Let Ideas Flow Freely, Reagan Urges Soviets

President Reagan, setting out one of the issues he hopes to develop during next month’s Moscow summit conference, challenged Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Sunday to tear down the “grim, invisible wall of oppression” that prohibits the flow of ideas and information between East and West.

“We have been too long divided, East from West,” the President said. “Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev, that our peoples might come to know one another--and together, build the world anew.”

In a speech reviewing the scope of U.S.-Soviet relations and their shifts over the past decade, the President said that just as he challenged Gorbachev last June to tear down the Berlin Wall, he is now calling on the Soviet leader to open the borders of the Communist world to the prosperity and creativity of the West.

Addressing the annual convention of the National Assn. of Broadcasters, Reagan said: “The Soviets and their clients must open their countries to ever-wider freedoms. Or they will see their economies--indeed their whole way of life--fall further and further behind.”

Optimistic on Afghanistan

But even as he laid out some of the differences that separate the United States and the Soviet Union, he spoke optimistically about the anticipated signing of an agreement under which the Soviets would withdraw their estimated 115,000 troops from Afghanistan. With the final obstacles to an accord apparently cleared away by talks completed last week in Geneva, officials have said an agreement, guaranteed by the United States and the Soviet Union, is expected to be signed later this week.

“If that accord is complied with and the Soviets withdraw irrevocably from that long-suffering country, this will be a great victory for its heroic people--whom we shall continue to support,” Reagan said in his speech. “It will also be a major contribution to the improvement of East-West relations.”

Asked as he arrived in Las Vegas whether “a deal” was in the offing to resolve the eight-year war between Afghan and Soviet troops on the one hand and U.S.-supported rebels on the other, the President replied, “We’re very optimistic, but nothing has been signed yet.”

With diminishing likelihood that U.S. and Soviet negotiators will be able to reach an agreement on a treaty limiting the superpowers’ arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons in time for the summit, which begins May 29, Reagan and his senior aides are focusing, in public and private comments, on other issues likely to be addressed during the five-day meeting.

Reflecting the uncertainty about progress on efforts to trim the long-range nuclear weaponry by 50%, Reagan said:

“We do not yet know whether we can reach an agreement with the Soviets on such a dramatic reduction in strategic arms in time for the Moscow summit. But the negotiations are going forward, earnestly and in good faith. That in itself is historic.”

But then, in his first lengthy comments on the impact of the revolution in technology and communications on East-West relations, the President told the broadcasters that just as the Berlin Wall divides East from West, “there is another wall that divides us, an invisible wall.”

“It is the wall the Communist world has erected against the free flow of information and ideas,” the President said. “It is the wall that prevents the Communist world from joining the West in this new age--this dazzling new age--of prosperity and creativity.”

And so, he said, “I challenge Mr. Gorbachev here today before the summit in Moscow--challenge him to tear down this other wall, this grim, invisible wall of oppression.

“I challenge Mr. Gorbachev to open the Soviet Union more fully to Western media. Western newspapers and journals should become freely available to Soviet citizens. Soviet airwaves should be opened to Western broadcasts. And, yes, the Soviets should open their country to books, all books.”

He singled out the works of “a great man and a historic author,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident author who wrote starkly about the terrors of Soviet life during the Stalin years and who now lives in the United States.

Reagan contrasted the impact that “economic and technological creativity” have had on the West with what he called the “vast economic stagnation” in the Communist world.

“Today the Soviet Union cannot--and remember, this is some seven decades after the (Bolshevik) revolution--cannot feed its own people,” he said, adding that the average Soviet family must spend two hours in daily shopping as a result of shortages.

After the speech, Reagan flew to Washington.