Light Candle for World Peace, Soviet Girl Urges as Tour Starts

Soviet schoolgirl Katya Lycheva began a 12-day visit to the United States today with a talking teddy bear, breakfast under the glare of television lights and a plea for world peace.

“If everyone who wants peace lit a candle . . . , there would be no dark spots left,” the slim, smiling, sandy-haired 11-year-old from Moscow said. “The sun would be as bright as all those candles . . . when they’re lit from the very heart.”

Katya had breakfast with two dozen primary-school pupils seated at a white-tableclothed “chef’s table” in a hotel kitchen. She then tagged along as the American students went to their school, the LaSalle Language Academy.

Her visit, sponsored by the San Francisco-based Children as the Peacemakers Foundation, was billed as a peace trip in memory of Samantha Smith, the Maine schoolgirl whose letter to late Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov resulted in a visit to the Soviet Union. Smith was killed last summer in a plane crash.

The Russian girl was accompanied by her mother, Marina Ignatieva, a researcher at the Institute of Economics.