Evidence mounts of KGB drive to disband peace group (12/28/86)

Evidence mounts of KGB drive to disband peace group

by Bohdan Faryma

NEW YORK - Evidence is mounting that the KGB is undertaking an intensive campaign to disband an independent peace group in the Soviet Union, the Second World Press (SWP) reported yesterday.

On December 3, Alexander Zaitsev, a member of the Group for the Establishment of Trust between the East and the West (the Trust Group), was arrested and confined to a psychiatric hospital in Moscow for his activities with the group, according to SWP, an international news service monitoring human-rights abuses in the Soviet Union.

Mr. Zaitsev had previously been detained on September 2 while participating in a Moscow seminar organized by the independent peace group.

On November 29, Anatoly Cherkasov, another Trust Group member, was arrested in a Moscow subway station and also put into a mental hospital.

Mr. Cherkasov had traveled to the Soviet capital with a letter from Kuibyshev peace activists urging General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan to come to an agreement concerning the jamming of Western broadcasts to the Soviet Union.

Mr. Cherkasov, confined three times in the past to mental institutions for his dissident activities, resides in Kuibyshev, 550 miles southeast of Moscow.

On November 26, peace activist Sergei Svetushkin, a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Foreign Affairs, was arrested and charged with "parasitism." Mr. Svetushkin has not been able to find a job because of his record as a dissident.

On November 27, the historian Andrei Krivov, also a Trust Group member, was arrested and put in jail for 15 days.

To defend their colleagues, Trust Group activists tried to organize a demonstration on December 1 for the release of all "prisoners of peace" in the Soviet Union.

However, the KGB was able to prevent the protest action by putting most of the group's members under house arrest. Only two women - the wife of the imprisoned Mr. Krivov, Irina, and Natalia Akulenok - showed up at the main entrance to Moscow's Gorky Park, the site of the rally.

In another case, Nina Kovalenko, an artist from Moscow and also a Trust Group member, was sent to a psychiatric hospital on September 27 - the day she was arrested for trying to demonstrate for the release of Nicholas Daniloff, the American journalist then detained by Soviet authorities and accused of espionage. Ms. Kovalenko had successfully staged a demonstration on Mr. Daniloff's behalf on September 20.

In addition to imprisoning members of the Trust Group, the Soviet authorities have resorted to expelling those peace activists they may deem less vulnerable to persecution. On November 24, the family of Trust Group member Gutman Levitan was told to leave the Soviet Union within three days.

Established in May 1982, the Trust Group believes that stable peace in the world is possible only as a result of broad personal contacts, including cultural and information exchanges, between the Soviet Union and the West without government restrictions.

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