Family Stood Up : Soviet Threat Cancels Visit to Refuseniks

MOSCOW — At 19 Maria Ulyanova St., a cake was ready on the table and tea was brewing in the pot Sunday as Yuri and Tanya Zieman and their 12-year-old daughter, Vera, waited for two very special guests.

And waited.

In what was to have been an exceptional gesture of support for Jewish emigration, the White House, working through the American Embassy, had arranged for President and Nancy Reagan to visit the Ziemans, who are among an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish refuseniks still barred from leaving the country.

Might Never Leave

U.S. officials said the visit was called off after Soviet officials made it clear that if the Reagans insisted on visiting the Ziemans, who have already waited 11 years for exit visas, they might never be allowed to leave.

No one, however, called to tell the Ziemans that the visit was off.

Nor did anyone tell the police, who flooded the neighborhood with plainclothes and uniformed security men:

Nor the crowd of 200 or so Russians who milled outside in the street on a warm spring day, drawn at first by all the security, then by the American television crews and then by the rumor that the American President would visit the home of an ordinary citizen:

Nor perhaps even the crews of government workers that arrived Friday night to give the area a face-lift, complete with paint for the building, new grass for the yard and new asphalt for the potholes.

“It was wonderful,” Tanya laughed. “They washed the street so much I thought we would all drown.”

“Why them?” one man in the crowd asked a reporter in puzzlement. “Why not come to my place?”

The Ziemans, whose older daughter, Galina, lives in Boston, are among a handful of human rights cases to which the White House and the State Department have given highest priority. A 50-year-old computer engineer, Yuri Zieman was automatically barred from his profession after he applied to emigrate, and he worked as a plumber in a maternity hospital for 11 years. Last November, he developed a neurological disorder accompanied by blinding headaches and double vision that Soviet doctors have been unable to diagnose.

As they tried, moving him from one hospital to another last month, he contracted hepatitis.

Zieman has received an invitation from the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore for diagnosis and treatment, but Soviet authorities, contending that he once had access to state secrets, has refused to let him go.

‘The Greatest Cure’

“What I probably need is some tests they cannot do here,” he said as he lay on a sofa, wrapped in a blanket in their tiny three-room apartment, waiting for the President who never came. His sense of humor still intact, Zieman added that “I don’t know much about neurology, but I’d guess that the best medicine would be a visa. It would be the greatest cure of Soviet medicine.”

His daughter, Vera, sat by his side, wearing a bright red dress, having been told that was Nancy Reagan’s favorite color.

The idea of a more or less spontaneous visit to a Soviet refusenik family apparently began to go sour last week as U.S. officials advised the Soviets of the plan--for security purposes.

According to U.S. officials, the Soviets bristled at the notion of a presidential visit to a citizen whose desire to emigrate is widely equated here with something akin to treason. At the same time, the equally strong Russian penchant for putting on a good show came into play. Just in case the Reagans went through with it, the authorities ordered a little contingency planning.

Around midnight Friday, a fleet of heavy trucks pulled up outside the Ziemans’ apartment and disgorged dozens of laborers.

Patched Potholes

Up and down the street, working through the night and into the next afternoon, they patched potholes that were older than some of the children in the neighborhood.

They collected aging trash and spruced up the apartment building with a band of pumpkin-colored paint around the foundation that promises to remain sticky for weeks. As dawn rose, teams of women with hoes and twig brooms tidied up and renewed the grassy center strip on Maria Ulyanova (named for Lenin’s sister) and groomed the bushes. Then came a parade of street-washing trucks, one after another.

Inside their apartment Sunday, Tanya raced from room to room, dusting, tidying up, washing the windows for the first time since autumn. “Even if they don’t come, at least I’ve gotten clean windows out of it,” she joked as Sunday afternoon dragged on, the police began to pull out and friends and reporters remained the only visitors.

Most wondrous of all, Yuri noted, was the appearance at his door of a reporter and photographer for Moscow News, who asked for an interview with the man who was about to meet the President and promised not to write a nasty story about him.

It was the first time in memory that an official Soviet publication has asked to talk with a Jewish refusenik.

Come-What-May Philosophy

As it became clear that the Reagans were not coming by, the Ziemans took refuge in the come-what-may philosophy that is the refusenik’s strongest armor.

“You know, we have the greatest hopes for this summit,” Yuri said. “We always live with hope against hope. Many refuseniks are expecting good news in connection with the summit.”

Added 12-year-old Vera, whose thick reddish curls and bright blue eyes evoke images of Little Orphan Annie: “Such a crazy day it was.”

The Ziemans, Vera included, will have a second chance to meet the Reagans today. In a part of the summit program that also has not pleased the Soviets, they and about 100 dissidents and other refuseniks have been invited to Spaso House, the American ambassador’s residence, to talk about human rights.