4 Soviets Tried U.S., Decide to Go Home

Four Soviet citizens, at a rare news conference, announced today that they are returning home because their hopes for a better life were not fulfilled in America.

“I feel that in the Soviet Union I will be much freer than I am here,” said Yuri Chapovsky, at 27 the youngest and best-educated of the group.

While two of the others stressed that they wanted to be reunited with their families, Chapovsky, a Georgia Tech graduate, is leaving his parents and brother behind in Atlanta. “They obviously reacted very badly,” he said.

Chapovsky said his reasons for going home were personal and political.

Could Not Find a Job

He said he could not find a job, despite a master’s degree, and had compared the situation in the United States with “words like democracy and freedom” that he had heard before emigrating here.

“We had a chance to compare the two things,” Chapovsky said. “The words did not match the deeds.”

Appearing before television cameras at the Soviet information office near DuPont Circle, each of the four told his story of emigrating and then deciding to go back. Two, Chapovsky and Israel Glickman, are Jewish.

Film maker Rashid Atamalibekov, who described himself as an atheist, said he missed the culture of his homeland.

Talking through a translator, the 54-year-old resident of Jersey City, N.J., said he had come to America in 1979 “to look at Western society not as a tourist but as a resident.”

Besides, Atamalibekov said, he had had a disagreement--he called it in Russian “a kind of scandal”--with his superior while working on his last film in the Soviet Union.

‘Looked at Everything’

“So he says he lived here, he looked at everything, and now he wants to return to his own country,” said the translator, Igor Bulag.

The two others, Glickman, 61, and Alexander Belikim, 41, had the least to say. They also will be the first to go home, next week.

Glickman emigrated to Dallas from Odessa in 1974 and has worked as a laborer. His wife, daughter and two grandchildren remained behind in Odessa.

Belikim, who emigrated to New York in 1977, was a clothing worker. Why was he going home? “He loves his motherland and his parents,” the Soviet official said.