Bonner Denounces Press for Insinuations on Health

Soviet dissident Yelena Bonner today put aside her vow not to talk to reporters and expressed anger at press insinuations that she might have exaggerated her illness to win a visa out of the Soviet Union.

In an outburst she said should be considered a complaint and not an interview, Bonner said she was disturbed by questions about her condition that arose after doctors determined that she did not need surgery to correct her heart problems and should quit smoking and restrict her diet. (Story on Page 6.)

Bonner, 62, said the press overemphasized her smoking as a factor in her heart condition.

“Americans say I should quit smoking,” she said. “Americans should imagine how life is, living with a tragic separation of the family.”

“In regards to the press, they say I need to diet,” Bonner continued. “I don’t need to diet. On the contrary, I need to gain weight. Americans are obsessed with dieting and quitting smoking.”

“The press is now engaged in a discussion of what kind of treatment is required for me,” said Bonner, wife of Nobel Prize-winning dissident Andrei D. Sakharov. “Who invented the story that I needed a bypass?”

Her family had said in November that they understood Bonner would undergo a coronary bypass when she came to the United States.

Her release for three months of medical treatment was won after years of protest by Sakharov. She warned her children in a phone call just before her trip not to be shocked by her appearance, which she said had changed dramatically after a heart attack in 1983.

Bonner, a pediatrician, said her heart condition was self-diagnosed until now--and her heart pills self-prescribed--because Soviet authorities would not allow Sakharov to accompany her on a visit to one of the few doctors she trusted, who lives in Moscow. She and Sakharov live in internal exile in the closed city of Gorky

“I don’t want to go to the hospital without relatives,” she said. “If my husband went with me, I would feel under less stress, but I was refused this and as a consequence did not have any treatment.”

Bonner also said recent videotapes of Sakharov in his doctor’s office, evidently filmed by a hidden camera and released by Soviet authorities a few weeks ago to show he was healthy, reaffirmed her distrust of Soviet doctors.

“Would you be able to undergo treatment, would you go again to a doctor if you knew you were posing undressed for the benefit of all the world to see?” she asked.

She said that if such an incident happened in the United States, people would be outraged.