BUCHAREST, Romania -- Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev travels Monday to Romania, one of Moscow's least cooperative and most troublesome allies, in the first state visit by a Kremlin leader since 1976.
The visit, the latest in a series of trips through Eastern Europe by Gorbachev since he took power in March 1985, was marred Sunday when Romanian customs officials refused entry to four Western journalists.
Romania, which has managed to pursue a semiautonomous foreign policy since persuading the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops in 1958, has not fallen in line with Gorbachev's economic and political reform effort.
Likewise, Romanian President Nicolai Ceausescu was the last East Bloc leader to visit Moscow following Gorbachev's rise to power, making a brief, 'friendly' working visit in May 1986.
But Gorbachev's trip is viewed more as a courtesy visit than an effort to peddle his economic liberalization policy of reconstruction, or to extract any trade agreements from one of the Soviet Union's chief agricultural suppliers.
Romania is the only East Bloc country that has not signed a bilateral agreement with the Soviet Union on the establishment of joint economic enterprises, a project associated with Gorbachev.
Gorbachev is believed to be strongly dissatisfied with Ceausescu's handling of the economy and the personality cult the Romanian chief has built around himself, but none of this is expected to mar the official visit.
'He will be a polite guest,' one Western diplomat said. 'Gorbachev is out to revivify contacts with all the allies. He is looking for areas of agreement and will downplay the disagreements.'
Meanwhile, four Western journalists, including a Washington Post reporter, were prevented from entering the country at the Bucharest airport on the eve of the Soviet leader's visit.
Washington Post correspondent Jackson Diehl, David Storey of the Reuters news agency, Robin Gedye of the Daily Telegraph of London and Gustav Chalupa of the Austrian radio network ORF, had arrived Sunday night without visas.
A colleague of Storey, the British Reuters correspondent was told, 'You are an unwanted person in Romania.'
Journalists regularly obtain their Romanian visas on entry to avoid bureaucratic red tape, and tourists are routinely given visas at the Romanian border or the airport. Austrian citizens -- of which Chalupa is one -- do not need visas to enter Romania.
In an unusual twist, a Soviet diplomat tried unsuccessfully for several hours to resolve the visa dispute.
U.S. and British diplomats visited the four at the airport, where they were told to spend the night in the VIP lounge.
'They are shooting themselves in the foot,' said a U.S. diplomat. 'Obviously Gorbachev has a different policy. This is what surprises me.'
Gorbachev, in contrast with his May trip to Czechoslovakia, where he was able to indulge in the 'walkabouts' that have become his trademark, is expected to be closeted in working meetings for most of his stay.
High on the agenda will be trade matters, particularly the establishment of more cooperative ventures in the area of machine tools, for which the Romanians have some Western licenses.
'The feeling of the Romanians is that relations are going well, although the Soviets are pushing a little on the economic side,' the Western diplomat said.
In the 22 years of Ceausescu's iron rule, Romania has witnessed the highest rate of industrial growth in Eastern Europe. But its 23 million citizens have the lowest standard of living, except perhaps for Albania, a source of embarrassment to the Soviet Union.
A foreign debt of more than $10 billion has been halved since 1982 and should be eliminated in the 1990s. Massive investments have been made in the industrial sector, particularly in petrochemical plants.
But there are long lines in front of sparsely stocked shops, little or no heat for damp apartments, tight rationing of food staples, including bread, and drastic cuts in electricity.
Politically, however, Romania has staked out impressively autonomous foreign policy positions, a stance that was grudgingly condoned during the last official visit of a Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, in 1976.
Romania refused to sever diplomatic ties with Israel after the six-day Middle East War in 1967, and refused to take part in the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It sent athletes to the 1980 Olympic Games in Los Angeles despite the Soviet boycott.
But the ouster of the shah of Iran deprived Romania of an important source of oil in the early 1980s, and it has been forced to tie itself closer economically to Moscow with oil-for-food deals.
