World: And Don't Come Back

When Soviet Rebel Novelist Valery Tarsis, 59, was permitted to fly to England last month for a lecture engagement, Western observers were frankly surprised. Tarsis had spent six months in a Moscow insane asylum for his outspoken attacks on Soviet officialdom in his first published underground novel, The Bluebottle, badgered the authorities still further last year with a scathing account of life on the funny farm, called Ward 7. All the same, counseled Komsomolskaya Pravda, "Let him go. We know why they [the West] need him. It is to pump all the anti-Soviet fascist vomit out of this mental case and then dump him onto the garbage heap. Let him go."

The authorities let him go, all right. Last week the Supreme Soviet's Presidium announced that it had deprived Tarsis of his citizenship, "for actions discrediting a citizen of the U.S.S.R.," leaving him permanently stranded in Britain. Tarsis had asked for it. He had roundly condemned "Soviet bandit fascism" at a London press conference, followed that blast with an article, obviously written before the edict but published after it, in the Sunday Telegraph reporting that despite savage persecution, "our people's immeasurable love of freedom is growing day by day."

It seemed curious that the Kremlin had allowed him to leave. One theory had it that Tarsis' trip had been meant to distract attention from the trial of Soviet Writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky (TIME, Feb. 18). According to a more ingenious version, he had promised the KGB (secret police) to publicly condemn Sinyavsky and Daniel when he reached London, then proceeded to do just the opposite. What seemed most likely, however, was that the Soviets had simply hoped that Tarsis would seek asylum of his own accord, thereby sparing them the problem of coping with a certified lunatic who, on occasion, makes altogether too much sense.