Freed Gulag 10 Don’t Fit Soviet Dissident Mold : Human rights: Among the ‘last political prisoners’ are military deserters and 2 KGB agents who passed secrets to the West.

One was a KGB agent working undercover as a journalist in San Francisco who fell in love with America and fed tips to the FBI. Another was a dope-smoking hippie who tried to defect by hijacking a plane. A third was a soldier in the strategic missile forces near China who “accidentally” ended up on the other side of the heavily guarded border and lived there for a year.

These are a few of the “last 10 political prisoners” released from the infamous Perm-35 prison camp by decree of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who announced their amnesty late last month in a United Nations speech as a sign of his commitment to human rights.

Millions of political prisoners were sentenced to hard labor at Perm-35 and other similarly brutal camps in the gulag system during 74 years of Soviet history--and many failed to make it out alive.

But these newly pardoned men hardly fit the traditional picture of Soviet political prisoner, that of a brave dissident who risked his freedom to let the people know the truth.

One of them admitted as much at a news conference given Tuesday by five of the 10 prisoners, who were released Friday.

“A prisoner of conscience is a person who is thrown behind prison bars only for his convictions and who never broke any existing law,” said Boris N. Yushin, the KGB agent who worked in San Francisco. “We violated some principles for which we had to be prosecuted. . . . But if you judge these actions morally, they can be justified.”

Yushin, 49, said that in two tours as San Francisco correspondent for the Tass news service in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, he informed the FBI about “dirty tricks” planned by the KGB.

“All present here, in some way or another, were collaborators with or advocates of the totalitarian regime, to which we are now bidding farewell,” Yushin told reporters. “Alexander Dolzhikov and Igor Fedotkin were forced to serve (with) its troops. Viktor Makarov had to fulfill orders of the KGB, which did not correspond to his moral understanding. And I wrote articles that praised the foreign political initiatives of the then-Kremlin leadership, which later gracelessly vanished in the haze.

“But an internal protest was ripening in us. . . . Therefore, each of us, in one way or another, violated the law that existed at that time,” Yushin added.

He wore a three-piece suit and appeared healthy, even though five of his almost six years in prison were in solitary confinement. Although Yushin maintained that their claims to the title of political prisoner were dubious, some of the others described their own fates in almost heroic terms.

“I’m proud that I acted against the criminal regime and the criminal organization called the KGB,” declared Viktor B. Makarov, 37, the other former KGB agent present. He said he was charged with treason for passing information to foreigners about his work deciphering diplomatic messages.

Vladimir V. Potashov, a military expert at the prestigious U.S.A. and Canada Institute who was sentenced for passing information to the United States, also gave a grand self-appraisal. “If, of all my blood that has been spent in the 10 years since 1981, just a few drops fell on the scales of disarmament and helped the ‘zero option’ materialize, then I would say my fate has been vindicated,” said Potashov, 42, whose health suffered during 5 1/2 years in the camp.

Potashov said an American official approached him on a business trip to Washington in 1981 and asked him to supply regular reports on Soviet acceptance of President Ronald Reagan’s zero option proposal, under which the United States would cancel its planned deployment of mid-range missiles if the Soviet Union agreed to eliminate all its SS-4, SS-5 and SS-20 missiles. Potashov did it, knowing that it was “deathly dangerous,” he said, because he wanted to support disarmament.

All 10 were charged with “betrayal of motherland,” the article used to sentence most political prisoners through the years. At the news conference, they said other political prisoners are still being held on criminal charges. “We did not betray our motherland,” Potashov said. “We tried to change it so that things would progress to the way things are now.”

But Potashov’s colleagues at the institute have different recollections.

“He is, for sure, not a prisoner of conscience,” said Sergei M. Rogov, current chairman of the military department of the U.S.A. and Canada Institute. “Prisoners of conscience are motivated by their beliefs. His was not a case of beliefs but a case of working for a certain U.S. agency. It was a clear violation of the law and nothing to be proud of.”

Although there were people in the institute who criticized Kremlin policy, Potashov was not one of them, Rogov recalled, “He was very orthodox.” Rogov said it was common knowledge that Potashov was motivated by the money paid to him by the American intelligence agency to which he sent information. But Potashov asserted, “I did not get a dollar or a cent.”

Most of the newly released political prisoners seemed unsure of what they will do now.

Alexander Dolzhikov, 32, who deserted his post in the strategic missile forces to avoid participating “in a holocaust,” said he wants to go to Ukraine to care for his sick grandmother.

The only one who seemed sure of his future plans was Igor Fedotkin, 24, imprisoned for trying to hijack an airplane in 1986, when he was a young conscript. Fedotkin, who was also charged with possessing and encouraging the use of narcotics, said he has rejected his wild youth and now hopes to continue his studies and open a special school that emphasizes the “moral principles of Jesus Christ.”