Soviets Jail 60 Dissidents Forming Democracy Group

MOSCOW — Police arrested 60 people after a group of dissidents met to form a democratic alternative to the Communist Party, a spokesman for the group said. He said 14 people remained jailed today.

The arrests were made Sunday at one of three locations in Moscow where the dissident group was holding organizational meetings, said Yuri Mitiunov, one of the organizers of the group, the Democratic Union.

Mitiunov said police came to one location and detained 60 participants. Forty were released shortly after their arrests, he said, and 20 were held overnight. Six were released this morning, he said.

About 148 people attended the group’s initial meeting Saturday to form the political organization, then broke into the smaller groups Sunday.

Mitiunov told the Associated Press in a telephone interview that the dissidents jailed are all from outside Moscow.

“Those jailed were ordered to leave Moscow and refused,” Mitiunov said. “Under our law, it is legal for visitors to be here three days and they had not been here that long so they had a right to remain.”

At the village of Kratovo outside Moscow, where another meeting was to be held today, “the house was encircled by militia,” Tamara Grigoryants said.

“The commanding officer of the militia said that under no circumstances would he allow the meeting to take place,” she said.

Yevgeniya Debryanskaya, who played host at the meeting where the arrests took place, said Sunday that the fledgling party drafted principles calling for a multi-party democracy, a new constitution, an independent trade union, and the withdrawal of Soviet soldiers from Eastern Europe, the western Ukraine and the Baltic states.