Public Relations Ploy : Emigration Spurt Seen as Temporary

The Soviet Union’s sudden release this month of prominent dissidents and “refuseniks,” capped by Friday’s decision to let Inessa Fleurov and her husband go to Israel so that she can donate bone marrow to her ailing brother, holds scant hope of change in an increasingly vindictive Kremlin emigration policy, Soviet affairs experts and human-rights activists agreed Friday.

While several experts forecast that more well-known activists or Jewish dissidents will be allowed to leave the Soviet Union in coming weeks, they said that the releases likely are a public relations stratagem geared to last week’s Iceland summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

A similar flurry of emigrations occurred after the first Reagan-Gorbachev summit last November. But the flow of Soviet emigres to Vienna, the prime arrival point for those with Israeli visas, has shrunk to only 631 through September--the slowest pace of any year since 1970, according to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.

By comparison, 51,320 Soviet Jews left the Soviet Union in 1979 before the Afghanistan invasion ended detente and the Soviets began a new crackdown on internal dissent.

Picking Prominent Cases

“The future will tell, but they seem to be picking out a few selective, prominent cases and taking action on them,” Walter J. Stoessel Jr., U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, said Friday. “They get a lot of P.R. out of that, but so far it doesn’t seem to affect the basic question about Jewish emigration and emigration of other groups.”

“I don’t think you can say the three cases together make a trend,” said Susan Osnos, an official of the New York office of the human rights group Helsinki Watch. “The Russians let people out when they think they can make use of them.”

The Soviets have called some of the latest releases gestures of good will toward the United States. But American observers mostly discount that, saying instead that the pace of emigration depends on the state of U.S.-Soviet relations and the political and public-opinion values of any single release.

In October alone, the Soviets have chosen to free three people whose cases have been the object of recent publicity or intensive diplomatic efforts and, therefore, will gain unusually intense press coverage.

Dropped Demand

Fleurov was told she would be allowed to take her family to Israel, where she is to donate bone marrow to her leukemia-stricken brother, after the Soviets suddenly dropped a long-standing demand that her father-in-law waive any financial demands against her husband.

On Thursday, Jewish scientist David Goldfarb departed the Soviet Union with his wife on the jet of U.S. industrialist Armand Hammer.

Two weeks ago, exiled dissident Yuri Orlov, a veteran human rights activist of international stature, was allowed to leave as part of a complex deal that included the freeing of American journalist Nicholas Daniloff.

Those Soviet concessions followed the February release of one of the Soviet Union’s leading dissidents, Anatoly Shcharansky, in a gesture that raised new hopes for a more open Soviet emigration policy. But those hopes were dashed when the U.S. bombing of Libya last spring again sent superpower relations into the deep freeze.

Public Gestures

Moscow recently has made public gestures toward its dissidents and refuseniks, in July opening a Department of Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs in the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and later setting up a human rights commission.

But if the latest releases hint at renewed hopes for emigration, Mark B. Levin, associate director of the National Conference’s Washington office, and others said Friday, the facts suggest otherwise.

The worldwide human rights group Amnesty International knows of at least 1,000 “prisoners of conscience” in the Soviet Union and suspects the existence of tens of thousands more, said Joshua Rubenstein, the group’s northeast U.S. director in Boston.

Few are optimistic that even an improved superpower climate will free all of them.

“As that (superpower) relationship goes, so go the emigration figures,” Levin conceded. “But you have to take into consideration some internal Soviet reasons: The KGB has never been happy with any emigration at all, for instance.

“If you let the Jews go today, who’s going to want to go tomorrow?”