Key to Summit Success, He Says : U.S. Aide Urges Soviets to Loosen Emigration

A senior U.S. official visiting Moscow said Sunday that the Soviet Union must loosen its rules on emigration if it wants next month’s U.S.-Soviet summit in Washington to be a success.

Addressing a group of about 75 Soviet citizens who have been refused visas to leave the country, Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead said he will meet today with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze and a top aide on humanitarian issues.

“We’ll tell the Soviets that if they want the summit to be successful, they’ve got to change their emigration policy,” Whitehead said. “No country has the right to keep people in a prison within its borders when they want to leave.”

While the Kremlin has been more lenient on allowing people to leave the country in recent months, he said, Washington will continue to work on behalf of free emigration “so long as there is a single one of you left here,” he added.

Whitehead arrived Sunday for a final set of talks on human rights with his Soviet counterparts in advance of the meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev starting Dec. 7 in Washington.

In Whitehead’s audience at the U.S. Embassy were two Soviet women married to Americans who were told just last Friday that they had permission to leave.

Galina Goltsman-Michelson, a white-haired woman whose husband, Anatoly, defected to the United States in 1956, was delighted at news that she would be allowed to join him.

In the past, she said, her case had been considered hopeless because the Soviet Union refused to allow emigration of family members in cases of defection.

“I lived without any hope at all,” she said in an interview. “I can’t even imagine what it is to live a free life--we never had anything like that here.” Her husband, she said, telephoned her from the United States to confirm that she had obtained permission.

“He didn’t believe it,” she said. “Then he told me to make sure to take a direct flight that doesn’t make any stops.”

Yelena Kaplan, who has been waiting for more than nine years to join her husband, Gary Talanov of Auburn, Calif., recalled that she began to cry when she heard the long-awaited word that she would get an exit visa.

But she said she will not start celebrating until she has the exit visa in her hand because of her unhappy experiences with the visa-issuing bureaucracy in the past.

Whitehead’s trip marked the first involvement of the State Department’s second-ranking official in a pre-summit meeting on human rights. Previously, his duties were taken by lower-level diplomats.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz said recently, however, that Shevardnadze suggested a new plan for dealing with such cases, indicating that Moscow was placing greater importance on resolving some longstanding disagreements.

Jews, ethnic Germans and Armenians--the groups who have made up the bulk of Soviet emigrants--are being allowed to leave in much larger numbers than at any time since 1979.

The government has reported that five times as many Soviet Jews have emigrated in 1987 as in 1986, for example, and the upward trend is steady. More than 51,000 Jews left the country in 1979.

For some persons at the U.S. Embassy gathering, however, nothing has changed--they remain refuseniks. Naum Meiman, 76, still is barred from leaving the country on grounds that more than 30 years ago, he had a job dealing with classified matters.

Sergei Petrov, a photographer who has been waiting more than six years for an exit visa to join his American wife, said he is concerned that the fewer the number of divided spouses who remain, the more difficult it will be to emigrate.

“Before the Geneva summit in 1985, the Soviet Union allowed eight of its citizens to join their spouses in the United States, but for this summit they have just permitted two persons to leave,” he said. “We are afraid we are going to be used as bargaining chips.”

Solomon Alber, a mathematician who has been refused an exit visa for 13 years, listened with interest to Whitehead’s remarks, then sighed, “For me, nothing has changed.”