Sakharov Offers to Curb Protest if Exile Is Ended

Andrei D. Sakharov has offered to cut back his activities as a human rights campaigner and promised not to talk to Westerners if the Kremlin agrees to end his internal exile and let him return to Moscow, his family said Wednesday.

Sakharov’s offer was revealed by his stepdaughter, Tatiana Yankelevich, who is accompanying her mother, Yelena Bonner, on a tour of Europe before Bonner returns to the Soviet Union on June 2 and her exile with her husband in the closed city of Gorky.

Yankelevich said that Sakharov, who turned 65 last week, told Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in a letter last July that he wanted to “cease entirely taking part in any public activity (of course, apart from the most exceptional cases) and to concentrate, instead, on my scientific work.”

Cautiously Optimistic

Sakharov’s relatives, including his wife, said they are cautiously optimistic that the Kremlin might relax the conditions of his internal exile in Gorky after Bonner returns.

Bonner, 62, who ended a series of meetings with French political leaders Wednesday, is due to return to Moscow on Monday, ending six months in the West for medical treatment.

“There is no real foundation for it, but I am an optimist. I am returning to exile with a clear head,” Bonner said Tuesday after meeting French President Francois Mitterrand.

Yankelevich said that the couple’s exile in Gorky, which began in January, 1980, was “unbearable” because of their complete isolation from human contact, except with the KGB security police.

Initially, Bonner was free to travel to Moscow but in August, 1984, she was sentenced to five years’ exile in the town 250 miles east of Moscow.

Yankelevich said Sakharov “is not just a human rights advocate” and indicated he did not want to resume the role he played in the late 1970s as a central figure in the Soviet dissident movement.

Movement Collapsed

The movement itself has virtually collapsed with the imprisonment or emigration of most of its leaders. “Things have changed. There is a lot of apathy,” she said.

She said Sakharov wants to continue to speak out on major issues. For example, she suggested he would want to offer views on “Star Wars”--the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative, of which he takes a critical view--and the recent Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

He also wants to be involved with the future East-West cooperation in nuclear fusion research linking the Soviet Union’s Tokamak project with similar projects in the United States and Western Europe.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, as an atomic physicist, Sakharov was at the center of research into nuclear weapons.

Yankelevich said she has not given up hope that Soviet political authorities may one day reverse their longstanding refusal to allow Sakharov to travel to the West because, they say, he still knows military secrets.

French Promise Help

Both Mitterrand, due to visit Moscow in July, and French Premier Jacques Chirac promised Bonner in meetings Tuesday to use what influence they could with the Kremlin, at least to help Sakharov return to Moscow.

Many believe that Western pressure was partly responsible for the Soviet decision to allow Bonner to travel to the West for heart bypass surgery last December.

She promised not to speak to reporters in the West, but members of her family made frequent statements to reporters, among other things describing her phone conversations with Sakharov. Toward the end of her stay in the United States, she began speaking out herself.

Thus, observers say, Kremlin authorities might be skeptical of any promises made by her husband, especially since he precludes silence on “exceptional cases.”

Test of Intentions

Bonner expects her return to Moscow next week to be a first test of the authorities’ intentions towards her.

She hopes to spend three to five days in Moscow, where her empty apartment is guarded night and day by police, but fears she may be whisked back to exile in Gorky instead.

While she has been in the West she has been able to talk a few times to her husband by phone, booking a call to a post office near the couple’s apartment on Gagarin Street, in the Gorky suburbs.

The last conversation, in which Sakharov said he was in good health, was on May 15.

“The line is so bad they get exhausted shouting at each other,” Yankelevich said.

From Paris, Bonner flew to London, where she said Wednesday she wouldn’t return to the Soviet Union if it wasn’t for Sakharov.

One Reason for Return

“I am returning only because of my husband. If it was not for my husband, I wouldn’t go back,” she told reporters at Heathrow Airport. She spoke in Russian and her daughter translated her remarks.

“I am leaving nine members of my family in the West. So I don’t think you could say I was looking forward to going back,” she said.

She canceled a trip to Oslo to meet Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland because of fatigue and arrived in London a day early. But she told reporters: “I am very well, fully recovered.”

Bonner is scheduled to have private meetings with politicians, academics and media executives and will meet Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on Friday before flying to Rome for talks with President Francesco Cossiga.