Speech #1000089246

The experience has made living here intolerable." As a refusenik left out of the latest group of 15 who gained approval to leave. Meiman is hardly alone. By western estimates. the cases of those consistently denied emigration visas runs into the hundreds. and perhaps thousands. U.S. officials have appealed to Soviet authorities for leniency in many of the cases. including Vladimir Slepak. a Moscow Jew refused an exit visa for 16 years who celebrated Passover with Secretary of State George P. Shultz here last April. Like Meiman. many refuseniks have had their applications rejected on the grounds that they possess state secrets. Meiman. a mathematician by training. worked on the Soviet Unions fledgling atomic bomb project in the 1950s. Although his work in this sensitive area ended in 1955. and Gorbachev has said that the statute of limitations on state secrets should be less than 10 years. Soviet officials still base their rejection of Meimans application for emigration on the contention that he knows classified information. In the past year. the emigration of Soviet Jews to the West has risen to over 4.000. more than four times the 1986 figure. During a long conversation in the sitting room of his apartment. Meiman was quick to dismiss questions about the effect of the new trend on his own chances to emigrate. "They seem to pick and choose who can go more or less by chance." he said. "And at my age you cant count on being the one to be picked. I used to live next to the telephone but a person cant live in that way." After returning from answering the telephone call from a friend and falling into a long silence. Meiman added an afterthought: "The human being is very complicated." he said. "Maybe something really has happened in my unconscious."e