The Lonely World of a Refusenik

By Jacob V. Lamar

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Reagan,

My name is Vera Zieman, but everybody calls me "Moscow's Orphan Annie." Though unlike Annie I have a family, and it is about its fate that I want to tell you.

She is a vivacious twelve-year-old who reads John Updike, finds Nancy Drew too predictable, and recites T.S. Eliot's poem The Journey of the Magi in a clipped British accent. A pianist, she talks enthusiastically about her favorite composers, Bach and Mozart. With her charm, dancing eyes and radiant smile, Vera Zieman should be one of the most popular girls in her Moscow school.

Instead, Vera's life is often lonely and sometimes cruel. Classmates sense that she is different. At a party last year, the boys decided they would ask every girl to dance -- except Vera. The parents of Vera's best friend no longer allow their daughter to spend the night at the Ziemans' apartment.

Vera is shunned because she is indeed different. Although her classmates are apparently unaware of it, her parents are Jewish refuseniks. She cannot discuss this with her would-be friends, which adds to her isolation. Since applying for permission to leave the Soviet Union in 1977, the Zieman family has lived in an excruciating legal and social limbo.

By the time Vera wrote to the Reagans last month, many of the country's better-known refuseniks had been granted permission to leave, and so the Ziemans have now moved into the spotlight. Americans who have met Vera cannot resist comparing the cherry-cheeked, curly-haired moppet to Little Orphan Annie. The Reagans considered visiting the Ziemans this week but decided that this might hurt rather than help their chances of getting a visa. The President does plan, however, to talk to Vera's father Yuri and a dozen other refusenik families at Spaso House, the U.S. Ambassador's residence in Moscow. "People pin all their hopes on the summit," says Vera's mother Tanya. "The old refuseniks are all in a terrible state."

Soviet authorities were peeved by Reagan's invitation to the refuseniks. Said Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Petrovsky: "This is hardly aimed at improving mutual understanding between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R." In Leningrad two dissidents who had been invited to Spaso House were questioned by the KGB until their train left for Moscow.

Still, the President was determined to keep human rights at the forefront of the summit. In a speech in Helinski, he charged that "Soviet practice does not -- or does not yet -- measure up" to international standards on human rights. Reagan has praised Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalized emigration policy, but called for laws guaranteeing such rights. Said Reagan: "What are we to think of the continued suppression of those who wish to practice their religious beliefs?"

Religion was only one reason the Ziemans asked to emigrate shortly after Vera was born. "We've always thought differently from most Soviet people," explains Tanya, 48. "We couldn't read the books we wanted or listen to the music we wanted or travel to the places we wanted to see." Before applying for an exit visa, Tanya was a professor of English at the Institute for Foreign Languages; her husband, 50, worked as a computer designer at the Academy of Sciences. After applying to emigrate, both had to quit their jobs. Friends disappeared; family members felt betrayed.

The Soviets denied Yuri permission on security grounds: he once held a job in a building where classified work was done. There may be another reason: Yuri's brother is a department head at Moscow's Institute of Cosmic Research and a top Soviet space scientist. The two brothers have not seen each other since Yuri applied to emigrate.

The Ziemans explained to Vera the difficulties she would face as a refusenik daughter, and she has learned to be wary. She has been studying English privately since she was three, and tosses off expressions like "Come on, Mom" with the exasperated sighs of an American youngster. Yet she has never let her teachers at school know that she can speak English and studies Latin: they might become suspicious and incite their students to harass her.

There were some hardships for which the Zeimans could not prepare Vera. A few years ago, Vera was with her parents when they were seized by the KGB and held for questioning about their contacts with foreigners. "I was so scared I couldn't tie my shoelaces," Vera remembers. For weeks afterward, she screamed in her sleep at night.

As an outcast, Yuri was forced to take the only job he could find: plumber at a maternity hospital. Not long afterward, he was injured in an oxygen-tank explosion. Since then he has suffered headaches and double vision. Doctors say he may need brain surgery. But, as Vera points out, "it's easier to get a ticket to the moon here than a brain scan." During a hospital stay last month, Yuri contracted hepatitis from a needle. The U.S. embassy has asked Soviet authorities to allow the family to leave so Zieman can get treatment not available in the U.S.S.R. The Soviets have responded with silence.

Last year, however, the Ziemans' eldest daughter Galina, 26, was allowed to move to the U.S. with her husband Victor Khatutsky. The couple now live in Brighton, Mass., with their 2 1/2-year-old daughter Anna. Vera's eyes sparkle when she talks of being reunited with her sister and starting a new life in the West. "I want to sing in a choir," she says. "And I'd like a dog. Our apartment here is too small for one." But beneath her infectious optimism dwells an ever present anxiety. "It's very hard for me here," Vera Zieman says quietly. "Sometimes I'm very frightened."

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Moscow