No Talking to Press : Yelena Bonner Tells of Deal Struck to Come West

The seriously ill wife of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov told relatives today that she won permission to travel next month to Rome and Boston for medical treatment after signing a pledge not to talk to reporters.

And Sakharov, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said he ended a hunger strike and rescinded his resignation from a prestigious Soviet science academy after his wife received permission to leave Gorky, where they are in internal exile.

Yelena Bonner said she will fly to Rome on Dec. 2 for an eye examination and to Boston a few days later for a coronary bypass operation. She warned her children not to be shocked by her poor condition.

First to Leave

If Bonner leaves as planned, she will be the first person sentenced to internal exile by Soviet authorities who was allowed to leave, said Aleksandr Nekrich, a Soviet emigre and research associate at Harvard University.

Bonner’s children, who emigrated to this Boston suburb in the late 1970s, reached the Sakharovs in Gorky today after two days of unsuccessful attempts. In a 40-minute talk in Russian, Bonner told her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich, that she had signed an agreement with Soviet authorities not to talk with the press when she arrives in the West.

“If she breaks the promise, she risks that she won’t be allowed to return,” said Efrem Yankelevich, Tatiana’s husband.

Hunger Strike Over

The Yankeleviches said Sakharov, 62, apparently had spent six months in a hospital during a hunger strike that ended Oct. 23, shortly after his wife was told she could apply to leave. Those six months, he told them, were the worst of his life.

Sakharov, a physicist and 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said he had gained back about half the 44 pounds he lost, and that he feels well despite an irregular heartbeat.

“I feel so well I don’t feel anything at all,” he joked, according to the Yankeleviches.

Bonner, 60, will fly to Rome for a consultation with a Siena doctor who performed both her previous operations for glaucoma. She will be met in Italy by Yankelevich and her son Alexei Semyonov, who also lives in Newton.

Back to Soviet Union

She will come to Boston four or five days later for a heart bypass operation and return to the Soviet Union within three months, her daughter said.

Yankelevich cautioned that her mother has yet to get her passport. “All she has is a piece of paper saying she is Yelena Bonner, which is the ID of all exiled people, but she has nothing else,” she said.

Nekrich, however, said it is not likely that the Soviets would rescind permission for her to leave. “I think their retreat from that promise would be too damaging,” he said.