Shcharansky Calls on Students, Profs To Press Divestment Against USSR

In a recorded message addressed to the Harvard community, freed Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky this week called on students and professors to press for divestment and other sanctions against the Soviet Union.

Praising the campus movement for divestment from South Africa-related firms as "a good moral position," Shcharansky said "it would be logical that the same measures like divestiture would be applied to the Soviet system."

"If you will compare the Soviet system with South Africa, we will see that there are all the signs of so-called apartheid on a larger scale," Shcharansky said.

The message was conveyed by Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz, a long-time advocate for Soveit Jewry and political prisoners who helped bring about Shcharansky's release last February.

The 38-year-old mathematician, who moved to Israel and adopted the Hebrew name Natan after gaining his freedom in an East-West "spy swap," is currently visiting the United States to call attention to human rights violations in the Soviet Union and to thank Americans who campaigned for his release.

Shcharansky recorded the message, which also thanks people at Harvard for supporting his cause, during a Monday meeting with Dershowitz in New York.

It was the first meeting between the former prisoner and the lawyer who had lobbied on his behalf at the White House, before various human rights conventions, and in the secret negotiations that ultimately brought about the exchange.

Shcharansky first gained attention when he was denied a visa to join his wife in leaving the Soviet Union in 1974. Shcharansky was arrested in 1977, following vocal criticism of the Soviet justice system, and was convicted the following year of spying for the CIA.

Shcharansky, who came to symbolize the plight of Soviet Jewry, told Dershowitz that the decision of American activists to focus attention on his case saved his life.

Shcharansky is expected to visit Harvard in the fall at the law professor's invitation.

Comparing Shcharansky to "Rip Van Winkle" after his nine-year imprisonment, Dershowitz said the dissident did not fully understand the implications of Soviet divestment and that his message should be regarded as a "general moral suggestion" rather than a specific tactical recommendation.

The call for Soviet divestment inadvertently struck at the heart of the debate surrounding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. Critics of the divestment movement have faulted it for ignoring other oppressive political regimes around the world.

Dershowitz played the tape at a luncheon for Gregory and Isai Goldstein, two Jews from the Georgian republic who were recently allowed to leave the Soviet Union after waiting 15 years for exit visas.

Soviet emigration policy has become more stringent since Mikhail Gorbachev's succession to the top Soviet post, and Jews now have little hope of gaining exit visas, the Goldstein brothers said. But at the same time, would-be emigres who do not raise a public protest suffer less persecution than in the past, they said.