Soviets Permit Activist to Exit; Bonner May Go

A Soviet human rights activist who had sought for two years to emigrate arrived here Monday with her family, and there were reports that the wife of noted dissident Andrei D. Sakharov has been granted permission to leave the Soviet Union for medical treatment.

A spokesman for the Austrian border police said that Irina Grivnina, 40, who was once imprisoned for investigating alleged abuses of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, arrived on an Austrian airline flight. She was accompanied by her husband, Vladimir Neplekhovich, and their daughters, Masha, 13, and, Yana, 2.

Meanwhile, West Germany’s Bild newspaper, quoting “reliable sources” in Moscow, said that Sakharov’s wife, Yelena Bonner, 60, can leave the Soviet Union “as soon as she wants, (to go to) where she wants” for a period of three months.

The couple have been in internal exile in the city of Gorky--Sakharov since 1980, Bonner since last year--for their dissident activities.

The Austrian police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Grivnina family missed a connecting flight to Amsterdam due to weather conditions and spent the night in a Vienna hotel.

Summoned to Agency

Grivnina had said in Moscow that she was summoned to the emigration agency Oct. 17 and told that her request to leave had been granted. She was given documents for emigration to Israel, although she has no relatives there and planned to go to the Netherlands.

She was active on the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, which monitored use of psychiatry, drugs and other medical practices on Soviet dissidents in the 1970s. She was arrested and convicted in 1981 on charges of trying to discredit the Soviet Union and its political system.

Grivnina was sentenced to five years of internal exile, later reduced to two years. She spent a year in prison between her arrest and trial and another 20 months in internal exile, returning to Moscow in 1983.

Since then, she has written articles for a Dutch newspaper and sought to emigrate, declaring that she had renounced all political activity and simply wanted to leave the country.

In its report on Bonner, Bild said it was asked by the unidentified Moscow source to inform the couple’s children in the United States that their mother has been granted permission to leave the Soviet Union for up to three months. Then she is directed to return to her husband in the Soviet Union, Bild said.

Bild said Bonner was summoned to Gorky police headquarters a few days ago and told, “Please, make an application now to leave the country if you still want medical treatment abroad.”

Bonner has long sought permission to leave the Soviet Union for treatment of an eye ailment. Until now, all applications to leave were rejected.

Sakharov, one of the team of Soviet scientists who developed the Soviet hydrogen bomb and the winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, has gone on several hunger strikes to back his wife’s demand for permission to go abroad.

Bild did not identify its source, but the newspaper is known to have close ties to Viktor Louis, a Soviet journalist often used by the Soviet government to feed material to the Western press.