Ratushynska arrives in Britain (12/28/86)

Ratushynska arrives in Britain

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - Soviet poetess Iryna Ratushynska arrived in London on December 18 with her husband, Ihor Herashchenko, and after a meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on December 22 announced her plans to slay in the West.

Ms. Ratushynska, 32, arrived in the West with a three-month Soviet travel visa to seek medical treatment. Reuters reported that she discussed primarily Soviet problems with the prime minister during the 35-minute meeting.

Earlier, her husband stated: "Iryna and I intend to live in the West. I consider the possibility of a return to the Soviet Union will become a reality only when respect for human rights will become something real not only in words but in deeds."

Ms. Ratushynska, a Russian Orthodox believer, spoke of her ordeals in labor camp, where she had served three years of a seven-year sentence for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" at the time of her release in October.

"The regime in the women's political camp was adapted specifically to create such conditions that we would not want to continue human-rights activities in the future," she stated. "Frequently measures applied to us were senseless humiliations. As a rule, actual physical blows were not used. They did not need this.

"They refined it down to extreme cold, extreme filth, extreme hunger. Conditions were geared to ensure that you died when you left the camp. I went into prison as a healthy young woman, and three years later I was certain I would not live out this year."

English clergyman Richard Rogers, who for 90 days stayed in a cage to campaign for her release, said doctors who examined the poetess stated she was emaciated and frail, but did not seem to have suffered permanent damage from heart and kidney ailments, Reuters reported.

During her imprisonment, Ms. Ratushynska wrote some 250 poems, most of them on bars of soap. In an interview with Washington Post correspondent Gary Lee before she left the Soviet Union, she said that she etched verses on a bar of soap with a match stick. "When I finished, I would memorize it, wash my hands and send it down the drain.

"Memorizing the poems was not the difficult thing. It was memorizing the index of poems, the list of things I wrote and when I wrote them." For an hour every day she worked on committing the index to memory, she said.

Reported Mr. Lee: "The series of poems - now collected into a three-part book - was relayed to her husband with the help of others, who memorized them and got them out to the West." Ms. Ratushynska refused to say how the poems were smuggled abroad for fear of endangering colleagues.

Born in 1954 in Odessa, Ms. Ratushynska graduated from university with a degree in physics and did not start writing poetry until she was 25. She is considered to be one of the Soviet Union's finest poets of this century.

Her ancestry is Russian and Polish; she speaks these two languages plus Ukrainian. Her husband is a Ukrainian.

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