Refusenik Wants Wife to Get Treatment in U.S. : Visa Plea for Cancer Victim Sent to Gorbachev

Naum Meiman, a 74-year-old mathematician who for more than decade has been refused permission to emigrate, said Monday he has renewed his efforts to win Soviet permission for his cancer-stricken wife to leave the country for medical treatment in the United States.

Meiman met with a group of reporters in his apartment and read his appeal addressed to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on behalf of his wife, Inna Kitrosskaya, who is suffering cancer of the neck.

“Close the door, please,” he said at one point. “I don’t want Inna to hear.”

He said she was waiting in the kitchen for the visitors to leave, and that he “wrote all this without her knowledge.

“This is our only hope,” he added.

Invitations from Abroad

Meiman said his wife has received invitations for treatment from Indiana University and the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York if the Soviet authorities would allow her to leave the country. Other invitations came from France, Israel and Sweden. But so far, he said, they have refused to let her go.

He said the only way to reach Gorbachev is through the Western press.

“Refusenik” Meiman is the only remaining Moscow member of a group of citizens formed to monitor Soviet compliance with the 1975 Helsinki accords on human rights.

He said he raised his wife’s case with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) when Kennedy visited Moscow earlier this month and has since renewed the plea in a letter to Kennedy.

“Refusal to let my wife go for treatment dooms her to death by slow torture,” Meiman said he told Kennedy in the letter. “I am convinced that your personal appeal to General Secretary (of the Communist Party) Gorbachev could win permission for Inna to go to the United States for treatment or, perhaps, even for the two of us to emigrate. Of course, Mr. Gorbachev would find it extremely undesirable to have the West link his name with such Soviet cruelty.”

Security Risk

Meiman said authorities have told his wife that her marriage to him in 1981 made her a security risk because of his work on a secret project in 1955 at the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

“My wife is being sacrificed to the imaginary security of the Soviet Union,” he said.

Meiman, a man with twinkling eyes under wispy white hair, said his wife, who is 53, teaches English but knows no more than a grade-school pupil about mathematics.

He said he had worked with Anatoly Shcharansky, the Jewish dissident who was freed last week in an East-West exchange of prisoners. He said he was called as a witness in Shcharansky’s trial as a spy, in 1978, but refused to testify in “that shambles.”

The refusal to grant his wife a visa for medical treatment, he said, shows that Shcharansky’s release was part of a “political game” the Soviet authorities are playing.

Still, he said, Gorbachev might decide to approve her departure if the appeal could penetrate the Kremlin bureaucracy and receive his personal attention.