KGB Kidnaping

Bad News for Defectors

Determined to paddle his own canoe in the West, Vladas Cesiunas, 39, slipped away from a Soviet sports team at Frankfurt airport in August, while en route to the World Canoe Championships in Duisburg. A gold medal winner in the 1972 Olympics, the Soviet canoeing star was quickly granted political asylum in West Germany, and thus became the first of the well-known Soviet sport and dance personalities who have defected to the West in the past two months, a group that includes Bolshoi Ballet Star Alexander Godunov and Skaters Oleg Protopopov and Ludmila Belousova.

What happened to Cesiunas since his escape may give other potential defectors second thoughts. Agents of the Soviet secret police are believed to have swooped down on the athlete last month as he stood outside a school in a suburb of Dortmund where he was studying German. According to Kurt Rebmann, West Germany's chief federal public prosecutor, who released news of Cesiunas' disappearance last week, "There are definite indications that he was abducted by the Soviet secret service and forced to leave the country against his will." If he has been repatriated by force, the canoeist faces a charge of treason, for which the penalty could be death. Last week the West German embassy in Moscow received an anonymous phone call from a Russian who claimed that Cesiunas was being held in a Soviet prison hospital, with severe head injuries, including a cracked skull.

Though Moscow has long been upset by celebrated defectors, it has rarely taken violent action to bring them back home in the post-Stalin era. Why the special interest in a gold medal canoeist? A big clue could lie in the book Cesiunas was planning to write for publication in the West prior to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The subject: an expose of how Soviet athletes use drugs in order to excel in international competitions.

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