Can We Take Soviet Easing Seriously? : Sakharov Is Released, but Emigration Rules Are Tightened

Last month, as Andrei D. Sakharov was being released from exile, the Supreme Soviet issued a new decree restricting emigration. How seriously should the West take these actions?

While waiting for the next chapter in the Sakharov saga to unfold, it would be useful to recall that all of the members of the Helsinki Monitoring Group--organized by human-rights activists to measure Moscow’s compliance with the commitments that it made in the 1975 Helsinki accords--continue to languish in Soviet labor camps or Siberian exile or have managed to get out of the Soviet Union. The release of individual activists, eager as we are for their freedom, must be seen as a deception aimed at relieving pressure against the Soviets for their human-rights violations.

By the same token, the new immigration rules offer little hope that the Kremlin intends to reverse the sharp decline in the number of Jews permitted to emigrate--from 51,000 in 1979 to fewer than 900 in 1986. Nor have I heard anything at the 11-month Helsinki review conference, which began in Vienna in November and where I serve as a public member of the U.S. delegation, to persuade me that the Soviets have any intention of living up to their human-rights promises in Helsinki.

The new emigration rules are deeply disappointing. Especially troubling is the failure to recognize emigration as a right, making any application subject to Soviet whim. Equally depressing is the omission of any reference to repatriation, under which thousands of ethnic Germans and others have received permission to emigrate in recent years and which, if applied to Jews, could be used to justify large-scale departures to Israel.

Any future Jewish emigration now appears limited to family reunification, and here the new law actually is more restrictive than previous practice. The first step in the process is an invitation from a relative abroad. (About 400,000 such invitations have been sent to would-be Jewish emigrants still living in the Soviet Union.) Under the latest decree, such invitations now must come from immediate family members: parents, children, spouses and siblings. In the past, such invitations have been accepted from grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Now Soviet Jews without first-degree relatives abroad are barred from emigrating.

In addition to these restrictions, the newly promulgated regulations list no fewer than nine reasons for denying requests to emigrate. One of them is a catch-all provision that gives the authorities the right to reject applicants on grounds of “ensuring the protection of social order, health or the morals of the population”--language broad enough to refuse every prospective emigrant. If this were not serious enough, the new decree also bars emigration “if the person abroad extending the invitation has violated Soviet law”--an attempt to punish alleged lawbreakers who live outside the jurisdiction of Soviet authority by penalizing their relatives inside the workers’ paradise.

Thus the decree is no “far-reaching” effort toward “serious reforms,” as the Soviet foreign ministry claims, but rather a tightening of existing restrictive policies. At the same time, the harsh treatment of Jews who seek to teach Hebrew, or who have made public their frustrations at being rejected for emigration year after year--some of them for a decade or more--continues unabated. Despite the much-publicized release of dissident Anatoly Shcharansky, Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, we know that the number of Jewish prisoners of conscience in Soviet camps and jails has doubled since Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power. Harassment and intimidation by the KGB are increasing. As the level of emigration falls to its lowest figure in 15 years, the pressures on Jews rise. They cannot live as Jews, and they cannot leave--and all the Soviet efforts at deceiving the West into believing that a new era has begun cannot change that fact.

In Vienna the Soviet line was that the numbers of the three main “baskets” that were adopted in Helsinki reflected their urgency and priority. Basket I deals with security and borders in Europe. Basket II deals with trade and commercial contacts. As far as the Soviet delegation is concerned, these items by far transcend the human-rights and family-reunification provisions of Basket III.

The American view, as expressed by Ambassador Warren Zimmerman, head of the U.S. delegation to the Helsinki review conference, is that all three baskets are of equal importance and stand in delicate balance with one another. Soviet performance in keeping its international human-rights commitments, Zimmerman argued, was essential to any hope of achieving agreement in matters of trade and--more important--security, which includes arms control.

If those in the Kremlin cannot be trusted to keep their word on human rights--as evidenced by their failure to honor their Helsinki commitments, which hardly affect their security--how can they be trusted on arms control, which so profoundly affects our security?

More than a few Americans, including members of the Senate, will ask this question when and if the day ever comes to ratify a treaty with the Kremlin that limits nuclear or conventional weapons as a means of preventing war. Human rights thus become a critical element, not a sideshow as the Soviets claim them to be, in the development of understanding and trust between the two superpowers.

If the Soviets continue to reject the urgings of Western statesmen, led by President Reagan, to improve the way they treat their people and to open the gates of emigration, the chances of early progress in improving the atmosphere between Washington and Moscow are dreary indeed.