SOVIET UNION: KGB Campaign

The next victim

"They threatened to make an Afghanistan out of my apartment," said Andrei Sakharov. He was referring to two armed men who last week forced their way into his apartment in Gorky, the city where the U.S.S.R.'s most celebrated dissident is now in exile. The intruders warned that the 1975 Nobel Peace prizewinner would soon be incarcerated in a KGB psychiatric facility unless he stopped issuing statements to the Western press.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has apparently targeted the next victim in its campaign against dissidents in the Soviet Union. Lev Kopelev, 67, an internationally known scholar of German literature, was accused in Sovietskaya Rossia of turning his Moscow flat "into a nest of ideological subversion and a place for meetings with Western emissaries." The paper also charged that Kopelev, a Jew who spent ten years in the Gulag under Stalin, "hates his homeland" and is "an enemy of the socialist system."

Kopelev served as the model for the kindly Communist character Lev Rubin in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle. After Stalin's death, all charges were lifted against Kopelev. Last week, however, Kopelev packed himself a small suitcase in readiness for yet another possible trip to the Gulag.