3 Soviet Spouses of Americans Begin Fast

Far from the sound of music and marching at the Red Square parade marking the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, three sad Soviet citizens married to Americans began a three-day fast Saturday to protest government refusal to grant them exit visas.

“We don’t feel much like celebrating,” said Sergei Petrov, 34, a professional photographer who has been barred from leaving the country since he married Virginia Johnson in 1981.

Petrov, who currently has a one-man show of his work at the American College in Paris, staged a 51-day hunger strike in 1982 in hopes of getting permission to join his wife in the United States.

Yelena Kaplan, 29, a student who has been trying for eight years to get out of the Soviet Union to join her American husband, said the fast over the Soviet holiday is a symbolic gesture to focus attention on their plight.

“When most people are celebrating and having a feast, we are fasting to show that we are not happy with our fate,” she said. “It’s very sad.”

The third faster, Galina Goltsman-Michelson, now in her 60s, has been separated for 31 years form her husband, Anatoly, who defected to the United States in 1956, leaving his wife and daughter, Olga, behind.

Olga Michelson, who was only 7 years old when she last saw her father, now has a 7-year-old daughter herself. Now divorced, she also has applied, along with her daughter, to join her father at his Naples, Fla., home.

Their case is difficult because the Soviet Union has taken a rigid stand in the past against allowing families of defectors to join them in their adopted country.

In some cases, Soviet officials have contended that the Soviet citizens seeking to leave have knowledge of “state secrets,” but this justification is not applied consistently.

For example, Svetlana Braun, denied a visa for three years because she supposedly knew important secrets, was allowed to leave the country last week to join her husband, Keith, a lawyer in Southfield, Mich.

At Saturday’s session, the three Soviets on the hunger strike decided to seek an appointment with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead when he arrives in Moscow later this week for pre-summit consultations with his Foreign Ministry counterparts.

They are aware that Moscow has allowed some of the “divided spouses” to leave the Soviet Union before previous meetings of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and President Reagan in Geneva and Reykjavik, Iceland.

Earlier, the group of three went to the Supreme Soviet to ask why their appeals for exit visas had gone unanswered.

“Come back and ask again in two weeks,” they were told. But their hopes were not raised because similar advice in the past had only delayed news of another refusal.

They also sent a new letter to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the highest government body, in the wake of Gorbachev’s speech last Monday that called for strengthening human rights in the Soviet Union.

“Only speedy permission for our families to be united, . . . and not generalities about human rights” would demonstrate the sincerity of Gorbachev’s words, the letter said.

Meantime, they assembled at Olga Michelson’s two-room apartment to consider strategy and console each other.

The hostess, offering only glasses of water to her guests, managed to quip, “I am sorry it’s not gin and tonic.”

In another case, Dr. Galina Vileshina of Boca Raton, Fla., recently was allowed to visit her husband, Pyatras Pakenas, of Vilnius in the Soviet republic of Lithuania for the first time in seven years.

But she said there is no valid reason for the Soviet Union to refuse her husband permission to join her in the United States despite claims that he knows secrets.

“He works in a meat-packing plant, for goodness sakes,” she said in an interview in Moscow where she was able to see her husband again.

“I am not a dissident,” Pakenas told a reporter. “I only want to be with my wife and family.” Vileshina said she hopes that her husband will get permission as part of a pre-summit package of humanitarian gestures by the Kremlin.