Soviet Delegate Hits U.S. Over ‘Cultural Genocide’

The Soviet Union attacked the United States today as a haven of “cultural and physical genocide” as a six-week cultural forum of 35 nations broke down in disarray without approval of a final document.

The attack came less than a week after the generally upbeat summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and followed the breakdown of intense negotiations between Eastern and Western nations over a final report.

At an East Bloc news conference, G. A. Ivanov, deputy chief of the Soviet delegation at the forum, delivered a scathing attack in which he described the United States as a country where “we have glaring examples of infringements of human rights and where censorship, direct or indirect, has been practically rampant.”

“The United States is also a country where cultural and physical genocide has been practiced, where we see examples of racism and anti-Semitism,” he said.

The East Bloc attack and the lack of a final document scuttled the high hopes many participants had voiced for progress at the forum, an outgrowth of the 1975 Helsinki human rights accords and the first such event to be held in a Warsaw Pact country.

At a separate news conference, leaders of the Western delegations expressed disappointment at the lack of a final report but said the forum itself was a step toward expanding cultural communications between East and West. More than 700 delegates, the majority of them artists, writers, architects or other practitioners of the arts, participated in the event.

“We regret only that in the end the differences were too basic to resolve,” said U.S. delegation chief Walter Stoessel.