there for political reasons. They said they had spoken to some of the prisoners for only 5 or 10 minutes.

According to Richard M. Stephenson Jr., a State Department officer who accompanied the congressmen, the department knows of more than 100 prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union.

Indirect Confirmation

Stephenson said that the prison official who runs Perm 35, Lt. Col. Nikolai Osin, indirectly acknowledged that there are prisoners of conscience. He said that after the congressmen toured Perm, Osin said, “Can you tell us about your political prisoners, now that you have seen ours?”

The prison camp, named for the industrial town of Perm that is situated nearby, acquired a reputation for inhuman conditions after former prisoners--among them Natan Sharansky, a former refusenik who now lives in Israel--told their stories to the West.

The congressmen praised Soviet officials for permitting them to visit the camp. They said this was a case of bringing “ glasnost to the gulag “--openness to the Soviet prison camp system.

They said Perm appeared to have been dressed up for their visit, with walls freshly whitewashed, floors polished and flowers placed in the barracks.

But they said they remain convinced that prison conditions are terrible. They said that if the Soviet Union does not make improvements before the Helsinki Conference on Human Rights, scheduled to take place here in 1991, the Kremlin may well be embarrassed by criticism.

The congressmen said some of the prisoners told them that they had been punished for speaking to A. M. Rosenthal, a New York Times columnist and former executive editor, who in December, 1988, was the first Westerner to visit Perm 35. Some inmates, they said, told them that prison officials refused to give them packages sent by their families and denied them showers.

Stephenson said the kind of punishments meted out at Perm “seemed well calculated to break a man’s will.” For example, he said, prisoners were often denied protection from the cold and refused small treats like chocolate.

But the congressmen described the camp’s inmates as “proud and courageous.”