Nobel peace Prize Won by Anti-War Physicians : Moscow Hails Award It Used to Criticize

The Nobel Peace Prize, once ignored in Moscow and denigrated as an imperialist provocation, was hailed here Friday after it was awarded to an organization whose co-founder is a prominent Soviet physician and deputy health minister.

The official Tass news agency promptly reported the award of the prize to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, whose co-president is Soviet cardiologist Yevgeny I. Chazov.

In contrast, when dissident Soviet physicist Andrei D. Sakharov won the prize in 1975, the Soviet media at first made no official announcement, then said that the prize was a reward for “anti-Sovietism” and refused to allow Sakharov to go to Oslo to accept the honor.

Five years later, he was exiled to Gorky, which, coincidentally is Chazov’s birthplace, a city from which foreigners are barred.

Prize to Walesa

In 1983, the Soviet media also delayed an announcement of the award of the Peace Prize to Lech Walesa, leader of Solidarity, the Polish trade union movement, and later denounced him as a money-grubbing, foul-mouthed demagogue.

Chazov, a leading advocate of the Kremlin’s views on nuclear war, is an urbane and articulate cardiologist who served as personal physician to the late Soviet leaders Leonid I. Brezhnev, Konstantin U. Chernenko and Yuri V. Andropov.

The award was seen by many as a political windfall for Moscow, which has long sought to establish an aura of legitimacy in Western eyes for anti-nuclear organizations operating under the direction of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee, among them Chazov’s Soviet wing of the international physicians’ group.

Western diplomats here said Chazov is a typical product of the Soviet system and is not likely to deviate from the Communist Party line on international questions. In fact, he is a member of the party’s Central Committee, a deputy minister in the Ministry of Health and a member of the presidium of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Sakharov’s Struggle

Sakharov won the prize 10 years ago for his independent struggle for human rights and arms control. He argued that the two issues were inextricably linked, saying that Soviet citizens could never bring meaningful pressures to bear on their government until they had the freedom to discuss military programs openly and with as much information as Westerners have at their disposal.

But Chazov, like other officially sanctioned Soviet spokesmen, has sought to separate the issues. The Kremlin position is that complaints about Soviet human rights violations are merely a cover for Western interference in the Soviet Union’s internal affairs and a diversion from the more important task of preventing nuclear conflict.

In contrast to Sakharov’s criticisms, the Soviet branch of the international physicians group has restricted itself almost entirely to statements and activities consistent with Soviet foreign policy.

While imputing blame for current world tensions and the arms race to the United States, it has not, for example, criticized the Soviet deployment of SS-20 missiles targeted on Western Europe or other aspects of Soviet military programs.

One exception to this pattern has been the willingness of the Soviet physicians’ group to join Western colleagues in questioning the concept of civil defense, which is said to offer only illusory protection from nuclear attack.

But while this criticism has been aired in the international group’s meetings held in the West, it has not been presented to the general public in the Soviet Union, where civil defense preparation remains an integral part of national policy.

Chazov is considered certain to accept the award in person. Besides preventing Sakharov from accepting the award in Oslo, Soviet authorities made it impossible for two Soviet winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature to accept the prize in person. They were Boris Pasternak in 1958 and Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn in 1970.

Times staff writer Robert Gillette, in Warsaw, contributed to this article.