Soviet Refuseniks Pessimistic on New Emigration Law

For the first time since the Soviet Union began letting small numbers of its citizens emigrate to the West nearly 20 years ago, the government has adopted and published a law setting out the conditions under which people may leave the country.

The new emigration decree, which goes into force Jan.1, has been welcomed by some in the West as a sign that the Soviet leadership, under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, is turning toward a rule of law and perhaps even a measure of liberalization.

But those who stand to gain or lose the most from the new law--the thousands of Jews and others who have tried unsuccessfully, many of them for a decade or longer, to join family members in the West--lean toward a much more pessimistic view.

11 Years of Waiting

A Jewish engineer who, with his wife, has spent 11 years waiting to be reunited with their daughter and grandchildren in Boston, said: “People in the West seem to think, well, a new law. Isn’t that nice. But it is worse than no law at all. It simply legalizes injustice.”

Like many others, this man and his wife were barred from their professions when they first applied to leave and have worked at menial jobs ever since.

According to independent groups of Jewish intellectuals in Moscow who have studied the new emigration law closely, it does little more than codify and make public the highly restrictive, unpublished regulations already in force. Although the law sets out a wide range of conditions under which an exit visa may be refused, it prescribes no circumstances under which the state is obligated to let a citizen leave.

Law Vaguely Worded

The vague wording of the law, moreover, appears to give the authorities unlimited scope of action, either to open the floodgates of emigration or, as appears more likely, to constrict the flow to the tiny trickle of people--100 or so a month--who are currently being allowed to leave.

“It is a rubber law, completely arbitrary, that violates other Soviet laws as well as international agreements on human rights that the Soviet government has signed,” Dr. Valery N. Soyfer, a Moscow geneticist, said in a recent interview.

Soyfer, who for eight years has been denied permission to emigrate, was one of 33 so-called refuseniks who submitted a detailed critique of the law to the authorities last month. The group has received no reply.

One of the international agreements the Soviet Union has signed, they pointed out, is the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says in article 13 that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

Emigration Declines

Since 1968, approximately 300,000 Jews, ethnic Germans and Armenians have been allowed to emigrate after obtaining formal invitations from relatives in the West. In 1979, the peak year, 51,300 Jews were allowed to leave, but in the early 1980s, amid deteriorating relations with the West over Afghanistan and new Soviet missile deployments, the number of emigrants fell drastically.

Virtually no Germans or Armenians are leaving now, and the number of Jews granted exit visas has declined to about 1,000 a year, out of an estimated 200,000 or more who would leave if they had permission.

During all this time, no published legal code governed the granting of exit visas, which are often refused without explanation, or on essentially meaningless grounds. People seeking to emigrate are often told, for example, that their application is “not in the interest of the state” or, more simply, that it is netselesoobrazno --pointless.

Then, last May, at a meeting in Bern, Switzerland, of the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Soviets agreed to publish their regulations on emigration and travel abroad.

Timing Unclear

It is not clear why, with emigration its lowest ebb in two decades, Moscow decided to do so, but diplomats and refuseniks suggest several reasons.

For one, the emigration law--actually a decree from the Council of Ministers, or cabinet--is consistent with a new effort to codify and clarify a tangled undergrowth of regulations, decrees and legislative acts, many of them unpublished, that has grown up over the years.”

In the Soviet system, laws or decrees with the force of law emanate not only from the Supreme Soviet, the nominal parliament, but also from the Council of Ministers and even individual ministries. According to the government newspaper Izvestia, some 10,000 so-called sub-legal acts from the ministries are currently in force, often in conflict with one another. This legal weed-lot forms one of the many obstacles to Soviet leader Gorbachev’s campaign to revitalize the economy.

No Ties to Economy

Emigration, however, has little direct connection with the economy. Western analysts and prominent refuseniks believe the new law is more likely a part of the leadership’s effort to improve its public image in the West on human rights questions, with the ultimate goals of encouraging trade and making Soviet arms control proposals more saleable to a skeptical Western public.

Although formally adopted last Aug. 28, the new law was publicly unveiled only in November, to coincide with the start of the 35-nation Vienna conference on European Security and Cooperation, which is partly devoted to reviewing compliance with the 1975 Helsinki accords on human rights and East-West relations.

At the same time, the Soviet Foreign Ministry set up a new Department of Humanitarian and Cultural Relations whose chief, Yuri Kashlev, told Western reporters in October that steps were being taken to improve “administrative measures” in matters of family reunification.

Refuseniks Exiled

The Soviets also appear to be trying to clear away some of the most visible, and to them, troublesome human rights cases. Beginning earlier this year with the Jewish human rights campaigner Anatoly Shcharansky, several well-known political prisoners and Jewish refuseniks have been released from prison or exile and allowed to leave.

Simultaneously, several senior scientists in Moscow who were fired from their jobs years ago after applying to leave, and have been active in the emigration movement, have reported informal offers in recent weeks of a chance to return to research positions comparable to those they once held, on the condition that they give up applying to emigrate. Of those known to have been approached, none has accepted the offer.

Many Jews in Moscow who lack such prominence fear that once Moscow sweeps the boards of cases that have attracted public outrage in the United States, Israel and Western Europe, Soviet emigration policy will remain unaltered and may even be made more restrictive.

Increase Expected

“When the new law goes into effect (in January), you’ll probably see a big increase, maybe 200 or 300 people allowed to leave,” Yuri Chekanovsky, a Jewish refusenik and former trade official, said in a conversation. “After a few months, when they’ve made a big impression, the numbers will come back down, maybe even lower than now.”

A third, more remote, possibility aired by some Moscow Jews is that the government hopes to use the new law to induce Israel or the United States to make trade or political concessions in exchange for a less restrictive emigration policy. The last of 11 sections in the law states that in addition to provisions of this law, entry and exit from the Soviet Union by private citizens “may also be regulated by bilateral agreements between the USSR and other states.”

Western diplomats, however, said this provision may not denote any special interest in signing such agreements, and could be nothing more than a standard acknowledgment that in international law bilateral agreements take precedence over domestic laws.

Bureaucratic Labyrinth

As the first published law of its kind in the Soviet Union, the new measure offers a stark view of Soviet concepts of law and justice, in which individual citizens are treated essentially as wards of the state. To sever one’s relations with the state means navigating a bewildering labyrinth of requirements that only now have been cast in legal form and made public.

Nowhere does the law say that leaving the Soviet Union, even for a temporary visit, is a right. The law instead treats leaving as a privilege, which the state will consider approving for certain limited purposes. These are given as reunification with family members, visiting a seriously ill relative, conclusion of a marriage, settling inheritance questions and “other significant reasons” not specified in the law.

The implication that a Soviet citizen might be able to go abroad in order to marry someone has surprised many, among them some of the 17 Soviet men and women who have married Americans in the Soviet Union but have been barred for years from joining their spouses in the United States.

Family Is Defined

While allowing emigration for family reunification, the law uses the narrowest possible definition of a family. As a starting point, emigrating or even visiting abroad requires a formal invitation from an immediate relative. But the government will consider applications only from people who seek to be reunited with a husband, wife, father, mother or biological brother or sister living abroad.

Those who have only grandchildren, aunts, uncles and cousins abroad need not apply.

The only apparent exceptions to this rule are applicants who have no family members in the Soviet Union, in which case an invitation from a more distant relative “may be accepted” for consideration.

In every case, the invitation cannot simply be a letter from a relative. It must be a formal legal document, endorsed and stamped by the relative’s home government and the Soviet embassy in that country.

1st of Many Hurdles

Currently, and under the new law as well, obtaining a formal invitation is only the first of many hurdles to be surmounted before the state will rule on an application for an exit visa. The law also requires an applicant to obtain written consent from his or her parents, a former spouse if there are children by a former marriage--and from any of the applicant’s own children over the age of 14, even if they plan to emigrate with their parents.

The clear intent is to protect the state from having to care for any relatives an emigre might leave behind. But in practice, the state has used this rule to prevent some scientists and other skilled persons from emigrating by pressuring their parents--threatening loss of jobs or pensions--not to grant a son or daughter written permission to leave.

Even if an applicant for an exit visa is able to obtain the necessary invitation from an immediate relative, and all living and potential dependents in the Soviet Union grant him permission to leave, the invitation can be ruled invalid if it comes from a relative who happens to be “abroad in violation of the procedures for exit from the USSR or for staying abroad.”

Deterrent to Defectors

This cryptic wording incorporates a standing practice of refusing to let the families of defectors emigrate, as a deterrent to future defectors. But many Soviet Jews fear that this provision will also be applied to relatives who received permission to emigrate to Israel but in fact went to the United States, as a majority of Jewish emigres did in the 1970s.

According to a Moscow refusenik who has discussed this point with a senior official at OVIR, the passport and visa agency, “this means that I cannot join my daughter in the United States. She emigrated on an Israeli invitation but went to the United States. This means she must send me an Israeli invitation, but she can’t do that because she never lived there.”

No Accountability

She cautioned, however, that there was no way to hold the official accountable for this interpretation, and that in granting an interview the official may have meant only to sow confusion on this point.

Another provision of the law allows only those families who maintain a “common household” to apply jointly to leave. Otherwise they must apply separately, compounding the mountain of paper work required, and the risk that part of the family will be refused.

“If parents live separately, even two doors down the hall, this means they must apply separately from their children,” said a refusenik who has studied the law closely. Alternatively, he said, parents could move in with their adult children before applying, but this would mean surrendering their own apartment--for which there is a years-long waiting list in most large cities--while risking that all would be refused and remain stuck together indefinitely in one cramped apartment.

Invitations Disappear

For those who satisfy the strict kinship requirements and obtain a valid invitation from abroad (not an easy matter, as most of those sent from Israel simply disappear in the mail), the law sets out six conditions under which exit visas “will not be allowed” and three more under which they “may not” be allowed.

First on the list is a sweeping security provision that is currently the most common reason for refusal: “Departure from the USSR for private matters by a citizen of the USSR is not permitted if he is privy to state secrets or there are other reasons touching on the security of the state--until the cessation of action of the circumstances preventing departure.”

Soviet citizens are rarely if ever told how long they must wait before their exposure to “state secrets” is considered no longer pertinent, although in some cases many years have elapsed since they served in the military or worked at a defense factory or research institute with military connections.

No Time Limit Set

The new law also sets no time limit. Nor does it define a secret or set procedures for deciding when, in a given case, state security is no longer a barrier.

In their joint critique of the law, the 33 refuseniks led by Soyfer said that “the lack of a concretely stated maximum term for detention . . . for reasons of state security amounts to a precedent for arbitrary detention of people for an indeterminate length of time.”

“The experience of refuseniks.” they said, “testifies to 10-, 15- and even 20-year denials of the right to leave. The new regulations do not improve on this situation.”

Other reasons for mandatory refusal include the existence of outstanding legal or financial obligations and an ongoing criminal investigation involving the applicant.

More Restraints

Along with these restraints, the law provides three other clauses under which exit permission may be denied at the discretion of the authorities, including one of unlimited scope.

An applicant may be denied permission to leave if:

--He gave false information about himself in applying to leave.

--”During a previous stay abroad, he committed actions violating the interests of the state, or customs or foreign currency laws.”

--”It is in the interest of protecting the public order, the health or the morality of the population.”

In private conversations, Soviet officials have explained the last clause by saying that it is not the Soviet population the law aims to protect but the health, morality and public order of other countries. It would be inappropriate, Soviet officials maintain, to burden other countries with depraved or unhealthy immigrants.

Against these restrictions, the new law offers two modest concessions, both of which are carefully hedged. Applications to emigrate are to be considered “in the course of one month,” although with the “need for additional study” this period may be prolonged to six months, or the time most refuseniks now must wait for their next refusal.

The law also says that “all or part” of the many documents submitted with an application may be reused for the next application to leave. Currently, most people refused permission to leave must start the entire procedure again from scratch if they wish to reapply, a process that takes one to two months of steady work.