Terelia goes underground (12/30/84)

Terelia goes underground

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - Yosyp Terelia, an activist in the outlawed Ukrainian Catholic Church and a former political prisoner, has gone underground to avoid being re-arrested.

According to Soviet sources, the 41-year-old dissident went into hiding in late November shortly after authorities searched his home near Lviv, western Ukraine. Earlier, Mr. Terelia had ignored a summons that he report to authorities for questioning.

Mr. Terelia, who has spent some 15 years in Soviet penal or psychiatric institutions, completed his last term in December 1983, having served one year for "parasitism."

In later 1982, Mr. Terelia and four other activists formed an Initiative Group for the Defense of the Rights of Believers and the Church. Mr. Terelia was arrested and charged with "parasitism" shortly after the group issued a letter to Soviet officials calling for the legalization of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which was dissolved by an illegally convened bishops' synod in 1946.

In 1976 Mr. Terelia spent three weeks in a mental institution for his religious activities. The following year, he was arrested and confined in a general psychiatric hospital in Berehovo in the Transcarpathian oblast. After a few months, he managed to escape, but was recaptured and sent to the notorious Dnipropetrovske Special Psychiatric Hospital. He was released in 1981.

Mr. Terelia's conflicts with the KGB, the state security forces, resumed again in the summer of 1982 when his home was searched in connection with the death of his brother, Borys, who was killed in a shootout with security forces in June.

Later in the year, Mr. Terelia formed the Initiative Group in Lviv.

Soviet sources have reported that when authorities came to arrest Mr. Terelia last month, they found only his wife, Olena. It is not known why authorities searched the Terelia home or what charges were to be brought against him.

Meanwhile, another member of the Initiative Group, the Rev. Hryhoriy A. Budzynsky, has disappeared along with his driver, sources said. The priest, who is secretary of the group, was last seen in October. No other details about the case are available.

The Rev. Budzynsky, who is said to have been imprisoned in labor camps in the 1950s and 1960s, had been the target of a smear campaign in the official Ukrainian press. In June 1983, two papers, Vilna Ukraina in Lviv and Radianska Ukraina, the Communist Party organ, carried articles attacking the priest and the banned Ukrainian Catholic Church.