Bonner Tells of Deal She Struck to Come West

Yelena Bonner, the seriously ill wife of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, told relatives Wednesday she won permission to travel next month to Rome and Boston for medical treatment after signing a pledge not to talk to reporters.

Sakharov, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said he ended a hunger strike and rescinded his resignation from a prestigious Soviet science academy after his wife received permission to leave Gorky, where they are in internal exile.

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.

If all goes as planned, she will be the first person allowed to leave the Soviet Union while in internal exile and then return, 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 by telephone in Gorky on Wednesday after two days of unsuccessful attempts. In the 40-minute talk in Russian, Bonner told her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich, that she signed an agreement with Soviet officials 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.

The Yankeleviches said Sakharov, 62, apparently 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 that he has 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, however, told her family not to be surprised at her ill health.

“She said she can’t go for walks anymore,” said Mrs. Yankelevich. “Around the house she can take care of the two of them, but not much more.”

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

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

Sakharov said he withdrew his resignation from the Academy of Sciences, which he submitted in May, after Soviet officials assured him his wife could leave.

The only reference to this week’s summit meeting between U.S. and Soviet leaders was a joke about the trouble the Yankeleviches had reaching Bonner on Monday and Tuesday.

“What do you expect?” Bonner reportedly said. “It’s probably a bad idea to try while they are having their meeting.”