Soviets Punish 4 for Persecution of Expose Writer

MOSCOW —  Three senior policemen have been punished and a deputy interior minister reprimanded in the Ukraine over the persecution of a journalist who exposed local abuses of power, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda said Friday.

Earlier this month, in a dramatic move signaling the extension of the Kremlin’s anti-corruption campaign to the previously untouched KGB security police, one of its senior officers, identified only as A. Dichenko, was fired over the illegal arrest and two-week detention of reporter Viktor B. Berkhin.

Pravda said the Interior Ministry had also investigated the involvement of its staff in the scandal in the industrial city of Voroshilovgrad and fired one senior policeman, demoted two others and reprimanded the deputy minister.

Berkhin, a writer for the magazine Soviet Miner, exposed widespread corruption in the region headed by Boris Goncharenko, a party secretary appointed while the late Leonid I. Brezhnev headed the Soviet government.

He was seized on the street by police and held on fabricated charges of hooliganism, Pravda said.