Soviets Must Change Rights Policy, Hart Says

The Soviet government is “much too repressive” in human rights cases and must change its policy, Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) said Wednesday.

Hart blamed “tremendous bureaucratic opposition” rather than the Kremlin leadership for continuing difficulties in emigration from the Soviet Union.

“Even if General Secretary (Mikhail S.) Gorbachev wanted to affect a few of these cases, he couldn’t get his own bureaucracy to respond,” Hart said at a news conference.

Hart, a front-runner to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 1988, has had two days of talks here this week with Gorbachev and other Soviet officials. Wednesday’s comments came after a Russian woman, Ludmilla Yevsupova, told him that her family had suffered reprisals because of attempts over a period of nine years to leave the country.

Yevsupova said her father was placed in a psychiatric hospital and her 24-year-old brother was twice sent to a prison camp for refusing to serve in the Soviet army. The brother, she said, fears that army service would prevent him from emigrating because the government could contend that he had learned military secrets and thus could not be permitted to leave the country.

Father Held in Clinic

She said her brother has been in a prison camp at Labutnangy, north of the Arctic Circle, for four months and has been advised that he will not be released until he forgets about leaving the country.

Her father, she said, was placed in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow on July 19 and later transferred to a clinic about 65 miles south of here. Doctors have told her he cannot be released, she said, unless he abandons his hope of emigrating.

Hart, who agreed to take up her case with Soviet officials, said the Soviet Union does not realize the impact of its rigid emigration policy on the thinking of the American people. Soviet leaders have said that emigration is a domestic matter and have accused public figures in the United States of using the issue for political advantage.

Hart said he has heard this “traditional point of view” but with a less dogmatic tone.

“I sense a very different style of government,” he said. “I believe this leadership is trying to make reforms and changes, particularly at home. . . . It is more open in the sense of a willingness to listen, to debate and not just to lecture.”

Mentions Sakharov Case

But he said there will have to be more improvements in the Soviet human rights record before the United States can take part in a humanitarian conference that the Soviets have proposed.

Specifically, Hart advocated a change in the exile status of Nobel laureate Andrei D. Sakharov, the granting of exit visas for Soviet spouses of American citizens and permission for many Jewish “refuseniks” to emigrate.

Meanwhile, a Soviet woman who is married to an American said she has received permission to go to Israel if she will renounce her Soviet citizenship.

“It’s fine--I just want to join my husband,” she said.

The woman, Sonia Melnikova, 40, is married to Michael Levine, a writer for an advertising agency in San Francisco. She said she first applied to emigrate to Israel in 1979 and then, after marrying Levine two years ago, asked for permission to go to the United States. She said she was refused three times--the last time two weeks ago.

Her husband is on his way to Moscow on a scheduled visit, she said, and they hope to return to the United States together in about two weeks.