For Long-Separated Kin, It’s Joy at Last

Tatyana Bondareva Bartholomew’s application to leave the Soviet Union to join her American husband, Tony Bartholomew, had already been rejected four times when she applied again early last month, hoping that the upcoming U.S.-Soviet summit would provide the key to an exit permit.

Tony Bartholomew, meanwhile, was living out of bachelor’s quarters in a Glendale hotel, waiting for his bride of 2 1/2 years to join him. He had moved to Glendale in March from his parents’ home in Fountain Valley, and Tatyana wanted him to wait for her so that they could go apartment-hunting together, he said.

On Saturday morning, he finally got the word: His 27-year-old wife, a former schoolteacher whom he married in Moscow in 1983, was on a list of Soviet citizens married or related to Americans who will be issued exit visas and allowed to emigrate.

“I’m so happy I can hardly talk,” Bartholomew, 47, declared to a reporter. “It’s got to be the happiest day of my life.”

Bartholomew--an engineer who worked in marketing positions that took him on frequent business trips to Moscow from 1971 until 1984--said the summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev had seemed to provide the last realistic opportunity to get his wife out of the Soviet Union.

“I’ve had a lot of support from various senators and even President Reagan himself,” Bartholomew said. “I figured if they didn’t let her go in the light of the summit meeting, and the pressure put on the Soviets, . . . they’d never let her go.”

Bartholomew recalled how he met his wife while trying to catch a taxi during a Moscow snowstorm in 1981.

Russians often share taxis, and on this snowy day, he recalled, “a taxi pulled up and she said, in very good English, ‘Would you like to share a taxi?”’

He got her telephone number while in the taxi and called to invite her to dinner the next evening, he said. Their romance blossomed during half a dozen business trips in the next two years, he said.

Soviets Announce Move

The State Department announced Friday that the Soviet Union planned to give exit visas to eight spouses of U.S. citizens, another Soviet citizen with American relatives and a dual U.S.-Soviet national. The Soviet gesture was widely interpreted as a move to deflect criticism of the Kremlin’s human rights record.

Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) on Saturday released what he said was the official Soviet list. The list, confirmed by the State Department, included the 10 people referred to Friday, plus the son and daughter-in-law of the dual national, and a Soviet woman, Marina Lepehina, already living in Illinois with her American husband. She had never been granted official permission to emigrate.

Kazimierz Frejus, 82, a Pomona resident whose wife, Helle Frejus, 50, was also on the list of those to be allowed to leave, said he has been trying ever since their 1979 marriage to get his wife out of the Soviet Union.

“I had lost hope,” he said Saturday. “It’s been six years, . . . not six months or six weeks, but six years!”

Frejus said he met his wife in 1978 when she came to Los Angeles for the funeral of her aunt and uncle. He went to the Soviet republic of Estonia in 1979 to visit her, and they were married there in October of that year, he said.

“It makes me feel good to get my wife back,” Frejus said. “I need somebody.”

Frejus brought out a large envelope of letters from his wife. He said the letters, written in Russian, contained pleas from his wife to get her out of the Soviet Union.

As the identities of those to be granted exit permission became known, wire service accounts reported the joy of spouses and family members across the nation.

‘Enormous Burden Lifted’

“It’s just like an enormous burden has been lifted,” said Woodford McClellan of Charlottesville, Va., who has been separated from his wife, Irina, for more than 11 years. She lives in Moscow.

McClellan, a professor of Russian history at the University of Virginia, said he reached his wife by telephone Friday night and she reacted skeptically to the news.

“Several times she asked me, ‘Are you sure? Who told you that?’ ” he reported. “She’s very cautious. She’s learned from bitter experience.”

He said he hadn’t seen his wife since 1974, although they have talked by phone.

Met in Kiev

University of Michigan doctoral student Sandra Gubin, 38, whose husband was also on the list of those granted visas, said she met her husband, Alexei Lodisev, 33, of Kiev, while in the Soviet Union on a student exchange scholarship. They married in April, 1981.

The dual U.S.-Soviet citizen was identified as Abe Stolar, 73, a native of Chicago who was taken by his parents to the Soviet Union in 1931. Stolar’s wife, his son and daughter-in-law will also be permitted to leave, Carle said.

The others on the list released by Simon’s office are:

-- Dimitri Argakov of Leningrad, married to Mary Lou Hulseman of Cleveland.

-- Michael Iossel of Leningrad, married to Edith Luthi of Holliston, Mass.

-- Leonid Ablavsky of Leningrad, married to Robin Rubendunst of Somerville, Mass.

-- Michael Stukalin, 16, of Moscow, who will join his mother, already living in the United States.

Carle said that Simon will not drop the issue until all 25 known divided couples are reunited and four engaged couples are allowed to marry.

Gohar Rezian, 27, of Gardena, was one of the unlucky ones. Rezian said she does not know why Soviet authorities left her husband, Poghos Rezian, 27, off the list.

Her husband was her high school sweetheart in Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia, and still works there, she said. She left with her family in 1981 and returned half a year later to marry him.

“I was really happy for these people,” she said. “I was . . . disappointed that I was not one of them.”

Times staff writers Catalina Camia and George Stein contributed to this story.