Bonner Trip Expected at End of Month

Yelena Bonner, the wife of exiled physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, has advised Moscow friends by telegram that she will go abroad for medical treatment at the end of this month, Soviet sources told Western reporters Friday.

The sources said the telegram was sent from Gorky, a city 250 miles east of Moscow that is closed to foreigners. Sakharov, 64, and Bonner, 62, have been confined to Gorky because of their human rights activities.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz has said a Soviet official told him that Bonner would be allowed to travel abroad for medical care. She suffers from eye ailments that result in part from a shrapnel wound sustained in World War II while serving as a front-line medic.

She had been allowed to go to Italy for treatment of glaucoma in 1975, 1977 and 1979, but it was not known if she would go there or elsewhere if she does leave the Soviet Union this month as expected. The sources said her telegram indicated that she might go to the United States to visit her two children, Alexei Semyonov and Tatiana Yankelevich.

Soviet sources, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal by the authorities, told Western correspondents the telegram said:

“I have received permission to leave. I shall leave at the end of November. I am taking precautions for Andrei (Sakharov) so he can survive the winter alone.”

The last sentence, the sources said, indicated to them that Bonner would be gone for several months. Initial reports said she would be allowed to be out of the country for up to three months.

The telegram also seemed to quash a report by a West German newspaper that Sakharov might be part of an East-West swap involving spies and dissidents to made in conjunction with the Nov. 19-20 summit in Geneva between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Bonner’s departure, according to the telegram, would be after the summit.