Speech #1000013381

Mr. Speaker. for Mikhail and Ema Manevich of Livingston. new Soviet emigration policies have created a mixture of hope and concern. They hope that their decadelong struggle to help members of their families emigrate from the Soviet union will soon result in Soviet Government approval. They are concerned by the news that the applications of their family members for visas have already been denied under the new emigration Soviet policy. In spite of repeated efforts by the congregation of Temple EmanuEI. where Mikhail Manevich is the cantor. as well as petitions to the Soviet Government on their behalf from local and State officials. from religious leaders and from me. the Soviet Government has remained unmoved. Ema Manevichs mother. father and brother first applied for their visas in 1976 and were denied because of Government claims that her father. David Karlin. held a job as financial administrator of an electronics company that exposed him to state secrets. The family disputes this claim. Even if he had held a sensitive job. the Government claim is questionable. because Mr. Karlin was dismissed from his job in 1974 after his brother applied for a visa. This is an alltoo familiar story among refuseniks and their families who are denied visas and then fired from their jobs for having applied. Mikhail Manevichs brother and his family have repeatedly been denied visas since 1980. based on Soviet Government claims that the request would further divide the family. In spite of wellpublicized cases involving emigration of wellknown Soviet refuseniks to Israel and the United States. little seems to have changed since my trip to the Soviet Union last May. The vast majority of requests for visas still results in repeated official denials and continued discrimination against the tens of thousands of Soviet refuseniks. I returned from my Russian trip with two clear impressions of the official Soviet Government attitude toward emigration. First. decisions appear to be totally arbitrary but. in reality. they are based on cold. calculated selfinterest of the moment. Second. to Soviet officials these refuseniks are merely names on a list. This second impression is the most important element of Soviet policy for Americans to keep in mind. We must never forget the human faces behind the statistics. We must remember that those lucky few who are allowed to emigrate should not divert our attention from those who must stay behind. We must make it clear in repeated efforts on behalf of the many refuseniks that it is in the Soviet Governments selfinterest to do more than to simply grant a few requests in wellpublicized cases. We must make it clear to officials of the Soviet Government that we see through its public relations campaign. We must remind Soviet officials that. in spite of their claims that new emigration laws have made it easier to leave. it appears that these laws have. in fact. made it more difficult. based on the cases of these two Leningrad families and thousands of other cases. And finally. we must remind Soviet officials that we view these people as individuals with individual rights and not simply names on a list.