Soviet Move to Let 45 Emigrate Reported : Knowledge of State Secrets No Longer a Bar, U.S. Official Says

In an apparent gesture of pre-summit good will, the Soviet Union has moved to lift emigration barriers for at least 45 Soviet citizens who previously had been barred from leaving the country because of their knowledge of state secrets, a State Department official said Thursday.

Upwards of 120 persons, many of them Soviet Jews who had worked on classified projects, are expected to be affected by the change in policy, according to the official and representatives of human rights agencies. The State Department, however, was able to confirm details only of the 45 who already have reapplied for visas or have informed U.S. officials that they are now free to emigrate.

The change in policy comes less than a week before the scheduled Dec. 7 meeting in New York of President Reagan, President-elect George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and it immediately follows a Soviet decision to permit for the first time in 35 years the broadcast of U.S.-financed Radio Liberty programming into the Soviet Union in Russian and other languages.

The Soviet Union has taken steps before previous summits to soften its human rights policy, usually with the release of prominent refuseniks. And officials cautioned that the lifting of the secrecy ban will not necessarily leave all 120 Soviet citizens free to emigrate, because their applications must still be reviewed.

But the week’s developments cheered human rights officials here, who welcomed what they said is a significant softening of Soviet human rights policy.

Hope for Improvement

“This development . . . signals what we hope will be a trend toward sustained human rights improvements in the Soviet Union,” Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), Helsinki Commission chairman, and Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) said in a statement. The congressional commission was established to oversee implementation of a 1975 agreement on security and cooperation in Europe.

The Soviet citizens were informed of the change in policy Wednesday and Thursday in telephone calls from the Soviet visa office.

Among those to be released is former electronics engineer Yuli Kusharoshki, whose requests for permission to emigrate have been refused by Soviet authorities for the last 17 years. Kusharoshki, believed to be the longest-serving among the so-called refuseniks, met with President Reagan last spring during the Moscow summit.

Also to be released is physicist Vladimir Kislik, who has served as a spokesman for Jews denied permission to leave the Soviet Union. Kislik’s wife, Bella Gulko, traveled to the United States recently with physicist and human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov.

Cause of Tension

Soviet restrictions on emigration for reasons of “state secrets” have been a continuing cause of tension in U.S.-Soviet relations during a period in which the dialogue between the two countries has improved steadily on a number of other issues.

The United States has maintained that the longtime Soviet practice is unjustified. Kusharoshki last worked with classified material 10 years ago, U.S. officials have said.

The rate of emigration of Soviet Jews, which peaked at 51,330 in 1979, fell to about 1,000 a year in the mid-1980s but has climbed this year to 16,572, according to the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration, an agency in Geneva that assists resettlement of Soviet Jews. It reported that 2,284 left in November, a slight drop from the October figure.

Times staff writer Don Shannon contributed to this story.