Dissident Disrupts Briefing, and Soviet Aide Takes a Walk

The Kremlin’s bold new effort to court the Western press hit a snag Monday when a top spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry angrily stalked out of a briefing amid a commotion touched off by a police effort to remove a dissident from the Soviet Union.

The walkout by Vladimir B. Lomeiko came after dissident Irina Grivnina refused repeated requests to leave from a Swiss police officer who spotted her as the person who had disrupted a similar briefing on Sunday.

Grivnina, who had been sitting quietly among the journalists, shouted, “No, I won’t leave! I won’t leave!” Accredited to cover the summit as a reporter for a Dutch weekly magazine, Elsevires, Grivnina declared, “I am a working journalist.”

Grivnina, 40, went to the Netherlands with her family three weeks ago after being allowed to leave the Soviet Union, where she had served for three years in a labor camp on charges of anti-Soviet slander.

Swiss officials later Monday stripped her of her accreditation, and she was taken to the airport for a flight out of Switzerland. Before the incidents with Lomeiko, the Swiss had initially refused Soviet requests to lift her press credentials, a Soviet source said.

Robert Vieux, Geneva’s chief of protocol and information, said the incidents showed that Grivnina was a “demonstrator,” not a journalist. He added, “Free speech is guaranteed in Switzerland, but this was a press conference and not a demonstration.”

Planned to Leave

Grivnina had been issued only a three-day visa and had planned to fly out of Geneva Monday night anyway.

Lomeiko had barely begun the conference when the Swiss officer asked Grivnina to leave and the commotion erupted. He remained at the podium amid the uproar and asked whether the briefing should continue.

Many reporters shouted encouragement to him, but he showed his irritation, saying: “This is an abuse of journalistic rules and interferes with our productive work. . . . I warned the Swiss organizers that this (incident) was planned and would occur. Nothing was unexpected.”

As Grivnina continued to defy the officer’s request to leave, Lomeiko snapped: “This lady is in a state of euphoria. To listen to her is useless. Do you wish to listen to her or me?”

When the commotion continued, he added angrily, “Obviously some of your colleagues would rather have a press conference with her.”

A supporter with Grivnina started handing out press releases amid the shouting and jeers. One man with press credentials shoved Grivnina and tore a sheet of paper from her hands.

As more photographers and reporters crowded around Grivnina, however, Lomeiko gathered up his papers and left, attracting an even larger crowd. As he walked out, Lomeiko remarked sarcastically, “Thank you for your attention.”

He was asked by reporters as he left whether the woman had the right to protest. “She has the clear right, but not in this conference,” he said.

Earlier Monday, Grivnina was at Geneva’s Cointrin Airport for the arrival of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev for the summit, and she shouted accusations at him in Russian and English as he stepped from his plane.

“If you are a peace activist, free Sakharov,” she declared, in a reference to Andrei D. Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been confined to the Soviet city of Gorky since 1980 for his dissident views.

Surrounded by KGB Agents

Grivnina was immediately surrounded by KGB agent and Swiss security agents.

After the uproar at the briefing, Grivnina invited reporters to go to the airport with her. “I’m afraid the KGB will kill me for these activities, or maybe kill some of my relatives. So help us, please, against the KGB,” she pleaded.

Lomeiko later conducted a briefing for a standing-room-only crowd of reporters who jammed into a smaller room after Grivnina, clearly distraught, had left the press center.

“She achieved what she wanted to achieve with the help of the organizers and some of your colleagues,” Lomeiko said.

When a reporter for Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, later asked White House national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane if the United States had sponsored her activities, he replied, “She was simply exercising a right of freedom to protest, and the United States had nothing to do with it.”

The news conference was unlike those held in Moscow, where Soviet authorities maintain total control. Appearing before the media here means that Soviet officials not only risk confrontation with dissidents such as Grivnina but also challenging questions from Western journalists.

In the view of many U.S. officials, the Soviet confrontation with the reality of press conferences is all to the good. If the Soviets continue to attempt to appeal to world opinion, instead of ignoring it as they have in the past, the U.S. officials argue, they will become more sensitive to what causes them problems. That, in turn, may exert some pressure to modify unpopular policies on human rights and other issues.

One Soviet reporter in Geneva confronted an American correspondent and, referring to the episode involving Grivnina, said, “How would you like it if we hired one of your black dissidents and put him in the hall with one of your officials? “