Kremlin Trying to Brighten Rights Image for Summit

The Kremlin’s apparent decision to allow the wife of dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov to go abroad for medical treatment was interpreted here Tuesday as a gesture intended to put the Soviet Union in a favorable light before next month’s summit meeting.

Further word that Yelena Bonner, Sakharov’s wife, will be allowed to leave the country for three months came a day after another Soviet human rights activist, once imprisoned for investigating Soviet abuses of psychiatry, was permitted to emigrate to the Netherlands.

Additional moves to polish Moscow’s human rights record are anticipated in the three weeks before Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev meets President Reagan in Geneva.

Reagan already has served notice that he will raise questions about the Sakharovs’ internal exile to the city of Gorky, 250 miles from Moscow, and other human rights issues at the summit conference Nov. 19-20. Gorbachev was forced to field questions from French officials and from newsmen about Sakharov and other human rights matters during a visit to France early this month.

While he has been combative on the subject in recent interviews, Gorbachev is expected to relent slightly as the meeting with Reagan approaches.

One Western diplomat said a Soviet citizen with close ties to high government officials told him recently, “You can expect a lot of people to go (out of the Soviet Union) before Geneva.”

A U.S. Embassy official said two Soviet citizens, both married to Americans, recently were granted Soviet exit visas after waiting more than two years for permission to go to the United States.

Irina Grivnina, 40, the human rights activist allowed to leave for the West on Monday, is one of several dissidents recently issued exit visas. Grivnina’s departure Monday came less than four months after the official news agency Tass said she never would be permitted to leave the Soviet Union because, as a computer programmer, she had knowledge of state secrets.

Grivnina once was active on the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, which monitored use of psychiatry, drugs and other medical practices on Soviet dissidents in the 1970s. She was arrested and convicted in 1981 on charges of trying to discredit the Soviet Union and its political system.

She was sentenced to five years of internal exile, but the sentence was later reduced. Since she returned to Moscow in 1983, she has written articles for a Dutch newspaper and sought to emigrate, saying she renounced all political activity and simply wanted to leave the country. Her husband and two children accompanied her.

“It’s only a handful of cases, yet it’s tempting to hope that it will become a trend,” said one Western diplomat who has been following emigration decisions.

More Skeptical

Other Western analysts were more skeptical about any major shift in the Soviet policy that has blocked emigration for critics of the regime and Jews who want to move to Israel.

West German reports on the granting of a visa to Bonner so she can undergo eye surgery abroad were affirmed Tuesday by Viktor Louis, a journalist who has been a source of official information on the Sakharovs in the past.

“It’s not a one-way ticket--she’s going and she’s expected to be back,” Louis told a reporter.

Conflicting Reports

(There were reports from Vienna, however, that Bonner would not be permitted to return to the Soviet Union. The Austria Press Agency, quoting Soviet emigres and sources in Amnesty International, said Bonner was required to leave the Soviet Union within two days and could not return to her husband).

In Washington, the State Department said it has no independent confirmation of Louis’ report that Bonner would be allowed to seek medical treatment outside the Soviet Union.

Department spokesman Bernard Kalb said, however, “It is also important that Ms. Bonner be permitted to return to her husband in the Soviet Union after she receives medical treatment.”

Bonner, 62, is serving a term of five years’ internal exile in Gorky, the same city where Sakharov was banished in 1980 because of his outspoken human rights stance and his opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Sakharov won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize because of his human rights campaign.

She once served as her husband’s voice in Moscow, relaying his views to Western correspondents, until she was confined to Gorky herself early last year. She was later convicted of anti-Soviet slander.

Since then, the couple has been isolated and virtually cut off from relatives and friends.

“I hope she makes it” out of the country, said one Western diplomat. “That would be a significant gesture.”

Bonner went to Florence, Italy, in 1975 and 1977 for eye surgery. She traveled to Oslo in 1975 to accept the Nobel prize on Sakharov’s behalf.

Louis said he did not know when Bonner would leave or where she would go to receive medical treatment. She also suffers from heart trouble.

Bonner’s son, Alexei, and her daughter, Tatyana, both live in the United States. An official at the U.S. Embassy said that so far she has not applied in Moscow for a visa.

Married in 1970

An Armenian Jew who was wounded in combat as a nurse in World War II and later became a pediatrician, Bonner married Sakharov in 1970 after they met during a human rights protest.

Soviet officials have contended that she was a bad influence on Sakharov, 64, one of the team of Soviet scientists who developed the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later received many of his nation’s highest awards.

He conducted a fast last spring to try to obtain permission for his wife to travel abroad for medical care, but the authorities were unrelenting. He also resigned from the Soviet Academy of Sciences to protest the government’s refusal to give Bonner a visa.

In other recent actions involving well-known dissidents, Mark Nashpits, a Moscow dentist and the son of a defector, was allowed to leave the country with his wife and child. Nashpits was sentenced to five years’ exile in Siberia for publicly protesting the denial of his emigration petition in 1975.