Dissidents Ussr

The sinister steel door in Lubyanka prison still has bars over the shoulder-high slot where KGB guards once spoke to political prisoners like Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. But today it leads nowhere. It is sealed shut, and the famous prison inside the KGB's Lubyanka headquarters has been converted to a staff cafeteria and bookkeeping department. The KGB stopped interrogating prisoners there when dictator Josef Stalin died in 1953, the secret police agency said Friday.

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.

Relative calm returned to the Armenian capital of Yerevan on Saturday after an appeal by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to halt demonstrations backing the return of an Armenian-majority region in the adjacent republic of Azerbaijan. Factories in Yerevan were operating and street crowds, which swelled to hundreds of thousands of people during the week, were said to be smaller, Soviet television reported.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev agreed Wednesday to review the cases of 355 "refuseniks" who have been denied Soviet permission to emigrate, the head of a U.S. committee on Soviet Jewry said. Gorbachev also acknowledged that anti-Semitism is a problem in the Soviet Union, although not a "deep-rooted" one, and he refused to issue a statement condemning it specifically, said Shoshana Cardin, leader of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.

Last month, on the eve of a U.S.-Soviet summit conference with human rights on the agenda, 1,145 Jewish emigres left the Soviet Union with visas for Israel. A total of 86 actually arrived here. The rest became what the Israeli government calls "dropouts," exchanging their immigrant invitations to Israel for refugee status in some other country once they had crossed the Soviet border. Most went to the United States.

A foreign visitor to this city in the western Ukraine recently tried to make an overseas telephone call, a request the hotel operator rejected as impossible. The visitor then approached the hotel manager, who said she too was powerless to help. "I'm just a government official," the manager said. "You'd better ask Rukh." Rukh--the word means "the movement" in Ukrainian--has remarkable influence in the Soviet Union's second-largest republic despite being legalized less than a month ago.

An unprecedented debate has surfaced in the Soviet press in recent days over the direction of the economic reform program of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The rancorous exchange could help shape the future of Gorbachev's perestroika , or restructuring of Soviet society, and may eventually affect the political fate of Gorbachev himself.

President Bush, in a message of condolence, praised Andrei D. Sakharov's courage and devotion to freedom Friday and said the Nobel Peace Prize winner was an example of goodness and decency. "All of us who knew him will never forget his courage and devotion to freedom. During the darkest hours of his struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union he embodied all that is good and decent in the human spirit," Bush said in a message to Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner.

The Georgian president bowed his head to enter St. Nino Church, lit seven slender candles and prayed for his nation's victory in its battle to free itself from the Kremlin. It was Palm Sunday and Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a former political prisoner who is now the president, was asking for God's help as the people of Georgia went to the polls that day to vote on the mountainous republic's independence from the Soviet Union.

A scholar in the history of ancient Armenia and Syria left his books two years ago and took to the streets to try to free his people from Communist rule. After six months behind bars for his dissident activities, Levon Ter-Petrosyan is now the president of the smallest Soviet republic. Changes are coming so rapidly in the Soviet Union that dissidents do become presidents and sit down to negotiate with the Kremlin leaders who had jailed them.

The sinister steel door in Lubyanka prison still has bars over the shoulder-high slot where KGB guards once spoke to political prisoners like Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. But today it leads nowhere. It is sealed shut, and the famous prison inside the KGB's Lubyanka headquarters has been converted to a staff cafeteria and bookkeeping department. The KGB stopped interrogating prisoners there when dictator Josef Stalin died in 1953, the secret police agency said Friday.

Mark Kabakov, a decorated World War II veteran who has found himself barred from traveling outside the Soviet Union because he had access to military secrets 17 years ago, expects no help from President Bush on this summit visit. Neither does Valeria Novodvorskaya, the outspoken leader of a radical group who has been held in Moscow's Lefortovo Prison since mid-May on charges of subversion. Nor does Yelena Bonner, the widow and comrade-in-arms of Nobel laureate Andrei D. Sakharov.

Calls are mounting within the Soviet Communist Party for the replacement of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as its leader, with conservatives and centrists now joining radicals in urging the election of another party chief, the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party said here Monday. Stanislav I.

The Georgian president bowed his head to enter St. Nino Church, lit seven slender candles and prayed for his nation's victory in its battle to free itself from the Kremlin. It was Palm Sunday and Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a former political prisoner who is now the president, was asking for God's help as the people of Georgia went to the polls that day to vote on the mountainous republic's independence from the Soviet Union.

Brash, angry and playing by its own set of rules, the new Soviet right now has the world's undivided attention. "I stand before you a reactionary, a hawk, scum," one of its leaders, Col. Viktor I. Alksnis, of the reactionary Soyuz (Union) faction, told the Soviet Congress hours after Eduard A. Shevardnadze, complaining of right-wing "hounding," quit Thursday.

An Armenian nationalist expelled from his homeland by Soviet authorities more than two years ago after charges of fomenting ethnic unrest received a hero's welcome Monday as he returned to Yerevan, the Armenian capital. "As soon as I got off the airplane, I saw that my people need me and that they have anxiously awaited my return," said Paruir Airikyan, 41, a political dissident for most of his life, who has been living in exile in Glendale, Calif. "They put their hope in me, that is obvious."

The leading conservative within the Soviet Communist Party's ruling Politburo was fiercely attacked Thursday by an avant-garde liberal newspaper as an opponent of most of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's political and economic reforms. In a harshly critical Moscow News article reflecting the intense politicking now under way within the Soviet leadership, Yegor K.

Brash, angry and playing by its own set of rules, the new Soviet right now has the world's undivided attention. "I stand before you a reactionary, a hawk, scum," one of its leaders, Col. Viktor I. Alksnis, of the reactionary Soyuz (Union) faction, told the Soviet Congress hours after Eduard A. Shevardnadze, complaining of right-wing "hounding," quit Thursday.

A scholar in the history of ancient Armenia and Syria left his books two years ago and took to the streets to try to free his people from Communist rule. After six months behind bars for his dissident activities, Levon Ter-Petrosyan is now the president of the smallest Soviet republic. Changes are coming so rapidly in the Soviet Union that dissidents do become presidents and sit down to negotiate with the Kremlin leaders who had jailed them.

Exiled writer Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, given a public platform by the Soviet press, called Tuesday for establishment of an all-Slav state to replace the Soviet Union. In a 16,000-word article entitled "How to Revitalize Russia," Solzhenitsyn launched a scathing attack on 70 years of Communist rule in his homeland. "The time of communism is over," the exiled Nobel laureate wrote. "But its concrete structure hasn't collapsed yet.