Dissident Poet Given Early Release From Soviet Prison

MOSCOW —  Irina Ratushinskaya, a prominent dissident poet, was unexpectedly released from a Kiev prison after serving half of a seven-year sentence for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, her mother-in-law said Friday.

Ratushinskaya, 32, arrived home in a car late Thursday, her mother-in-law told reporters in a telephone interview from Kiev.

Her relatives had not been told that she would be freed, said the woman, who would not give her name but identified herself as the mother of Ratushinskaya’s husband, Igor Gerashchenko.

She said Ratushinskaya did not know why she was released.

Ratushinskaya’s release was confirmed in the West by Keston College near London, which monitors treatment of dissidents in the East Bloc.

Another Dissident Freed

Also on Friday, the Bukovsky Foundation in the Netherlands reported that dissident Tatyana Osipova had been released from a labor camp and would be allowed to join her husband, Ivan Kovalyov, in exile 320 miles outside Moscow.

Osipova was sentenced in April, 1981, to five years in jail followed by five years of Siberian exile, and had been given an additional two years in prison for violating camp rules, the foundation report said. It said she was not due to be released from prison until May, 1987.

Both Osipova and her husband were sentenced in connection with activities of the Helsinki group in Moscow, which monitored human rights in the Soviet Union.

Ratushinskaya’s case has received considerable publicity in the West, and it is possible that her release on the eve of the Reykjavik, Iceland, meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev was intended to counter Western criticism of Soviet human rights policy.

Former Physics Teacher

Ratushinskaya, a former physics teacher who turned to poetry full time in the late 1970s, suffers from severe heart trouble, high blood pressure and possibly glaucoma.

Her poetry, widely praised in the West, challenged compulsory love for the motherland, criticized the docility of the Soviet people and ridiculed the hypocrisy of the Kremlin’s version of Soviet history.

She was arrested Sept. 17, 1982, and sentenced in March, 1983, to seven years in a labor camp followed by five years of internal exile. Last July, she was transferred from a camp to a jail in Kiev.

Reports in the West said she had come under pressure recently to appeal for clemency but had refused to do so, contending that she was wrongly convicted.