Bonner, Frail and Tired, Arrives in Rome

Yelena Bonner, the wife of dissident Soviet physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, arrived in Rome on Monday on her first visit to the West since 1979 and disclosed that she has had “no modern medical care” since suffering a heart attack in 1983 and that her husband is “very ill.”

Bonner, 62, a physician, was allowed to travel to the West for medical treatment after 19 months of internal exile in the closed Soviet city of Gorky. She looked frail and tired as she spoke briefly to reporters after her arrival at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci International Airport.

Repeating what she had told reporters in Moscow earlier in the day, Bonner explained here that as a condition of her 90-day visa, she had signed a statement promising Soviet authorities that she would give no interviews or press conferences.

“Because I want to return to my country, I do not want to speak to the mass media,” she said, speaking in Russian through an Italian interpreter. “I think everyone here will understand it. I beg all my friends here to excuse my silence.”

Earlier, however, when her Alitalia flight from Moscow made a brief stop in the northern Italian city of Milan, Bonner told an Italian television interviewer that her husband “is very ill in general, and I can’t say anything more.”

To journalists who accompanied her on the flight from Moscow, she spoke of plans to visit a cardiologist in the United States after her eye problems are treated in a clinic in Siena where she was previously treated in 1979.

“In May, 1983, I had a heart attack and I have had no modern medical care,” she said.

Bonner said she does not know what treatment she will require for her eyes, which have troubled her since she was wounded while serving as a Soviet army nurse in 1941, or how long it might take.

Members of her family have said that her heart problem may require open-heart surgery in Boston, but Bonner said she does not yet know what may be involved or who will treat her. Her visa can be extended, if necessary, to permit heart surgery, she said.

Italian press reports said she may meet first with Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, President Francesco Cossiga and possibly Pope John Paul II. The Vatican said no request had been made for a papal audience.

Before she left Moscow, Bonner said she agreed not to meet the press in return for a Soviet government guarantee that she will be allowed to return to her husband, who has been confined to Gorky for almost six years because of his criticism of Soviet human rights abuses and its invasion of Afghanistan.

The issuance of a visa to Bonner was regarded as a gesture designed to polish the Kremlin’s humanitarian image in advance of last month’s U.S.-Soviet summit meeting. But her silence lent a poignancy to her departure from Moscow, in light of her role as a firebrand in the human rights movement during the 1970s.

Don A. Schanche reported from Rome and William J. Eaton reported from Moscow.