Soviets to Allow Marrow Donor, Family to Leave

Soviet authorities cleared the way Friday for the sister of a cancer-stricken Israeli biochemist to leave the country in order to provide a bone-marrow transplant that could save his life.

Inessa Fleurov, a 37-year-old sociologist, has been trying for eight months to go to Israel and had been granted personal permission to leave. But she had been held up by the Soviets’ refusal to allow her husband to leave with her. She received word Friday that her husband would be allowed to join her and their two children.

Her husband, Viktor, 38, a physicist, said Friday that he was given a card certifying that he has permission to leave. He said the family intends to fly to Israel in about two weeks, praying that it will not be too late to save the life of his wife’s ailing brother, Mikhail Shirman, 30.

Visa for Husband

In Washington, a State Department official said Viktor Fleurov had been granted a visa “and it looks like the whole family’s coming out.” The official did not have definite confirmation of the report from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

In New York, Shirman heard the news when he phoned his wife in Israel from the Lincoln Square Synagogue, where he was holding a news conference to call attention to his plight. She had talked to his sister and relayed the report.

“It’s a miracle,” he exclaimed, “but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Shirman said he expects to return to Tel Aviv, his home, next week.

“We hope my operation will be successful,” Shirman said. “I feel that I have now more potential to fight . . . my disease.”

His doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where he has been undergoing chemotherapy, described Shirman’s condition as “precarious” because the leukemia is advanced and said he had a 30% chance of survival with the transplant.

Approval of an exit visa for Viktor Fleurov was the latest in a series of steps by Soviet officials resolving cases involving humanitarian issues.

In recent weeks, the well known dissident Yuri Orlov, a human rights activist, has been released from Siberian exile and flown out of the country, and poet Irina Ratushinskaya, imprisoned in the Ukraine for slandering the state, has been freed.

On Thursday, David Goldfarb, a longtime “refusenik” who was credited by the American journalist Nicholas Daniloff with helping him avoid a trap set by the KGB, the state security and espionage agency, flew to the United States on American industrialist Armand Hammer’s plane.

Other Cases

In addition, three Soviet spouses of Americans have been granted exit visas after years of waiting, and two leaders of an unofficial peace group have been sent out of the country.

Western diplomats here speculated that the Kremlin is trying to resolve some of the most publicized emigration and prisoner cases in the hope of blunting criticism of its human rights record at a conference early next month in Vienna to review compliance with the 1975 Helsinki accords on human rights.

In the bone marrow case, the Soviet authorities acted after they were depicted in news reports around the world as callous and uncaring for refusing to allow a sister to aid her dying brother.

Shirman, his head nearly bald from chemotherapy treatments that have checked his disease, was in Reykjavik last week, the site of the Soviet-American summit conference, to dramatize his sister’s effort to emigrate and to lobby Soviet officials to grant his brother-in-law a visa.

Viktor Fleurov said Friday that he believes that he was finally granted permission to leave because of Shirman’s appearance in Reykjavik.

Advised to Emigrate

At first, Inessa Fleurov asked permission to leave Moscow only temporarily. But authorities at her workplace refused to approve her application, partly on grounds that the Soviet Union does not have diplomatic relations with Israel. Officials advised her to emigrate instead.

She and her two daughters received permission to leave the country last August, after six months of trying. But her husband was stopped from going because his 75-year-old father balked at signing a waiver of financial claims, though the two had not seen each other for more than 20 years.

Without the waiver, Soviet officials said, Viktor Fleurov could not be given the exit visa that is needed to leave the country.

“I was torn between helping my brother and abandoning my husband,” Inessa Fleurov said at one point.

Refused to Quit

The family refused to give up, however, and Inessa Fleurov delayed her departure in the hope that the authorities would relent and issue a visa for her husband. He refused to eat for a time, as a way of protesting.

“I feel physically exhausted,” Viktor Fleurov told reporters as he relayed the news about Friday’s decision. He said he was granted permission to leave without the financial waiver the authorities had previously said was essential.

Last week, the Fleurovs were detained for two hours after trying to unfurl near Communist Party headquarters here a banner saying, “Don’t Separate Our Family.”

On Sunday, the official Soviet news agency Tass said Inessa Fleurov was being used by “Zionist circles” to create anti-Soviet feelings in the West. There was no official comment Friday on the Fleurov case.