Attempt to Counter Rumors on Health : ‘KGB Home Movies’ of Sakharov Aired

A television station today broadcast excerpts from a videotape of Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, who was seen talking with a hospital director, walking along a street and carrying his wife’s suitcases.

His family denounced the tape as “KGB home movies.”

Bild newspaper, which obtained the nearly 23-minute videotape and made it available for broadcast, said it is evidence of a Kremlin campaign to refute reports that the Nobel Prize-winning physicist is ailing.

West Germany’s ZDF network broadcast about 40 seconds of the videotape. It showed Sakharov looking tired and walking very slowly with his head slightly stooped.

Both Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, were wearing heavy winter clothes. The ZDF network said the films appear to have been taken shortly before her recent departure from the Soviet city of Gorky to Moscow for the trip to Italy and the United States for medical treatment.

The final scene shows the 64-year-old Sakharov carrying what ZDF said were Bonner’s bags to a train station.

In Newton, Mass., where Bonner is staying for medical treatment, a member of Sakharov’s family said today he was “sick and tired” of films being released by Soviet authorities depicting Sakharov in good health while his wife is seeking medical treatment in the United States.

Efram Yankelevich, Bonner’s son-in-law, said the film was part of a continuing effort by Soviet authorities to blunt Bonner’s visit to the West.

“The reason they released them was to show us that Sakharov is fine and to counter what Yelena Bonner might have said about his condition. We hope we will be able to learn more about the actual situation after talking to him on the phone, but I’m getting sick and tired of these KGB home movies,” Yankelevich said.