SOVIET UNION: A Spokesman Muffled

"Let us hope that after the President's visit there will be no more political arrests," said Soviet Historian Pyotr Yakir on the eve of Richard Nixon's arrival in Moscow for the summit meeting. "It is time to end the Middle Ages." Last week plainclothes officers of the KGB (secret police) burst into Yakir's apartment, hustled him into a black Volga sedan, and took him to Lefortovo Prison, where he faces charges of passing information to the West about dissent in the Soviet Union.

He would not deny the accusation. The bearded, volatile Yakir, 49, has been the most outspoken of dissident intellectuals and one of Western newsmen's most accessible sources. "One of our main jobs," he said last year, "is to spread news of how some Soviet citizens are standing up for their rights and defying the authorities so that others may also be emboldened." He added, almost recklessly, "The Voice of America and the BBC are our megaphones."

If Yakir's case comes to court, it will be the first known political trial since January, when Writer Vladimir Bukovsky was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment, forced labor and exile under Article 70 of the Russian Republic's criminal code ("defaming the Soviet political and social system"), the same law under which Yakir is being held. Yakir protested Bukovsky's arrest and presumably will now defend himself by arguing that the authorities themselves are violating the Soviet constitution when they suppress dissent.

Premonition of Arrest. Yakir apparently had a premonition that he would be arrested and even warned some of his contacts of the possibility. Recently he told London Times Correspondent David Bonavia—just before Bonavia was expelled from the U.S.S.R. —"If they beat me, I will say anything. I know that from my former experience in the camps. But you will know it will not be the real me speaking. Another thing, I shall never in any circumstances commit suicide. So you will know that if they say I have done away with myself, someone else will have done me in."

Yakir practically grew up in Stalinist concentration camps. At the age of 14, he was swept up in the mass arrests of 1937, the year his father, Major General lona Yakir, was executed during Joseph Stalin's purge of the Red Army. Pyotr Yakir was released after 17 years and rehabilitated as part of Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign in 1956. It is rare—and therefore especially ominous—for the Soviet authorities to rearrest a former inmate of a Stalinist labor camp.

By muffling Yakir, the KGB has probably succeeded in further demoralizing the apparently shrinking circle of scientists, writers and scholars active in the Soviet Union's self-styled "civil rights movement." A number of prominent dissidents, mostly Jews like Yakir, have recently been pressured into emigrating (TIME, June 19). However, a hard core of activists is obviously determined to keep the movement alive. Physicist Andrei Sakharov, father of the Russian hydrogen bomb and a leading critic of the current regime, last week released a letter he had written to Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, protesting the increase of "persecution for political and ideological reasons."