Soviets OK 137 Visa Requests Pressed by U.S.

The Soviet Union has approved 137 of the emigration applications pressed by a U.S. commission concerned with human rights, the panel’s chairman said Thursday.

Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), head of the commission that monitors compliance with human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki accords, said this is the first time the Soviets have directly responded to a list of cases presented by his commission.

Word of the Kremlin approval came four days before Secretary of State George P. Shultz is due to begin talks with his Soviet counterpart in Moscow, and Hoyer suggested that the announcement was timed for optimum propaganda value.

Quick Implementation Urged

Jewish emigration has increased under the glasnost --or openness--campaign of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but skeptics say it is too early to determine if that is a trend that will last.

Saying his commission received word of the approvals directly from the Soviet government, Hoyer expressed joy that the Kremlin has resolved some of the 442 cases raised by the commission last November. However, he also called for quick implementation of the decisions.

Noting that such notification in the past has sometimes been followed by years of delay, he said, “A name on a list is not a person in the United States or Israel or some other destination.”

The commission refused to release the names of those who have been granted permission to leave the Soviet Union until their relatives could be notified. However, Hoyer said that more than two-thirds of those on the list have been trying to emigrate for more than five years. Most are little-publicized cases, he said, and the majority are Soviet Jews who have asked to move to Israel.

Data on 80 Cases

The Soviets also provided the commission with information on 80 other cases, with the following disposition: Twenty people were not released due to national security reasons, they said; another 16 have not formally applied, 18 already have left, three are imprisoned, three wish to remain, five are dead and the remaining 15 could not be located, they said.

Appearing at a news conference of the Helsinki-monitoring commission was 22-year-old Boris Goldfarb, whose wife, Elena, and baby daughter, Lisa, are said to be on the list of those who will be allowed to emigrate. Goldfarb was forced to divorce his wife to be allowed to move to Silver Spring, Md., last year with other family members and has not seen her since.

He said that he had spoken with her as recently as Tuesday and that she had not been informed at that time that she would be allowed to leave.

Timed to U.S. Visits

Hoyer said it would be “unrealistic and naive” to believe that the notification was not timed with consideration of the “propaganda value” that it will lend to the meetings of top Soviet officials with Shultz and with a congressional delegation that is also about to visit the Soviet Union. The lawmakers, led by House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.) will depart today; Shultz will leave Saturday.

However, Hoyer also noted that as recently as 1985 the Soviets had shown the commission “a cynical, unresponsive confrontational treatment of the issue of human rights. It has changed.”

The commission, known officially as the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, was established by the government in 1976 to monitor compliance with the Helsinki Final Act. The agreement was signed by 33 Western and Eastern European nations, as well as Canada and the United States. Although it does not have the force of law, it is considered a political commitment.

Its humanitarian provisions include support for freer movement of people among the nations, with an emphasis on family reunification.