The Lonely World of a Refusenik

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.