Sakharov’s widow in plea for quiet funeral

Press, 19 December 1989, Page 8

Sakharov’s widow in plea for quiet funeral

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The widow of the human rights campaigner, Andrei Sakharov, has appealed to people not to make his funeral a mob scene after up to 100,000 people flocked to a Moscow youth palace to pay their last respects. In an interview with Soviet television, Yelena Bonner asked that only Close friends and relatives attend the burial of the Nobel Peace Laureate at Vostryakovskoe Cemetery in suburban Moscow. “Least of all do I want the day of Andrei DmitriyeVich’s funeral to become a day of Khodynka,” she said, referring to a Moscow field where over 1000 people were trampled to death in 1896 at coronation festivities for Czar Nicholas 11.

“I would like this day to pass calmly, in inner communication with him,” she said. “This is a small cemetery, and I ask only that his close friends and relatives come.” As her words were broadcast, thousands of people were still filing past the flower-strewn bier where Sakharov’s body lay in an outpouring of public grief for the nuclear physicist who became father of the Soviet human rights movement. It had been planned to close the doors at 5 p.m. (local time) yesterday, but with thousands of people still forming queues 5 kilometres long they were kept open until just before midnight. The police put the crowd at 65,000, an apparently conserva-

tive estimate. Many of the mourners stood for five or six hours in biting cold until, half-covered with snow and clasping candles and wreaths, they entered the glassfronted building near the city centre. Some of them wept as they passed the bier. “He was the conscience of our nation,” were the words heard repeatedly from the crowd, which included many people there to pay respect to the role Sakharov played as spiritual leader of persecuted dissidents in the 19705. “There’s been at least a million people here and that’s the way it should be. There will be even more for the funeral,” said a middle-aged woman attendant at the door.