Sakharov calls for help

Press, 3 February 1984, Page 17

Sakharov calls for help

By

NEAL ASCHERSON

Andrei Sakharov, the veteran Soviet dissident, is appealing to the world’s scientists to help his sick wife, Elena Bonner, to leave Russia. Dr Sakharov, who lives in enforced exile in Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow, believes that if her heart condition is treated in the Soviet Union, “some means may be found to bring about her death.”

In a letter given exclusively to the “Observer,” entitled “A letter to my Scientific Colleagues,” Dr Sakharov writes: “I believe that medical treatment of my wife in the U.S.S.R. would be dangerous. Believe me, this is not the case of unjustified ‘nerves’ or of a search for confrontation. My wife has suffered for many years from an unprecedented campaign of slander and from intense pressure exerted directly on her, as well as on her children and grandchildren.” Dr Sakharov goes on: “The K.G.B. appraises Elena’s role in my life and public activity very highly and seeks to eliminate her moral influence and, I hive reason to fear, her physical presence as well. A unique and unbearable situation

has been created.”

Describing the public campaign against her, he says that recent press articles “deliberately and outrageously misrepresented my views on nuclear war, peace, and disarmament. In violation of common sense my wife was saddled with that burden as well. It has been used to incite popular hatred and denunciation.

“Thousands of letters, passers-by on the street, passengers sharing her compartment on the train, savagely accuse my wife of being a Zionist, an agitator, a traitor to the motherland, a murderess.” Elena Bonner suffered a severe heart attack in April last year and has suffered several further attacks. Western doctors to whom the symptoms have been described consider she may need heart bypass surgery. Dr Sakharov complains that Elena Bonner has been denied proper care. Policemen watch her Moscow apartment, and “doctors

hesitate to visit her, fearing the consequences. The telephone in our Moscow apartment was disconnected in 1980, and the nearby coin telephone was disconnected right after Elena’s heart attack. This is certainly not sheer coincidence ... ” Elena Bonner’s application to travel abroad has not been answered, any more than her application to bring a slander case against her attackers in the press. “Now the only acceptable solution is for her to go abroad.” Since the letter was written, another attack on Elena Bonner has appeared in the journal “Man and Law,” with a circulation of nearly nine million. The article presents Dr Sakharov as a pathetic, mentally unbalanced man who is being used as a vehicle for C.I.A. and Zionist propaganda by Elena Bonner and her “evil brood” (Sakharov’s step-children), who push him into "actions which contradict the image of J Sakharov the scholar.” — Copyright — London Observer Service.