Soviets Give Ailing Wife of Dissident Visa to Go to U.S.

The wife of a well-known Soviet dissident said Thursday that she has been granted an exit visa and will leave the Soviet Union on Sunday to receive cancer treatment in the United States.

Inna Kitrosskaya and her husband, Naum Meiman, had been seeking permission for him to accompany her to the West, but Soviet authorities refused to allow it.

She said she is leaving with “mixed feelings” because Meiman could not go along.

Kitrosskaya, 53, said she has been feeling very weak over the last two weeks and is anxious to begin therapy for the neck cancer she has suffered since 1983.

Meiman, 76, was a founding member of the Helsinki Group that monitored Soviet compliance with human rights accords of the 1975 Conference on European Security and Cooperation in the Finnish capital. The group disbanded because most of its members were exiled, imprisoned or forced to emigrate.

He has been denied permission to emigrate on the grounds that he did some classified mathematics calculations 30 years ago.

Kitrosskaya has had four operations since 1983 in an effort to arrest her cancer. She said no advanced treatment is available in the Soviet Union and has sought permission to be treated in the West for the last three years.