Reagan Blames Emigre Snags on Bureaucrats

President Reagan, apparently trying to avoid further public sparring with Mikhail S. Gorbachev on human rights near the end of the Moscow summit, suggested Wednesday that Soviet barriers to emigration for Jews and others are less the fault of deliberate policy than of hidebound bureaucrats.

Three times during his final news conference at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence, the President fended off reporters’ questions about Soviet emigration policy by saying all governments share a common problem with intransigent bureaucrats.

His remarks seemed likely to incur criticism from human rights groups in the West. They have long argued, as have specialists on the Soviet Union, that curbs on the movements of Soviet citizens--while complicated by bureaucracy--are rooted in an old, authoritarian and often anti-Semitic culture where the will of the state prevails over law and emigration is equated with betrayal.

Spokesmen for American Jewish groups appeared initially inclined to give Reagan the benefit of the doubt, however. In Washington, Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, said that Reagan’s remarks evidently were “a diplomatic way of trying to save face for the Soviets after he had made the point as loudly, dramatically and vigorously as he could.”

“From the perspective of our concern, it really doesn’t matter (what Reagan said) as long as the objective is obtained. If tomorrow they (refuseniks) deal with the ‘bureaucracy’ and come out by the thousands, that’s fine,” Foxman said.

And Jerry Strouber, a spokesman for the National Conference of Soviet Jewry, said, “Our clear sense is that the President raised the issue in a forceful fashion and is now waiting for a Soviet response.”

Reagan first suggested that bureaucrats were mainly at fault in his remarks Tuesday to students at Moscow State University.

Asked in his news conference Wednesday whether Soviet curbs on emigration are not a willful policy of the government, Reagan replied, “No, I can’t say that.”

“I don’t know that much about the system,” he said, “but it was a question (that) was presented to me on the basis that it possibly was a bureaucratic bungle.”

Reagan then told an illustrative story from his wartime experience about efforts to dispose of filing cabinets full of useless documents. Permission finally came down the chain of command to do so, the President recalled, “providing copies were made of each file destroyed.”

Not Excusing Gorbachev

Asked whether he was excusing Gorbachev for a deliberate denial of a basic human right to which Moscow formally subscribes, Reagan, who appeared fatigued at the end of four days of summitry, repeated his stand.

“No,” he said. “But I just have to believe that in any government some of us do find ourselves bound in by bureaucracy, and then sometimes you have to stomp your foot and say, unmistakably, ‘I want it done.’ And then maybe you get through with it.”

Reagan added: “But I have great confidence in his (Gorbachev’s) ability to do that.”

His efforts to avoid an awkward diplomatic situation at the end of the summit seemed to reflect a generally positive mood and the feeling of U.S. officials that a healthy dialogue on human rights is now under way between the superpowers.

Reagan said he had taken pains to explain to Gorbachev that American insistence on raising human rights issues--the principles as well as specific cases--was not an effort to interfere in internal Soviet affairs, as the Soviet leader maintains.

Dismissed Rights References

Gorbachev, in his own concluding news conference Wednesday, dismissed Reagan’s frequent references to human rights--and the President’s meeting with dissidents and refuseniks--with the remark that “I did not have a lot of admiration for that part of the trip.”

Reagan said he tried to explain that one in eight Americans can trace his or her origins to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and thus many have a natural concern for the countries of their heritage.

“I have put it this way: that you don’t stop loving your mother because you’ve taken unto yourself a wife,” he said.

“When we feel that people are being unjustly treated, imprisoned for something that in our country would not be a crime . . . our people get aroused, and they come to us and they want help. They want something done.”

When an American wife waits eight years for her Soviet husband to be allowed to join her, Reagan said, “we think it’s very much our business to bring it to the attention” of the Soviet government.

Gorbachev’s Response

The President added that it seemed as if Gorbachev had “seen the justice of what I’ve said” because many of the people whose plight the United States has brought to the Kremlin’s attention “have been released from confinement here and have been allowed to emigrate.”

Yet Reagan seemed to feel that he had been less successful in explaining human rights in the United States to Gorbachev. At his own news conference earlier, the Soviet leader said he had many questions about this subject.

In the end, Gorbachev said, he found that the President’s explanations of the problems revealed in official data and in newspaper reports were “not convincing.”

Reagan lamented what he said was a mistaken view that dominates the Soviet press of racial and religious prejudice in America and “the so-called street people that apparently have no place to live.”

“Oh, how I yearn to have him come to our country for long enough to see some of our country,” Reagan said. “I think we can straighten him out if he saw what we did in our country.”

Limits on Solutions

Although these social problems do exist, the President said, American democracy itself imposes limits on the solutions.

“When you have a free country, how far can we go in impinging on the freedom of someone who says, ‘This is the way I want to live.’ ”

Despite occasional flashes of irritation that Soviet officials and the state-controlled press have displayed at the American side’s stress on human rights, U.S. officials insisted that at the level of expert working groups, talks on human rights have gone smoothly--although with little progress in resolving specific cases.

One U.S. official familiar with these talks said the Soviets have indicated that about a dozen refuseniks on lists presented by the United States this week will receive exit permission.

Vladimir Kislik, a spokesman for refuseniks, said in Moscow that he has learned that about 100 refuseniks will be permitted to leave the Soviet Union, United Press International reported. He said the number involves 30 families, most them now living in the Leningrad area.

The U.S. official said that none of the refuseniks expected to get visas are among the best known or most urgent cases, involving people with serious medical problems.

Nevertheless, the official said, “The difference in tone between now and 18 months ago, to say nothing of six or seven years ago, is staggering.

“There is no tension in these talks. People banter back and forth--what I would call friendly sniping. There are disagreements, sometimes sharp. But there is a real dialogue going on.”

The Soviets, he said, have appeared equally forthcoming in discussing specific human rights cases the United States raises and in talking about draft changes in laws controlling political activity.

Despite continuing disagreements on individual cases and a broad philosophical gulf, the important point, this official emphasized, is that the Soviet Union--in contrast to past practice--”has accepted human rights as part of the agenda” in its relations with the United States.

In public, however, restrained diplomatic sparring continued as U.S. officials Wednesday dismissed as propaganda Soviet claims that one of the dissidents and refuseniks invited to meet with President and Mrs. Reagan on Monday was a Nazi collaborator in World War II.

One official called the Soviet charges “a typical KGB ploy” and said, “Obviously, we do not believe there are any grounds for these charges, or he would not have been invited.”

Soviet spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov told reporters Tuesday that Nikolai Roshko was a policeman under the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. He claimed Roshko had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for “torturing and murdering Soviet citizens” but was released under an amnesty.

On Wednesday, U.S. Embassy officials said Roshko was an American citizen, born in the United States and returned to the Soviet Union as a child before the war.

“We have been negotiating on behalf of this man for years, and the Soviets have never before mentioned such charges,” an embassy officer said.

Times staff writer Paul Houston contributed to this story from Washington.