THE SUMMIT AT GENEVA : Soviets Trying to Ignore Question That Won’t Go Away: Human Rights

In some ways, Avital Shcharansky seemed a forlorn figure, standing Wednesday in a light snowfall at the barbed wire barriers that screened off the Soviet Mission.

She had no chance at all to deliver her letter asking Soviet First Lady Raisa Gorbachev to help free Avital’s well-known dissident husband from a Soviet prison camp.

The barriers kept her blocks away from the compound where Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his wife are living and working during the summit conference. Avital, who is married to Anatoly Shcharansky, a Jewish activist who was sentenced to 13 years in labor camps for treason and anti-Soviet agitation in 1978, had been expected to hand the letter to Nancy Reagan when she arrived later for tea with Raisa Gorbachev. But Avital did not even wait for Mrs. Reagan’s arrival.

“The Swiss police have asked me not to do anything,” she said.

Yet, cold and forlorn as she seemed, Avital Shcharansky--handing out copies of her letter to reporters, posing in a prison smock for television cameras--was a powerful symbol of the human rights issue that has dogged and irritated Gorbachev and the Soviet delegation throughout their stay in Geneva. Try as they might, they have not been able to shake off the issue. It will not go away.

Gorbachev tried to ignore the human rights question at his dramatic meeting with the Rev. Jesse Jackson within the Soviet compound Tuesday, but the American civil rights leader persisted and twice asked about the plight of Soviet Jews, thousands of whom have been refused permission to emigrate. Gorbachev finally denied it all.

“The so-called problem of Jews in the Soviet Union,” he said “does not exist.”

Outsiders do not know how the issue was raised during the talks between President Reagan and Gorbachev. But it emerged again and again in parades and demonstrations on the streets of Geneva and in the news conferences that Soviet officials called to sway public opinion in their own direction.

The pressure on human rights came from two sources: first, the various Jewish organizations, mainly from the United States, that came to lobby here, and, second, the various European human rights groups that have grown increasingly concerned in recent years about the abuse of rights in the Soviet Union.

Some analysts, in fact, believe that Gorbachev could swing European public opinion significantly in the weeks ahead if he allowed both Shcharansky and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei D. Sakharov, who was sentenced to five years of internal exile in the city of Gorky for subversive activity in 1980, to leave the Soviet Union.

But, although Moscow announced on the eve of the summit that it would allow 10 Soviet citizens to join their spouses or other relatives in the United States, there was no public hint from Soviet officials that anything as sensational as the release of Shcharansky and Sakharov was in store.

Avital Shcharansky was briefly detained and questioned by Geneva police late Wednesday for “causing a disturbance” near the Soviet diplomatic mission. Police alleged that she had blocked the way to the mission and drove her to police headquarters, but she was released after they checked her identity papers.

There were several outbursts at news conferences that obviously irritated Soviet officials. Irina Grivnina, a Soviet dissident who had emigrated three weeks ago and came to the summit as a reporter for a Dutch magazine, disrupted one news conference by shouting, “How many people have you imprisoned for anti-Soviet activity?”

Nikolai P. Vlasov, an exasperated Kremlin spokesman, warned, “Do we have to call the Swiss militia to remove this lady?”

When a Swiss agent tried to eject her from a second news conference the next day, Grivnina loudly resisted and, as she was being escorted out, pleaded for help from other journalists. “Help me, please, against the KGB,” she said. Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Vladimir B. Lomeiko angrily walked out, ending the session. When Gorbachev arrived in Geneva on Monday, Grivnina, standing amid the journalists, called out, “Free Sakharov.”

Both the Swiss government and many journalists were unhappy about Grivnina’s use of press credentials to put human rights pressure on the Soviet Union. The Swiss revoked her credentials, an academic matter as it turned out, because she had planned to leave Geneva the same night.

Although Raisa Gorbachev never received the letter from Avital Shcharansky, she was heckled on human rights. When she visited the University of Geneva library Tuesday, a spectator cried out, “Let the Jews out of the U.S.S.R.”

Avital’s undelivered letter, in which she expressed hope that Mrs. Gorbachev’s “basic human compassion will bring you to ask him (Gorbachev) to send my husband Anatoly free,” came up at another news conference. But Lomeiko refused to answer a question about it and called on reporters “not to violate (journalistic) ethics by putting questions of this kind.”

Various Jewish organizations held news conferences on the eve of the summit detailing what they described as abuses of Soviet Jews. With these reports, they urged President Reagan not to be taken in by promises of Gorbachev. They demanded something more concrete.

The presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan was a second issue that the Soviet officials found difficult to avoid in Geneva, though this did not cause as many emotional outbursts as the issue of human rights. Afghan guerrillas were cheered at meetings throughout town. When journalists persisted in asking questions about Afghanistan at Soviet news conferences, Soviet officials reacted defensively.

The issue even came up at a Soviet briefing on the summit itself Wednesday. “We feel it necessary to come up with a political solution,” Kremlin spokesman Leonid M. Zamyatin told the news conference. “That is the Soviet policy for the moment. If we are able to come up with a solution sooner, that would be better.”

He also contended that if the West would stop supporting the “counterrevolutionaries” who are fighting the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, the Soviets would be happy to withdraw their “limited contingent of troops” and accept a political settlement. The Soviets have never put a number on their forces in Afghanistan, which they invaded in December, 1979, but Western intelligence agencies estimate that there are more than 115,000 troops there.