The World - News from Feb. 16, 1986

Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, in a letter attributed to him, described a nightmarish ordeal he endured at the hands of the KGB which he compared with George Orwell’s novel, “1984.” The letter, said to have been smuggled to the West, describes in vivid detail Sakharov’s confinement in a hospital where he was force-fed and threatened while on a hunger strike in 1984 in an effort to win permission, later granted, for his wife, Yelena Bonner, to leave the country for medical treatment. “What happened to me in a Gorky hospital in the summer of 1984 is strikingly reminiscent of Orwell’s famous novel, even down to the coincidence of the book’s title,” according to the letter, published in U.S. News & World Report.