Ribicoff Demands Soviet Official Get out of This Country for Trying to Blackmail Congress on Trade

Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (D.Conn.) renewed his demand today in the Senate for the Soviet government to recall G.A. Arbatov, a leading Soviet authority on the United States, for “trying to blackmail the Congress and the American Jewish community and telling them how to behave on a great moral issue.”

Arbatov, who is director of the Institute for United States Studies at the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow, told the Soviet-American Trade Conference Feb. 27 that anti-Semitism will arise in the U.S. and in the Soviet Union if Congressional legislation aimed at removal of Soviet restrictions on emigration blocks the pending Soviet-American trade agreement. He also said failure of “normalization” of Soviet-American trade relations would result in “serious political repercussions” which would be blamed on the Jews.

Arbatov made his statements in responding to questions asked by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the briefing for newsmen held by conference leaders. The conference was sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers and attracted about 800 leading American businessmen and industrialists. In his Senate remarks, Ribicoff contrasted Arbatov’s attempted “intimidation” with the views at the conference by Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D.Maine) who, Ribicoff said, gave a reasoned analysis that the exit visa issue is a moral issue of concern to Americans.

A State Department official informed JTA that he did not know whether Arbatov was still in the country and would not immediately comment on Ribicoff’s demand. Ribicoff criticized Arbatov the first time on Feb. 28 before Secretary of Commerce Harry S. Dent at the hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on International Trade of which he is the chairman and at which Dent was a witness.

MORAL ISSUE IS BASIC

When Ribicoff angrily declared “I am using this platform to tell Mr. Arbatov to mind his own damned business,” Sen. Clifford P. Hansen (R. Wyo.) said, “I join with you on that, Mr. Chairman.” Ribicoff did not press Dent for a response to his demand observing that the Secretary “just happened to be in the witness chair today.”

Ribicoff recently filed a special report advocating greater East-West trade and most favored nation status for Communist countries after his visit to Rumania and Hungary where he had addressed a major conference on East-West trade. “I recognize the importance of East West trade for developing relations between nations,” Ribicoff told Dent. “But I am also concerned with the basic moral issue presented when exorbitant ransom fees are now being levied against Soviet citizens, and particularly a segment suffering from discrimination, as a condition for permitting them to emigrate from the Soviet Union.”

Continuing, the Senator declared: “To have Mr. Arbatov come to the United States of America and before an audience of American business men, then tell them to use their influence and pressure on the Congress of the United States against a legislative proposal, the Jackson Amendment, which is a very alive proposition and threaten that Jews of the United States will be subjected to anti-Semitic actions by the people of the United States, is presuming upon the good will of the United States.”

Then, demanding that Arbatov leave this country Ribicoff said: “All he can do is to make mischief and harm relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. He is the one that is causing harm to detente, not the Congress of the United States.”