Edition: U.S. / Global

ON MY MIND; Lessons Of Perm

By A. M. Rosenthal
Published: December 27, 1988

One day, I am sure it will be possible to forget the prison camp in the Urals. So far, almost three weeks later, that has not been so for more than a few hours at a time.

Nobody escapes physically from Perm 35, where so many political prisoners suffered for years - and where some still do.

The commandant says nobody ever tries to escape. Where would they go? Beyond the barbed wire lies not only snow and forest but a vast nation, where no person can move about without papers of permission, least of all a person running.

The only escape for prisoners of Perm 35 is in the mind - poetry written on the memory, music without sound, prayers without prayer books, imaginary embraces.

But the mind itself is what keeps bringing freed political prisoners back to their cells and is why the sentence never really ends for them. They ask themselves questions, seeking some trace of meaning in injustice, as does a visitor.

In the late fall, the Soviet Government agreed I could go to Perm 35, about which I had written some columns. No foreigners had been permitted there before. I think permission was given because most of the prisoners of Perm 35 were to be released before I got there. Moscow apparently believed the report of an interested American journalist might be of some use.

But permission to visit Perm 35 was rescinded as soon as I arrived in Moscow. I believe the reason for the last- minute reversal was that the camp still held Soviet citizens imprisoned for political crimes. Some officials might have been nervous about a visit at the very time Mikhail Gorbachev was telling the U.N. that Soviet citizens were no longer imprisoned for what they said or believed. A Soviet editor intervened, and the visit was on again.

Are there meanings to be sifted out and kept?

I think one was in the way prisoners and officers acted.

The Soviet officials who were with me every step of the way in the camp - prison officers, police inspectors, prosecutors, men of the K.G.B. -simply could not handle a totally new situation like foreigners moving about a camp talking to prisoners.

They could find no answers in the fat handbooks of regulation and punishment by which they were taught to rule and to which they kept turning. Without those instructions to sustain them, they turned on each other, angrily contradicting and threatening one another.

I thought of them in the days after the Armenian earthquake, when officials in Moscow berated Soviet rescue squads for falling apart. But it was not asked often in Moscow who or what was really to blame.

The prisoners were men who had sacrificed their liberty to fight the society that lived by regulation handbook. So that day in the camp, while the officials were confined by the rigidity of regulation, the prisoners were the free men, free enough to seize the moment and, through the visitors, shout their message to the world: Remember us.

All they needed was the courage to risk retaliation after the visitors left. They did have that, those allowed to talk to us, and those who were not.

A few hours after we arrived, a prisoner rushed out of a wooden building toward us, shouting in English that he wanted to talk to us. His name tag read Valery Smirnov. Guards shouldered him away. And the commandant, Lieut. Col. Nikolai M. Osin, stared into his face.

After I was back in the United States, I learned that Smirnov had been the cellmate of Natan Sharansky in the political ''zone'' of Perm 35.

Once, when Sharansky was returned from a punishment cell where he had been on a hunger strike, Smirnov gave him bread he had saved from his own rations. This infuriated the commandant. He said that if Smirnov was such a good guy, let him try hunger for himself, and sentenced him to the punishment cells. Sharansky testifies to this in his memoir of the Gulag, ''Fear No Evil.''

That commandant was the same man who looked so long into Smirnov's face as they stood in the snow, the same Osin.

We did not see Smirnov again. But I know from the risk he took, from what freed prisoners and those still in the cells say, and from what the top Soviet official who accompanied me said, that outside attention to the political prisoners has helped set them free. That is another lesson that keeps coming back from the visit.

Many Americans have written to the prisoners of Perm this past year. The address is: U.S.S.R.; 618810, Permskaya obl.; Chusovskoy r-n; St. Vsesvyatskaya; uchr. VS-389/35.

Perhaps more letters will help speed the day for the political prisoners still in Perm 35, or any other places of the Gulag that remain.