Remaining Dissidents Feel America No Longer Cares

Mark Kabakov, a decorated World War II veteran who has found himself barred from traveling outside the Soviet Union because he had access to military secrets 17 years ago, expects no help from President Bush on this summit visit.

Neither does Valeria Novodvorskaya, the outspoken leader of a radical group who has been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison since mid-May on charges of subversion.

Nor does Yelena Bonner, the widow and comrade-in-arms of Nobel laureate Andrei D. Sakharov. She has continued campaigning for human rights, largely by denouncing Soviet military actions in the Baltics and the Caucasus Mountains.

These days, activists say, even though several hundred would-be emigrants are still denied exit permits and scattered other human rights violations persist, they have the impression that the White House and the American public no longer care.

When President Ronald Reagan came to Moscow in 1988, he opened his first private talks with Gorbachev by presenting a list of Soviet political prisoners and “refuseniks” who had been denied exit visas. He also planned a visit with Yuri and Tanya Zieman, a refusenik family, but was told that if he saw them they would not be allowed to emigrate, according to White House officials. Reagan refrained, and the Ziemans received an exit visa soon thereafter.

For this summit, officials say, there are no burning human rights issues on the agenda and no meetings planned with victims of violations.

Interest has fallen off, Bonner said, because the Soviet government has indeed made great strides in reducing the number of political prisoners, stopping psychiatric abuse and codifying in the law--if not yet fully allowing in practice--the near-universal right to travel abroad and emigrate.

Many top refusenik activists also have left for Israel or the United States, and warmer Soviet-U.S. relations leave little incentive for American leaders to make political capital out of human rights problems.

But the issues have not disappeared--and they have become more complex, Bonner said.

The focus of Soviet human rights activism has largely shifted, she said, to fighting “violations of people’s right for self-determination”--in the separatist Baltic republics, where Soviet troops killed civilians this winter, in the Caucasus, where Soviet forces help deport Armenians from villages in Azerbaijan, and in other areas of ethnic conflict.

“These are questions of human rights, too,” she said, “even if the West stubbornly thinks that big states are more convenient and is willing to betray other democratic principles for that.”

Bonner acknowledged that it is tricky for American leaders to try to intervene in border and ethnic disputes when their pressure could only complicate Gorbachev’s attempts to stabilize the country.

But still, she said, “even if defense of one dissident is certainly more concrete and simpler than defending the rights of self-determination, it still has to be addressed.”

Kabakov, 67, is one refusenik, a successor to tens of thousands who elicited a storm of human rights agitation on their behalf in the 1970s and 1980s. He fought for four years in World War II, earning several medals, and spent four more years minesweeping in the navy, then worked in a classified defense industry until 1974.

In 1989, he received an invitation to visit an aging relative in Switzerland. His request for an exit visa was turned down; since then, he has been on a merry-go-round of court appeals and challenges to government officials.

“It’s absolutely absurd,” Kabakov said. “It’s illogical, and it shows that human rights here, despite improvement, are still very far from American and European standards. In every country there are secret documents. But this is the only country in the world with secret people.”

The new emigration law, passed May 20, puts a five-year-limit on the time that people who have had access to state secrets can be refused permission to cross the border. But it leaves a giant loophole for defense officials, saying the period can be extended in “special cases.”

“The ‘special cases’ can become the system,” Kabakov warned.

The Western press, which used to cover Soviet refusenik and dissident activities with vigor, has virtually ignored Kabakov’s case, even after his story was given almost a full page in the government daily newspaper Izvestia.

Officials of a Moscow-based public committee founded largely by refuseniks and American activists to help would-be emigrants now estimate that several hundred refuseniks remain in the Soviet Union.

About one-third are held for security reasons, one-third because of various personal problems and another third are so-called poor relatives--unable to obtain the required consent from their relatives to emigrate. Most are caught in nightmarish struggles with the bureaucracy.

It has become harder to rally help for them, said Victoria Shakhet, the group’s co-chairperson, because Westerners tend to think that now that the new emigration law has been passed, everything should be all right.

“For them, if a law appeared saying that a person is free to leave here, that’s an enormous step forward,” she said. “And a person who lives here and still can’t leave has a very hard time explaining it to them.”

If the remaining refuseniks have trouble gaining support abroad, Valeria Novodvorskaya’s case has barely evoked a fight, even from veteran human rights campaigners in the Soviet Union. Novodvorskaya is one of the most prominent members of the Democratic Union, an ultra-radical group that calls for the total abolition of communism and still stages unsanctioned rallies that inevitably end with several members being hauled off to jail.

According to her lawyer, Sergei Kotov, Novodvorskaya publicly argued that if a government violates human rights--as the Soviet government did when its soldiers killed civilians in Latvia and Lithuania--then its citizens have the right to overthrow it.

“The problem is that the traditional human rights movement is not used to Novodvorskaya’s actions,” Kotov said. “It’s a little scary for them.”

Soviet human rights circles have also proven slow to take up the cause of homosexuals, who under current Soviet law can be sentenced to up to five years in prison for voluntary sexual relations. But U.S. gay activists are now joining forces with their Soviet counterparts and beginning to campaign. A joint Soviet-American gay rights group is holding a conference in a suburban Moscow hotel during the summit.