IVANOV SENTENCED IN LITHUANIA, DEFENDED BY RUSSIAN ALLIES.

A Vilnius court yesterday sentenced pro-Soviet activist Valery Ivanov to one year in prison and a 70,000 litas fine for moral damages, on charges brought by the families of seven Lithuanians killed in the January, 1991, Soviet crackdown. Ivanov had repeatedly claimed in articles and statements that "Lithuanian nationalists" had fabricated the killings to discredit the USSR. Ivanov was a founding leader of the Internationalist Unity Movement — Yedinstvo, which was created during the final years of Soviet rule to oppose the Baltic independence movements. In 1994 he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for anti-state activities, but his sentence was reduced to seven months, after which he published the memoir "Lithuanian prison."

Ivanov is a citizen of Russia residing in Lithuania. The Lithuanian authorities sought after 1994 to deport him to Russia, but Moscow and some Western human rights groups condemned the intended measure as persecution. In Moscow yesterday, the Duma’s red-brown vice-chairman, Sergei Baburin, and the chairman of the "Anti-NATO" deputies’ association, Sergei Glotov, called on Western human rights organizations to intercede on Ivanov’s behalf. (BNS, Russian agencies, July 15)

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