The Ordeal of Sergei Kovalev

...why Alexander Solzhenitsyn was hounded from his homeland...

...36, a "strict regime" camp about 700 miles southeast of Moscow...

...He was correct, and the sentence of the Lithuanian Supreme Court was the maximum for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda": seven years in a "corrective labor colony" for "especially dangerous state criminals," followed by three years of internal exile...

...But some of Kovalev's American colleagues have used blunter language to score the proceedings that ended his brilliant scientific career after he took up his pen in defense of human rights...

...Sukharev concluded: "Although Kovalev's behavior during the trial complicated the work of the court, his case was subjected to a thorough and objective examination...

...In March, he was twice placed in solitary confinement?once for drinking tea on his birthday in someone else's section of the barracks...

...Harvey Fireside, a past contributor, is chairman of the Department of Politics at Ithaca College That being the case, Cornell University has invited Kovalev to come as a visiting scholar at his "convenience' to resume his research on cellular physiology...

...why thousands of political and religious dissidents are being brutalized in camps and psychoprisons for attempting to exercise the rights guaranteed in the Soviet constitution...

...In a tass interview, Sukharev contended that Kovalev had, "with the help of other persons, prepared and circulated vicious, slanderous materials casting aspersions on our state...

...Kovalev's prospects are not bright...

...Victor Krasin, a former Moscow activist now an emigre in New York, was horrified to learn that a deposition the KGB had extorted from him in 1973 had been used against Kovalev and others, whom he asked for forgiveness "for the pain and grief I caused them by my dishonorable behavior...

...All of her requests have been denied, however...

...McHugh's rejoinder to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin merely pointed out diplomatically that Cornell has yet to receive a reply to its invitation...

...It was not open to the public, there was no debate between parties, the trial was conducted without a defense counsel, and it was completed in the absence of Kovalev and without his final plea...

...And it is hoped that the committee recently established by Congress to monitor observance of the Helsinki Accord will be able to intercede in Kovalev's behalf...

...This rhetoric reminiscent of Stalin's purges was followed by a description of Kovalev's trial, "held in the biggest hall in the courthouse" and "attended by the public, needless to say, within the limits imposed by seating capacity...

...He had also taken public responsibility for helping to compile the underground Chronicle of Current Events, with its factual record of political arrests and trials, and the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church, a bulletin of religious repression in that Baltic republic...

...He has wanted to know, for example, why the cybernetician Leonid Plyushch was punished for his political heresies by 30 months in a psychiatric prison at Dnepropetrovsk amid violent criminals...

...These materials were smuggled abroad to anti-Soviet centers...

...Following these 17-day punishments, Kovalev conducted five-day protest hunger strikes, and in June he was again put into an isolation cell...

...Harvard Professor Edward O. Wilson and Cornell Professor Thomas Eisner, for instance, in a letter to Science, called the charges against Kovalev a "laundry-list indictment" for "asking forbidden questions...

...Kovalev, whom Sakharov calls his "close friend, a man of great spiritual beauty and force, of limitless altruism,' has a chronic intestinal ailment that has been aggravated by the year he has already spent in prison...

...A committee that includes nine Nobel laureates has sent letters to thousands of biologists through the Federation of American Scientists asking that they intercede for the Russian's release...

...Now he suffers from strong pains and, almost daily, from heavy bleeding...

...If Sakharov is right, such entreaties may hold the sole hope that Helsinki will not turn out to be meaningless...

...Leonid Plyushch, for one, declared that he was indeed shut up under the horrendous conditions of the phychoprison described by Kovalev, and was not in the therapeutic atmosphere sketched by the prosecution's medical witnesses...

...After being denied the counsel of his choice, Kovalev began to conduct his own defense...

...The official picture of "Socialist legality" is further punctured by testimony from the subjects of Kovalev's allegedly slanderous articles...

...ANOTHER TEST FOR HELSINKI The Ordeal of Sergei Kovalev BY HARVEY FIRESIDE Arecent message from Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Andrei Sakharov to Jeremy Stone, director of the Federation of American Scientists, has described the distressful state of Sergei Adamovich Kovalev, whose case is a crucial test of Soviet intentions regarding the Helsinki Accord...

...Sakharov denounced the proceedings as "blatantly unlawful...

...More than 20 witnesses were called and a large number of documents confirming his criminal antistate activity were examined and verified...

...Sakharov reports that the courage and independence Kovalev displayed at his trial last December have, in the meantime, been sorely tested...

...Moreover...

...Thus far, Cornell has received no reply from the biologist himself, the Soviet government or Moscow State University, where he wrote the 60 publications on mathematical biology and genetics that brought him to the attention of the West...

...Meanwhile, in Sakharov's opinion the biologist's survival rests on "public and open appeals to the Soviet official hierarchy" that he be allowed the medical and postoperative treatment he needs...

...pointed out that Kovalev's treatment violated the 1975 Helsinki Accord...

...In that treaty the Soviet Union promised with 34 other nations to "recognize the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for which is an essential factor for the peace, justice and well-being necessary to ensure the development of friendly relations and cooperation among themselves...

...Kovalev's other crimes included signing petitions for a half-dozen dissidents and joining both the Action Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR and the Moscow section of Amnesty International...

...The widely hailed "Basket Three" of the agreement also solemnized the intent of the signatories to promote educational exchanges, specifically of "scientists and research workers...

...Congressman McHugh did receive a curt note from the Soviet Embassy, though, referring him to an account of the case presented by Alexander Sukharev, First Deputy Minister of Justice of the USSR...

...Sakharov fears that the authorities arc preparing to transfer Kovalev to Moscow's notorious Vladimir prison, a facility reserved for prisoners "guilty of disturbing order...

...The Lithuanian connection gave the authorities a pretext for holding Kovalev's trial in Vilnius—off-limits to foreign correspondents and inaccessible to most of his Moscow friends...

...The biologist's wife, Lusya Boitsova, has appealed to Minister of Internal Affairs N. A. Shchekolov to transfer her husband to the central prison hospital in Leningrad, the only place in the USSR where radical surgery can be performed on inmates...

...Sakharov asks that petitions for Kovalev's transfer to the central prison hospital be sent to the Medical Administration of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs, Moscow, Petrovka 25a, Meduvpravleniya MVD, SSSR...

...As further punishment, he is no longer allowed to correspond at the rate of two letters per month, and the number of annual family visits he is permitted has been dropped from three to two...

...Last month, a concurrent resolution introduced in the House of Representatives by Matthew F McHugh (D.-N.Y...

...When the judge barred potential defense witnesses, including Sakharov, from the courtroom, Kovalev declared a hunger strike with the words, "the court manages so easily without a defense counsel that it will of course complete the oase without a defendant either...

...The 44-year-old biologist is serving a seven-year sentence at Perm Corrective Labor Colony No...