Soviet Official Links Exit Visas to Key Research

The Soviet government will permit the emigration of Soviet citizens who have already applied to leave the country unless they have been involved in military research, according to a senior Kremlin official.

“I don’t think we will force any one of them to stay who wants to leave,” Alexander N. Yakovlev, the newest member of the ruling Politburo and key adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, said in an interview.

Yakovlev, responding to questions about the fate of “refuseniks,” those who have been denied permission to emigrate, said their previous applications are being reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

He said that those who have worked on “military projects” would not be allowed to leave the country but that “as far as all the others are concerned, they are welcome to leave.”

Backlog Estimated at 12,000

He referred to a backlog of pending applications and was not signaling a new liberalization of emigration policy. The backlog, estimated by Soviet officials at 12,000, includes some individuals who are reapplying to emigrate after being denied permission as well as those whose cases are pending.

Critics of Moscow’s emigration policy have charged that it defines military research too broadly, thus preventing the emigration of anyone who has even a tenuous relationship, past or present, with the military.

Yakovlev denied charges by human rights organizations in the West that tens of thousands of Soviet citizens want to emigrate.

Emigration, primarily involving Jews, has been a controversial issue between the Soviet Union and the United States. The number of Jewish emigrants peaked at more than 51,000 in 1979 but fell to fewer than 1,000 last year.

On Jan. 1, the Soviet Union put into effect a set of rules governing emigration. The new law allows emigration for purposes such as family reunion, although it defines families only as immediate relatives. Critics contend that, in general, the law treats emigration as a privilege, not a right.

Party Partly to Blame

In a two-hour interview, rarely granted by Politburo members, Yakovlev said the present campaign for more democracy in the Soviet Union will have to “begin with the Communist Party itself.” But he acknowledged that the party, which runs the government in the Soviet Union, bears part of the responsibility for economic and social ills.

“The party is part of society and suffers the same illnesses as society,” Yakovlev said. “Sometimes illnesses start with the party. Yet we believe that in this period of reconstruction through glasnost (openness) and criticism, the prestige of the party has increased. We are in a stage now where we can go deeper with our democracy.”

He said the Soviet legal code is being rewritten to include clear procedures for individuals to appeal the decisions of officials and courts.

“What we are talking about,” he said, “is an optimal level of social justice, and we have to provide a process of appeals of firings and fines because a judge cannot know everything.”

Although Yakovlev is known to be a prime architect of the new policy of glasnost, he made it clear that his government is “not going to move toward Western-style democracy, now or ever.”

‘Socialist Democracy’

Scorning parliamentary politics and a free-market consumer economy, Yakovlev said the emphasis will be on “socialist democracy,” including direct election of factory and farm officials. He predicted that this will lead to a vast decentralization of decision-making in the highly concentrated Soviet economic and political system.

A former exchange student at New York’s Columbia University, Yakovlev was Soviet ambassador to Canada for nearly a decade. In the interview, which took place in his office at the Communist Party Central Committee (he also holds the post of party secretary), he alternated between English and Russian.

Yakovlev, who was elected a candidate member of the Politburo last January and now has authority over cultural matters, dismissed mass Western culture as “decadent.” He said his government will do “everything to prevent the domination of Soviet mass culture by imports from the West.”

“We are going to do what is in our power,” he said, “to make it impossible for violent and pornographic films to penetrate here.”

Favors Artistic Freedom

But he said he favors much greater artistic freedom than there has been here in the past, and added:

“There are currently no movies in the Soviet Union that are being held back from public release because of their content, as had often been the practice in the past.”

He spoke approvingly of the movie “Repentance,” one of the films formerly held on the shelf by Soviet censors, which has been exhibited recently and hailed as a condemnation of terror tactics employed in the Stalin era.

“It was artistically and politically very interesting, and it would be good to show the movie in Chile and South Africa,” Yakovlev said.

He said there is a growing trend against restrictions in publishing and the arts.

“For us there is no question about it,” he said. “The trend is to give more and more rights over publishing to film, book and magazine editors.”

Referring to the movie industry, Yakovlev said: “The democratically elected leaders of the cinema unions now have the full power to determine the production and release of films. It’s their business.”

He said he is not interested in imposing his personal cultural tastes on others.

There is an increasing amount of rock music being performed in public arenas, he said, and added:

“I personally don’t like rock ‘n’ roll, but if my grandchildren like it, let them. If it’s on my TV, I turn it off, but if someone else likes it, why not?”

Hard Line Toward U.S.

Yakovlev is a strong advocate of domestic reform, and he has a reputation for following a hard-line policy toward the United States.

He indicated that a recent spate of Soviet concessions on arms control issues has come to an end unless U.S. leaders give a more positive response.

Other top officials interviewed in Moscow expressed pessimism at the possibility of Soviet-U.S. movement toward deep cuts in strategic weapons because of what they perceive as U.S. intransigence on the Strategic Defense Initiative, President Reagan’s proposed space-based missile defense system.

Despite Gorbachev’s recent offer to negotiate separately on medium-range missiles in Europe, Yakovlev repeated a point heard repeatedly in official circles that any cuts in strategic weapons will depend on a narrow interpretation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that bars testing and deployment of weapons in space.

He said that past Soviet concessions, along with the unilateral 18-month Soviet moratorium on nuclear tests that ended recently, caused some criticism of Gorbachev within the Soviet Union.

“You do not recognize our problems,” he said. “You recognize only your own problems. We made no tests while the U.S. made tests. How can we prove to an ordinary man that the U.S. is not preparing for war? If your neighbor is sharpening his knife, he must be doing it for a reason.”

Desire for Better Ties

Yakovlev, who met recently with a delegation of influential Americans, including former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the former ambassador to the United Nations, said he is impressed by what he called growing American sentiment for improved U.S. relations with the Soviet Union.

But he charged that the Reagan Administration has resisted any such change and remains in the grip of “50 or 60 people in the U.S. who do not like this country for personal reasons--they are not serious.”

He said many experts in the United States misunderstand Soviet foreign and domestic policy because “they think the world revolves around the U.S. and the whole world must become just like the Americans.”

Yakovlev insisted that “democratization within the Soviet Union will follow a very different model than the American one--which is our business. We don’t insist that you follow our model.”

The emerging Soviet model, Yakovlev said, will attempt “direct democracy” based on decisions made by local work collectives. Farms and factories will be managed by directors elected in competitive, secret elections that, he said, are already under way in some places.

A Check on Party’s Power

“We are providing greater numbers of candidates and secret elections (for directors’ posts),” he said, “but this does not mean we are going closer to your system of democracy. We are going further apart. Workers in your country will never be able to replace the owners and directors of a plant by secret ballot, because that would mean socialist revolution.”

Discussing laws being drafted, Yakovlev said the growing power of decentralized collectives will serve as a check on the Communist Party in the future.

“In the coming development, power over many things will be given over to the collectives,” he said. “Let them decide what is sufficient change.”

The real test of Gorbachev’s new program, he said, will be whether it allows the Soviet economy to match the achievements of the United States and other Western countries.

In the Soviet Union, he said, the key to success will be new standards requiring factories and farms to make a profit and pay for such social benefits as housing and recreation facilities.

Yakovlev acknowledged that there has been resistance to the new program by workers who fear loss of their jobs and by managers who shun responsibility for making difficult decisions.

“We are in a developing process and there is no guarantee against mistakes,” he said. “Nor does it mean that we know how to do everything. But practice and the joint intellect of the people will show us how to do it. So everything is still ahead of us.”