Dissident agrees not to talk

Press, 4 December 1985, Page 8

Dissident agrees not to talk

NZPA-Reuter Milan Yelena Bonner, wife of the dissident Soviet physicist, Andrei Sakharov, flew to Italy for medical treatment yesterday but refused to talk about her husband or their life in internal exile. In her first direct contact with the Western news media for 19 months, she said ou a flight from Moscow that she had signed an agreement with the Soviet authorities not to give interviews. She said that if she broke it they might not let her return to the Soviet Union. “I really can’t say any-

thing. I have to be able to go back,” she said. “I know you do not want to see Andrei Dmitrievich (Sakharov) left on his own any more than I do.” Yelena Bonner, aged 62, was banished last year to join her husband in exile in the central Russian city of Gorky but has been allowed to travel to Italy and the United States for eye and heart treatment. During a brief stop in Milan, she had an emotional reunion with her son by a previous marriage, Alexei Semyonov, and her'son-in-law, Yefrem Yankelevich, who live in the United States. A prominent dissident in

her own right, she said that before agreeing to let her travel the Russian authorities had asked her to make a written undertaking not to give interviews or press conferences, or meet Western reporters. She gave no information about the health of her husband, the 1975 Nobel Peace laureate, whose fate has been closely followed in the West for many years. She will see Professor Renato Frezzotti, an eye specialist who has treated her three times before, this week. “It comes from an old wound I received during the

War (1939-45) ... There was a time when I could hardly see at all,” she said. After the eye treatment in Italy, she will join Semyonov and her daughter Tatyana Yankelevich in the United States and see a heart specialist

“I don’t know who it will be. It’s up to my children but I am sure they will choose a good one,” she said, adding that she had suffered a heart attack in April 1983. The Soviet passport office had issued a 90-day visa but indicated that it would be extended if she needed a heart operation and time to recuperate, she said.