Soviets Finally Tell Abe Stolar He Can Leave

Thanks to the coming Soviet-American summit and a calculated campaign of harassment, Chicago-born Abe Stolar and his family finally got Kremlin permission Saturday to leave the Soviet Union after 10 years of trying.

The Stolars were on a brief list of people granted exit visas on the eve of the meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and some Moscow bureaucrats were sure to breathe a sigh of relief.

Stolar’s son, Michael, and his wife, Julia, met virtually every month with officials concerned with emigration, asking detailed questions that took up hours of time and once drove one bureaucrat out of his office in exasperation.

Abe Stolar, 73, and his wife, Gita, may not believe their good fortune until they actually arrive in Israel, their intended destination.

More than a decade ago, the Stolars and their son had permission to leave, and had packed their bags and gone to the airport.

At the last minute, however, Soviet officials refused to let them board their plane after ruling that Gita Stolar could not leave because she had been engaged in secret work as an analytical chemist. Stolar’s case is believed unique in that it was raised in the course of discussions between President Jimmy Carter and the late Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev at the last U.S.-Soviet summit in Vienna in 1979.

Stolar, son of a dedicated Communist printer from Chicago’s Humboldt Park district, came to the Soviet Union in 1931. At first he was full of enthusiasm for the Soviet system, but when his father disappeared in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and his sister was sent to a prison camp, Stolar became disillusioned. But he served in the Soviet army during World War II and worked for Radio Moscow as a translator until his retirement in 1974.

When they arrived in Moscow, their U.S. passports were taken and new Soviet citizenship papers were issued. Stolar subsequently received a new U.S. passport, but since he was made a Soviet citizen, apparently against his will, found that he could not leave the Soviet Union.

A short, cheerful man with a trim gray mustache, Stolar was a familiar figure at U.S. Embassy functions, especially the annual 4th of July celebrations.

Last summer, Stolar, his wife and their son received permission to depart, but Michael’s wife was refused an exit visa. The Stolars refused to go without her, however, and their gamble paid off with the Kremlin’s word Saturday that all four had been granted visas.