Former Colleagues Tell of Visit With Sakharov

Two former colleagues recently visited dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov at his home in exile in Gorky, but a similar visit scheduled for late January has been cancelled, friends of the Sakharov family said Saturday.

The unpublicized trip to see Sakharov was made in late November by Boris Bolotovski and Efim Fradkin, both physicists from the Physical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Soviet sources said.

Two other scientists were authorized to visit Sakharov in Gorky sometime between now and the end of the month, but their trip was cancelled without any explanation, the sources said.

Sakharov sent traditional New Year’s greetings to his son and daughter, children of his first marriage, but the messages gave little information about him and his second wife, Yelena Bonner.

The lack of more frequent contact with members of his family has aroused concern among friends of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who was banished to Gorky, a city about 250 miles east of Moscow, for his outspoken views.

“Some of us feel he may have lost his fighting spirit,” said one friend of the family.