From Russia, Thwarted Love : Immigrant Hopes ‘Tokens’ Exchanged at Summit Will Include Husband’s Release by Soviets

Gohar Rezian, 27, who left Armenia four years ago, lives in Gardena. She works as a clinical laboratory assistant in Torrance.

Her husband, Poghos, lives in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He works at the Lenin Factory, making machine parts. He can’t get out.

Soviet authorities twice have refused to let him leave the country. They say he knows too much. They say he served in a secret unit in Siberia when he was in the Red Army seven years ago. He says he was just a construction worker in the army.

So far, the Soviet authorities have had the last word. But that may change.

Bargaining ‘Token’ at Summit

U.S. senators and representatives are intervening on behalf of Gohar and Poghos and in similar cases, hoping that their pleas will be heard at next month’s summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and that the Kremlin will relent.

“They may give us a few tokens” at the Geneva summit, said Jeremy Azrael, a former member of the secretary of state’s Policy Planning Council and now a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. “If you happen to be one of the spouses and you are one of the tokens, that is a pretty big accomplishment.”

If the story of Gohar and Poghos is just a footnote in the history of geopolitical thrust and parry, it is also an old-fashioned love story. It begins a long way from Gardena.

Gohar and her husband grew up in Yerevan, a picturesque city in the mountainous Caucasus region that was a major stop on medieval trade routes between the Black Sea and India and now is Armenia’s capital, industrial center and largest city (population 1,114,000).

Relating her story in a series of interviews, Gohar said her father worked for 30 years as accountant for a collective farm--the 22nd Session of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union Collective Farm, to be precise.

Gohar lived in a big house made of pink stone, owned by her family. Outside was the family garden. It had grapes, roses, tulips, parsley, mint, green onions, tomatoes and eggplants. Her father, Haykaz Panosovich Khdrian, who never joined the Communist Party, loved working in the garden.

She met Poghos in her last year of high school when she was 17 1/2. School authorities were combining classes, and she was put in his class.

Poghos, with tousled good looks, was standing at the entrance.

“Hello,” he said.

She walked by without answering. “I wasn’t expecting him to greet me,” she explained. But he had made an impression.

“I was ashamed that I didn’t answer him,” she said. Much later, after they were going together, she told him that.

Good Times Together

Gohar was a top student. Poghos, who was not, made her laugh.

“He can be really funny. Everybody sits there and watches him perform,” she said.

Six months later, they were at a class picnic. They played a card game, duraki , a word that means fools in Russian. They talked. They became close friends.

Two years later, they kissed.

“We were at a party,” she recalled another time. They were playing a game. “There is a question asked and if you say no, you kiss the girl,” she said. “So he kissed me.”

Gohar remembers the kiss. She does not remember the question.

“He told me that he loved me.”

Then he went into the Red Army. He wrote many letters, and sent her a German doll he had picked up somehow.

“I still have it,” she said. “It is in my room, on my bed.”

He came back to Yerevan two years later and went to work at the Lenin Factory. She, with top grades, was preparing to study biology at Yerevan State University. They both lived at home with their parents.

The two lovers went out to plays, ballet, concerts. They went swimming. They visited all the historic site of Armenia.

“He can be really silly and he can be serious. Deep down he is such a sweetheart,” she said. “He would buy me flowers all the time.”

He called her “Gog.” She loved looking at his eyes--”so meaningful. I loved his hair, too. He had the best hair. He is losing it now.”

Her parents liked him.

“But they didn’t like the idea of our relationship because they had already applied to leave. Neither his parents nor my parents liked the idea that we would be hurt,” she said. “But I am not sorry.”

He wanted to get married and made her promise that if permission to leave was not granted after five years on the waiting list, then they would get married.

Sister Stayed Behind

But the exit visa came through in time.

The family--mother, father, brother and Gohar--left Yerevan in December, 1980. A married sister stayed behind.

“We had everything planned. I would go back, get married, register our marriage papers, send him the invitation and in two or three months, he would get his permission and he would come,” she said.

She felt confident because most--some authorities estimate 85% to 90%--of those who request permission to join spouses abroad are granted exit visas within months.

Even so, it was hard to say goodby.

“At Yerevan’s airport, all our relatives and friends were there. My sister dragged me to the plane. I couldn’t leave,” she said.

She flew back in October. She and Poghos were married Oct. 21, 1981. The next morning, she flew back to the United States.

Request Denied

Poghos applied to Soviet emigration authorities in February, 1982. They turned down his request that July.

He wrote the KGB in December, 1983.

“I inform you that I from the 21st of October 1981 am married with Citizeness G. A. Khdrian, who lives in the United States of America,” Poghos wrote in the stilted prose Soviets use when addressing officialdom.

He complained that the emigration office had turned him down “without any sort of reason. In connection with this unfounded and unjust denial, I repeatedly addressed the leaders of corresponding republic and national organizations without results.”

But the KGB was no help either. He was turned down March 15, 1984.

He wrote the agency again in April. He was told in a telephone call that he would not be allowed to leave because he had been in a secret army unit when he was stationed near Novosibirsk. Poghos remembers his army assignment as construction.

(Supporters of the divided spouses reject as a fabrication Soviet assertions that secrecy is the issue. “It is the excuse they use all the time on people who obviously have no secrets whatsoever,” said Democratic Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois.)

Plea Made In Person

Gohar flew back to Armenia late last year.

On Jan. 2, she went to the emigration office, a plain two-story building near the train station. It was the day after New Year’s and few officials were in.

As she recalls it, a heavy-set man came out of an office and said that the girl who makes appointments was not there so nobody else could do it.

“I said I could do it,” Gohar said. “They wouldn’t let me.”

They went back the next day. A tall, thin man dressed in a suit came out and asked what they wanted. He said Poghos would have to wait for an answer.

“I told him that I wanted to see the chief,” she said.

“We will not talk to you because you are not a Soviet citizen,” he said.

“I am a Soviet citizen,” Gohar replied.

“You don’t live here,” the man said.

“That was it. He just walked away. So we left,” she said.

Stopped by the Guard

The next stop was the Ministry of Interior Affairs. They did not get past the waiting-room guard.

“He complimented us and said we were a cute couple and that if he had a son, he wouldn’t like him to leave. He said, why should they let Poghos go? He is young and he has family. He said I should stay and live with my husband. I said I would never do that.”

Poghos told her during that visit that he wanted her to have a child. She said no, not until he could join her.

Gohar headed back to Gardena on Jan. 6.

“February 15, he calls me and said, ‘I got another rejection,’ ” Gohar said. Since then, she was been waiting.

As the summit approaches, the couple’s cause and those of others like them has attracted some powerful support.

“We will be sending the letters to both President Reagan and to General Secretary Gorbachev urging them to give the issue of separated spouses high priority at November’s meeting,” the Simon letter circulating in the Senate says.

Legislators Sign Letter

So far 37 senators have signed the letter, including Alan Cranston and Pete WIlison from California. A companion letter circulating since Monday in the House of Representatives has collected 70 signatures, including those of Los Angeles Democrats Howard Berman, Melvin Levine and Henry Waxman. Robert Lagomarsino (R-Santa Barbara) and two other California representatives also have signed it.

Simon said in an interview that the Senate leadership is trying to arrange a meeting between President Reagan and the divided spouses.

“Reagan is the kind of President who doesn’t deal with abstractions,” Simon said. “If he can actually talk with these people in the Oval Office, they will become more than a statistic.”

It just might work, say observers of Soviet-American relations, who provided this analysis:

The issue is simple and novel enough to generate a new wave of negative publicity at a time when the Soviet leadership is showing more sensitivity to its public image than at any time in the past.

Understandable Issue

“I have talked to Soviet leaders who complained about the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). When you walk down the street, not one person in a hundred understands SDI, but they do understand when they see a man or a woman on the ‘Today’ show saying my husband or wife is in the Soviet Union,” Simon said.

In addition, the observers said, the divided spouses, as an issue, are not associated with policy failures of the past, unlike Jewish emigration, another human rights issue that is receiving increasing attention as the Nov. 19-20 summit in Geneva nears.

The Soviets were angered when the Jackson-Vanik amendment linked most-favored-nation trade status for the Soviet Union to progress on Jewish emigration. They cut back emigration sharply after passage of the amendment, which is still in effect.

With this history in mind, the divided spouses and their supporters are making their appeal solely on humanitarian grounds, as opposed to linking it to other issues.

‘Just Pure Instinct’

Without responding to particular cases, the Soviets have indicated the possibility of movement on the issue.

“Gorbachev mentioned in Paris that they would try and reunite spouses. I have the feeling that in the cases of divided spouses, we are going to be making some headway. That is just pure instinct,” Simon said.

In Washington, Soviet Embassy spokesman Boris Malakhov left open the possibility of progress. He said he was aware of the State Department list of divided spouses.

“When a security matter will not prevent the relevant authorities from allowing the person to leave the country, they will be let out,” he said. “I cannot predict what will be in Geneva.”

Gohar will be watching.

She and her parents live in a two-story apartment complex in Gardena, where her father, the indefatigable gardener, plants tomatoes, eggplants, mint and parsley between trees. She works in Torrance for Allied Physicians Laboratory and drives a 1976 Buick Skylark.

Signs of Stress

The stress has taken its toll. A small patch of roughened skin near her right ear and two on her right arm have been diagnosed as caused by stress. A doctor told her to relax.

“I did for a while,” she said, and the condition got better. “It keeps coming back every time he calls me or something goes wrong.”

She has photo albums with pictures of Poghos but she does not look at them often. “It makes me cry,” she said.

She sees her friends getting married, having relationships, enjoying all aspects of Southern California’s casual life style--a reminder all the more that she is separated from the one she loves most.

“It hurts,” she said.

She tries not to think about what might happen if Poghos has to stay in Yerevan forever.

Her expressive brown eyes grow misty.

“It is scary,” she said. “I will never be happy like I was with him.”