Correspondents' Correspondence

...Furthermore, there are not that many active dissidents to lose A hundred at most, along with the several tens of thousands of Soviet Jews who want to emigrate to Israel, out of a total population of 245 million...

...Andrei Sinyavsky, the literary critic jailed in 1966 for anti-Soviet propaganda, reportedly has requested an exit visa...

...Along the East River, between 107th and 110th Streets in Manhattan, construction is under way on 1199 Plaza, a cooperative sponsored by the Drug and Hospital Union...

...Civil rights activists have talked and demonstrated for freedom of the press, speech and travel, but Soviet "hard hats" have shown more concern for food, clothing and housing...

...mark Hopkins Saving Mitchell-Lama New Yorkwhile the Forest Hills housing and Canarsie school busing controversies have dominated newspaper headlines here, two ambitious community-building ventures have escaped public notice...

...Testifying for the legislation during 1970 House hearings, representatives of the United Housing Foundation and Mitchell-Lama tenant organizations reported that financing costs account for approximately half of the rent they pay...

...Despite intensive house searches and interrogations, "Case 42," as this KGB effort is tagged, remains open...

...But apparently the more subtle Soviet leaders have taken the line that it is better to expel dissidents than to imprison them...

...Tenants in the most famous Mitchell-Lama, Co-op City in the Bronx, have recently been hit with 20 per cent rent increases...

...Even middle-level officials and government journalists are informed about dissidents' activities: who their contacts are, what they are writing, where they are concentrated...

...Consequently, old as well as new Mitchell-Lama housing threatens to drift beyond the means of all but the wealthy...

...rendezvous are watched and sometimes foiled...

...The most innocuous telephone arrangements for meetings with dissidents are monitored...

...A Grigorenko or Yakir in a Soviet labor camp becomes a martyr as reports of his plight are relayed out by the Western press corps and then transmitted back by foreign radio broadcasts...

...In 1956, when the program was initiated, funds raised through floating bonds could be secured at 3.25-3.5 per cent...

...Now that the Administration has declared a moratorium on all new housing subsidies, the bill's prospects appear dim...

...Although his West Side district contains several projects that would qualify, the measure reflected more than a parochial concern...

...The sponsoring United Housing Foundation is not rent-gouging...

...finance charges and maintenance costs have soared...

...To be sure, the security police (KGB) has not been purged of its heavy-footed, Stalinist operatives whose instinctive reaction to dissidents is to commit them to a labor camp or a psychiatric ward...

...Under pressure, Valeri Chalidze traded his membership in the embryonic Moscow Human Rights Committee for an exit visa to the United States, where Soviet diplomats relieved him of his passport and citizenship...

...Supported by sympathizers in the upper echelons of the Party, the police are also trying to ferret out the editorial directors of the Chronical of Current Events, a clinically dispassionate underground record of political trials and repression...

...In any event, the KGB is spending a large amount of time and money these days on surveillance and bugging...

...It knows, for example, that the Nixon Administration, like those of Johnson and Kennedy before it, will not make an issue of civil rights in the Soviet Union...

...The bill died in 1970, and last year Congress passed no new housing legislation...

...A Chalidze free in the West soon becomes a forgotten and unheard voice...

...From this, we may safely assume that the traditionalist-minded and always purposeful Brezhnev leadership knows exactly what it is doing...

...Major General Pyotr Grigorenko is still a victim of this mentality, as are several dozen other nonconformists who have received less publicity in the West...

...Nonetheless, the Ryan proposal, which would preserve existing moderate-income housing, should be viewed not as launching a new program but as protecting previous public investments...

...Pyotr Yakir, son of a general executed under Stalin, and imprisoned for his own dissent, is said now to have been forced to recant...

...The Kremlin may calculate that it is less of a problem to have them abroad talking to foreigners than at home agitating among their own people...

...Perhaps more important, it might help renew that much buffeted group's faith in the future of the nation's cities.david Kusnet...

...While the tactic of exiling "name" dissidents seems to be drying up the most celebrated sources of domestic anti-Soviet propaganda, it is perhaps equally significant that Soviet dissidents of every variety have failed to link up with the workers and thereby create a popular movement...

...Other urbanized states have similar programs, and the interest-rate spiral is nationwide...

...In the equally depressed Mariners Harbor district of Staten Island, a site has been approved for an apartment complex to be built by the Urban League...

...Interest rates have since skyrocketed to over 6 per cent, sending monthly rents for new apartments financed only by Mitchell-Lama up to $95 per room...

...Biologist Zhores Medvedev, twin brother of Roy and author of several solidly documented anti-Stalinist works, wants to lecture for a year in England, and there is good reason to suspect he will not return to his homeland...

...Indeed, as physicist Andrei Sakharov and other prominent critics of the regime have reported, suppression of civil rights activities has increased since last spring's Nixon-Brezhnev summit meeting in Moscow...

...Before his death last summer Manhattan Congressman William Fitts Ryan had introduced legislation to make Section 236 funds available to Mitchell-Lama housing built prior to 1968...

...Cosponsors of Ryan's bill included Democratic Congressmen John Conyers of Michigan, Henry Helstoski of New Jersey, and Robert Nix of Pennsylvania...

...Because funding must be arranged as the project progresses, rising interest rates have pushed debt charges much higher than originally anticipated...

...But with Federal "Section 236" funds reducing their mortgage interest to 1 per cent, rents for the East Harlem and Mariners Harbor developments are expected to run less than $50 a room...

...Muffling Dissent Moscowthe Soviet civil rights movement, only a seedling to begin with and never as deeply rooted in the USSR as one might think from reading reports of its activities in the Western press, is wilting before a winter wind...

...The two developments are subsidized by the state's Mitchell-Lama program, providing low-interest loans from bond issues as well as 80 per cent exemptions from real estate taxes...

...All this suggests that the Soviet political establishment is more astute than was once thought...

...Both developments promise to attract a racially integrated, middle-class tenantry...

...Federal aid to Mitchell-Lama housing would be a fitting memorial to the man who spoke for New York's integrationist middle class...

...But this does not mean political liberalization in the USSR...

...A doubling of the debt charges, therefore, would raise rents by 50 per cent...

...Congresswoman Bella Abzug, who now represents Ryan's former district, has indicated a willingness to introduce legislation equivalent to his...

...Senate votes for an American-Soviet trade agreement...

...Meanwhile, in the projects that were the prototypes for the Local 1199 and Urban League ventures, moderate-income families face an increasingly tenuous future...

...Unfortunately, appropriations for Section 236 are not sufficient to meet the demand, and the subsidies are limited to housing for families with incomes below $10,000 a year...

...The projects are possible because of a 1968 amendment to the National Housing Act that allows "piggybacking" Federal and local subsidies for the construction of moderate-rent housing...

...For two years, tenant organizations have proposed extending Federal subsidies to the refinancing of existing developments...

...The Kremlin may relax its "education tax" on emigrating Soviet Jews to win U.S...

...Most Co-op City families, however, live on fixed incomes or controlled wages and salaries, as do more than 25,000 families in other Mitchell-Lamas who face rent hikes of 15-30 per cent...