Bonner Back in Russia to Rejoin Mate

Yelena Bonner, accompanied by two congressmen and two American friends, arrived back in the Soviet Union today after six months in the West to rejoin her husband, Andrei D. Sakharov, in internal exile.

“If I didn’t have a husband, I wouldn’t have returned,” Bonner said as she arrived on a flight from Milan, Italy. “He is waiting for me.”

Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Daniel E. Lundgren (R-Long Beach), who arrived with Bonner, said the American Embassy had requested a meeting with Soviet officials on Tuesday so they could discuss the Sakharov case.

One of the friends who accompanied her, Richard Sobol, said he hoped to accompany Bonner to her reunion with her husband in Gorky, which is closed to foreigners.

Sobol said Bonner’s health had improved. “She has stopped smoking and is into chewing gum,” he said.

Bonner said her doctors in the United States “insisted I return in two years’ time for checkups.”

Only two Soviet friends were waiting as the tired-looking Bonner made her way past customs and immigration checks at Moscow’s Sheremetevo Airport.

“I went to get medical care,” Bonner said. “My heart is good. My plan is to rest, to sleep for a night” and go to Gorky in two or three days, she said.

“I have not the slightest desire to return,” the 63-year-old Bonner said at a news conference earlier at Milan’s Linate Airport.

“I think anyone in a sound mental state would not want to return from freedom to prison,” Bonner said. She was sentenced in 1984 to five years in exile in Gorky.

She went to the West for treatment of eye and heart ailments in Italy and the United States on Dec. 2.

Bonner was seen off in Milan by her son, Alexei Semyonov of Newton, Mass., who stood clutching a rail in the departure lounge, smoking a cigarette and staring at the jetliner as it began taxiing down the runway.

Semyonov and his sister, Tatiana Yankelevich, also of Newton, both sought visas to return with their mother but were turned down, friends said.