Bonner’s Heart Problems Given Top Priority

Soviet dissident Yelena Bonner met privately with Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi on Thursday and then prepared to fly to Boston for medical consultations over her severe heart problems.

Bonner, 62, wife of dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, drove to Rome on Thursday afternoon from the medieval hill town of Siena, where a leading Italian eye specialist urged her to seek treatment for her heart before undergoing cataract surgery in his clinic.

“It is not the moment for her to consider an (eye) operation,” said Dr. Renato Frezzotti, who treated her for glaucoma in 1975 and 1977. He examined her again in 1979 on her last visit to the West before she was sentenced to internal exile with her husband in the closed Soviet city of Gorky.

Sakharov, 64, winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, recently ended a six-month hunger strike that was staged to force Soviet authorities to allow Bonner to seek medical treatment in the West.

Visa Extension Advised

Frezzotti said he urged the dissident physician to take care of her heart problems first, then seek an extension of her 90-day exit visa from the Soviet Union so that she can return to Siena for the cataract operation on her left eye and treatment of glaucoma in both eyes.

The eye specialist implicitly criticized the neglect of Bonner’s medical problems in the Soviet Union. He said she needs to be examined “every three or four months, not every six years” to prevent a worsening of the glaucoma that could lead to blindness. The eye condition dates from war wounds and a concussion that Bonner suffered as a Soviet army nurse in 1941.

Bonner’s son, Alexei Semyonov, and son-in-law, Yefrem Yankelevich, said here that she suffered two major heart attacks, one in 1983 and another last May, and may require coronary bypass surgery. They said she will see an unnamed Boston cardiologist soon after she reaches the United States, probably this weekend.

The prominent Soviet human rights activist reached Rome from Moscow on Monday and was reunited with Semyonov and Yankelevich, husband of her daughter, Tatiana, all of whom live in Newton, Mass., a suburb of Boston. The two men refused to confirm reports that they and Bonner will fly to the United States today.

According to Semyonov, Bonner cabled her husband, still living in internal exile in Gorky, when she arrived in Rome but has not yet received a reply. He said she will try to telephone him when she reaches Boston.

Officials at Craxi’s Chigi Palace office said Bonner had asked to see the prime minister privately to thank him for helping her to gain the exit visa. Tatiana Yankelevich met with Craxi last spring, and the Italian leader subsequently saw Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Moscow and urged that Bonner be allowed to come to Italy.

The two met in Craxi’s office with only an interpreter present while Semyonov and Yankelevich waited with reporters in the open courtyard of the ornate 17th-Century palace in central Rome.

Recalling that she had met Craxi on an earlier trip to Italy in 1975, when he was a rising Socialist Party leader, Bonner quipped, “The only thing that has changed since then is that he has become premier and I have become a criminal.”

Five-Year Sentence

Sakharov has been in internal exile since 1980, when he angered authorities by condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He had numerous conflicts with the Kremlin earlier as a result of his and Bonner’s outspoken protests against Soviet human rights abuses. Bonner was sentenced to five years in internal exile 19 months ago for her human rights activities.