Stroke, Heart Attack Concealed : Soviets Forged Cables on Sakharovs, Family Says

Relatives of Soviet dissident Yelena Bonner said Tuesday that the KGB forged cables and released misleading videotapes to prevent the world from learning that she had suffered a heart attack and that her husband, Nobel laureate Andrei D. Sakharov, had had a debilitating stroke brought on by forced feeding.

Bonner, 62, arrived in Rome Monday, breaking 19 months of internal exile in the closed Soviet city of Gorky, after she received permission to visit the West for treatment of eye and heart problems. Her heart attack was in 1983, relatives said.

Bonner refused to talk with reporters, citing an agreement with Soviet authorities to avoid contact with the press as a condition of her return to Gorky, where Sakharov remains in internal exile.

But Bonner’s son, Alexei Semyonov, and a son-in-law, Yefrem Yankelevich, called a press conference at which they reviewed what they knew of their parents’ treatment and added details that they said came from “clarifications” by their mother after she arrived here. Both Semyonov and Yankelevich live in Newton, Mass.

While Sakharov, 64, conducted an almost nonstop hunger strike over six months this year to force the authorities to let his wife go to the West for medical treatment, the Soviet Union’s KGB security police forged cables in Bonner’s name to deceive friends and others into believing that the two were living together and that both were in good health, they said.

“My mother tried to contact friends by sending cables,” Semyonov said, adding that these cables were facsimile transmissions of what purportedly was her handwriting. “Each of them was forged in such a way as to create the impression that everything was normal.”

For example, he said, Bonner sent a friend a guarded message in which she included a line from a well-known Russian poem--”I have friends, thank God.” She was confident that the friend would fill in the preceding line--”The solitude is driving me from door to door”--and realize that she and Sakharov had been separated.

But when the friend received the cable, it had been altered by the KGB, using Bonner’s handwriting from previously intercepted cables, to say, “Everything is all right, thank God.”

“There were many other cables like that,” Semyonov said in explaining how his family was duped into hoping that the Sakharovs were well at a time when the physicist was actually in a hospital being force-fed because he had undertaken the hunger strike.

Videotapes that reached the West through West Germany, showing Sakharov eating and the couple apparently enjoying life together, were also false, the relatives said.

‘Frightening Reality’

“All of this,” Semyonov said, “shows us very plainly that what Mama said two years ago--that they can be killed in Gorky at any moment and nobody would know--has now become a frightening reality.”

It was during an earlier hunger strike last year that Sakharov suffered what Semyonov and Yankelevich described as a stroke, the effects of which are still visible in a trembling lower jaw, they said.

Outside the press conference, the Sakharov relatives showed a letter written by Bonner, 62, a physician, that contained a vivid description of the stroke. They said the letter was smuggled out of the Soviet Union last spring.

” . . . First they would do it intravenously,” the letter said, describing the forced feeding. “then through a tube in his nose; a clamp would then be put on his nose and whenever he opened his mouth to breathe they would pour food down his throat--excruciating.

“During the first intravenous feeding, he suffered either arterial spasm or a stroke--loss of consciousness, incontinence, then distorted vision when he regained consciousness. Afterward he had trouble walking, writing was difficult, his hands shook, and when writing some words he would repeat certain vowels like “u” and “o” three times without noticing this himself. They began to intimidate him by saying this was Parkinson’s disease. . . .”

Break in Hunger Strike

The two relatives said Sakharov’s most recent hunger strike began in April, was interrupted for two weeks in July after he wrote a personal appeal to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, then continued until Oct. 23, when authorities relented and gave Bonner permission to go to the West for medical treatment.

At the low point, Sakharov’s weight dropped from his normal 180.4 pounds to 136.4 pounds, Semyonov said, but it has recently returned to 162.8 pounds.

He added that the physicist, exiled for his human rights activities and for protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, also suffers from heart arrhythmia. The heart problem involved two to three irregular heartbeats per minute after earlier hunger strikes, but there is now an irregular beat every two or three heartbeats, he said.

Despite the problems, Semyonov said, Sakharov “feels good, does exercises every day and studies again his scientific work.”

Bonner ‘Very Weak’

Bonner, a World War II Soviet army nurse who was trained as a physician after the war, also has heart trouble and suffered a major heart attack in 1983. Yankelevich said her heart remains “very weak” and “when she walks, she has to rest and can’t go up stairs.”

“She takes nitroglycerin every 15 to 20 minutes,” he said.

Yankelevich, husband of Bonner’s daughter, Tatiana, said the family’s most realistic hope is that Sakharov might be allowed to return to Moscow, though he indicated that the physicist would not turn down a chance to emigrate. He said Sakharov was ready to accept a 1983 offer from Norway to live there.

Bonner has an appointment today with an eye specialist in Siena. After treatment for her eye condition, which dates from a wartime injury, she will leave Italy for Boston to be examined by cardiologists for possible heart by-pass surgery.