Santa Brezhnev, Santa Pinochet
The liberation of Vladimir Bukovsky by a swap of political prisoners between Russia and Chile is unlikely to be imitated

The Economist
December 25, 1976, p. 9

When two countries which loathe each other's political systems, and whose political systems are about as bad as each other's, decide to exchange Christmas presents, purse your lips. When those presents consist of two of the most important political prisoners each country holds, let out a low whistle. The release to the west from Soviet imprisonment on December 19th of Vladimir Bukovsky in exchange for Chile's imprisoned Communist leader, Luis Corvalan, is one of the most spectacular diplomatic coups of recent years. Chile initiated the deal, its brokers being the American and British governments. The idea of such a swap -- dismissed derisively by most people at the time -- was first mooted as long ago as 1974 by Chile's President Pinochet. The Chileans had taken the precaution of treating Mr Corvalan well, at least in the later stages of his three years of captivity, in maked contrast to the starvation diet and forced labour which have etched their lines on Mr Bukovsky's face. Chile is run by a ruthless army dictatorship, though not obviously a more brutal one than the regimes of many Latin American, African, Asian or east European countries. But General Pinochet is not loved: where else but from Chile, for example, would Italian television decide to ban pictures of the Italian team taking part in last weekend's Davis tennis cup final, on the ground that scenes of applauding people "could give a false image of Chile"? The price the Russians have paid is to remind people that their record on human rights is no better than Chile's.

The Russians must have found it hard to give General Pinochet his propaganda coup. Harder still to acknowledge to the world that Mr Bukovsky, like Mr Corvalan, had been imprisoned for his beliefs and not as the halfmad troublemaker they had made him out to be when they locked him up in asylum and prison. The Russians have thus embarrassed their friends in the west, who had previously argued that Chile's repressive government could never be equated with, as they see it, the well-intentioned authoritarianism which runs Russia. Both the French and Italian Communist parties have given the Russians a drubbing this week; the French one said that the existence of political prisoners in Russia (unsuspected in its old Stalinist days) was "inadmissible" The communist parties of western Europe have been pressing Russia to end the protests about Mr Bukovsky's imprisonment by simply expelling him from the country, as it expelled Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Amalrik. But why, they are now asking, as part of a deal with that blackguard, General Pinochet? They look after their friends The simple answer is that the Russians wanted Mr Corvalan back. The Chilean Communist leader is useful to the Russians not as a means of conducting an autopsy on Chile's failed revolution but as an example of how the Russians look after their own. Mr Corvalan was always loyal to Soviet interests, and now he is getting his reward. Moscow has been the drab sanctuary of a host of exiled Communists over the years -- people such as Carlos Luis Prestes of Brazil, Dolores Ibarrurri of Spain and Alvaro Cunhal of Portugal. Mr Corvalan will no doubt be whelled out from time to time as the latest in a long line of Soviet-approved revolutionaries over-whelmed by the brute force of reaction. But the real audience the Russians are aiming at is a much smaller one: they want to give the harried little band of South American communists the feeling that someone, somewhere, is on their side.

Anyone else for a swap? There is no shortage of candidates among the thousands of Soviet political prisoners. Amnesty International is about to focus attention on an imprisoned colleague of Mr Bukovsky, Mr Semyon Gluzman. There are others who, if not released, could surely at least be allowed to move from prisons to hospitals where their desperately poor health would perhaps be cared for: Sergei Kovalev, the Crimean Tartar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev, Anatoly Marchenko.

The snag is that there are very few imprisoned communists of Mr Corvalan's standing who could provide the other side of the deal by being either let free or given a decent hospital bed. The democracies of north America and western Europe do not have political prisoners. Elsewhere communists such as Brazil's Marco Antonio Tavares Coelho, or Indonesia's Umiharti Sardjono, or the Jorge Montes whom Chile has offered to exchange for a prominent Cuban political prisoner, are probably not big enough prizes to justify a repetition of this week's embarrassment for Russia. And the Russians are interested only in sound pro-Moscow men; they will not go out of their way to help a Trotskyist or, worse, mere nationalist locked away behind foreign bars.

Amnesty International fears that the Bukovsky-Corvalan deal may tempt some governments to seize and hold prisoners for barter. It probably need not worry. Few right-wing dictatorships are likely to go to such lengths solely to score ideological points off Russia. Last weekend's exchange may mean no more than that two men will spend a happier Christmas than they would have without it.