Word: kremlin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...said Physicist Andrei Sakharov, perhaps the Soviet Union's most famous human-rights advocate, in assessing last week's announcement by the Kremlin that it had begun to release as many as 280 political dissidents from prisons and other places of detention. At best this would represent no more than 40% of the 750 or more Soviet citizens who are currently imprisoned or detained for their political beliefs. Still, it is the first mass release of prisoners of conscience since the de-Stalinization drive of the late 1950s, as well as the latest and perhaps most important manifestation of Soviet...
...U.S.S.R. was reacting uneasily to the latest evidence of Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness. In announcing the prisoner release, Gennadi Gerasimov, spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry, said he doubted that the number to be freed at the present time would exceed 280. He acknowledged that the Kremlin's action did not enjoy universal support within the party. "I can say to you that there are comrades who think the harsher the better," he declared. "But at the moment, we are heading into a softening, so that we may have fewer people behind bars and barbed wire." Significantly...
...Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner, whose tiny apartment on Chkalova Street has once again become the nerve center of the human-rights movement. The Sakharovs advised Western reporters that they knew of 43 political prisoners who had suddenly been freed, in what Bonner called a "wonderful turnaround" in Kremlin policy. Soon old friends and even distant acquaintances, some newly arrived at Moscow's Yaroslavsky Station in camp clothes and close-cropped prison haircuts, came to call. When Yuri Shikhanovich arrived, Bonner sent him off with money to buy wine and vodka for a celebration...
...included in the release were some of the more prominent Jewish dissidents, including Begun, Yuli Edelshtein and Sakhar Zunshein. Several of the remaining prisoners had apparently refused to sign a letter requesting a pardon and pledging that they would not engage in any more anti-Soviet propaganda. Though the Kremlin claims to have told 500 Soviet Jews last month that they could emigrate, a figure that is almost certainly exaggerated, it seemed clear last week that most refuseniks were not yet enjoying the benefits of glasnost. Naum Meiman, 75, a mathematician and close friend of Sakharov's, has repeatedly been...
Despite the Kremlin's glaring contradictions on human rights, most Western observers regarded the prisoner release as a positive sign. Said Arthur Hartman, the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow: "It seems to me that the Soviet government has recognized that its treatment of individuals has had an effect on the overall relationship of the Soviet Union to other countries, and I think it has been moving to dampen down that effect...