The Clamor Will Go On

The shopworn excuse of Soviet officials trying to justify the lack of free emigration for Russians is that too many of the people who want to leave know state secrets, the disclosure of which abroad could harm Soviet national security. Vladimir Slepak was one of those who heard this excuse. For 17 years, ending only two months ago, Slepak was denied an exit visa. What state secrets did Slepak possess? He was a radio engineer. But because he lost his job as soon as he applied to emigrate to Israel in 1970, and because Soviet technology in those days was far behind that of the Western world, Slepak says that his technical expertise didn’t extend much beyond the archaic vacuum tube. The only conceivable secret he might have had is that the Soviet Union had a lot of technical catching up to do, and that was hardly a secret at all.

Lately Soviet officials, General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev among them, have added a new canard to justify restrictive immigration policies. The real motive for foreign pressures in behalf of Soviet emigration, they say, is not selfless humanitarianism but a wish by the U.S. and other Western governments to subject the Soviet Union to an injurious brain drain. It is, in short, just another insidious plot to undermine the Soviet state by luring away its best and brightest. Family reunification, the chance to escape from religious or cultural persecution, the basic right to pick up and re-establish one’s life elsewhere--these have nothing to do with it.

The Soviets, in fact, have been getting quite testy lately on emigration and other human-rights issues, knowing that President Reagan is determined to raise them at this week’s summit meeting and knowing that they will be on the defensive. Last Sunday 200,000 people rallied in Washington in behalf of human rights in the Soviet Union, including emigration for Jews and others who want to leave. The next day the official Soviet news agency Tass shrilly proclaimed that Americans had no business pointing fingers, given the imperfections in their own society. Those imperfections, including the survival of racial and religious bigotry, certainly do exist. The great difference, of course, as Tass well knows, is that they aren’t state-encouraged prejudices as, for example, anti-Semitism continues to be in the Soviet Union.

Whether Soviet officials like it or not, it seems clear that the clamor in this country and elsewhere in behalf of greater human rights for Soviet citizens is going to go on. Demands will continue for more liberal emigration policies and, as the letter this week to Gorbachev from more than 260 congressmen shows, for increased freedom of religion. To urge these things does not constitute unacceptable interference in Soviet internal affairs, as Moscow indignantly alleges. To urge these things is instead to recognize that moral standards must have a paramount place in the conduct of human affairs, whatever political barriers national boundaries may impose.