If It Weren’t for Sakharov, ‘I Would Not Have Come Back’ : Reluctant Bonner Returns Home

Escorted by two American congressmen, Yelena Bonner returned reluctantly to the Soviet Union on Monday to rejoin her husband, dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, in lonely exile.

“If I did not have a husband here, I would not have come back,” she told reporters at Sheremetyevo Airport on her return from six months in the West to receive medical treatment.

At her request, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and California Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Long Beach) flew with her from Milan, Italy, to Moscow in what Frank called a show of solidarity. Bonner also was met by diplomats from the United States, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and other Western countries.

From the airport, she was driven to her apartment on Moscow’s busy Garden Ring Road in a U.S. Embassy car with Eugene Zajac, the U.S. consul general.

Short Rest in Moscow

Weary from a series of visits to Paris, London and Rome, the 62-year-old Bonner said she wanted to rest a while and take care of personal affairs in Moscow before going back to Gorky, where she and her husband had been exiled.

Bonner is serving a five-year sentence of internal exile after being convicted of defaming the Soviet state by expressing her views and those of her husband on human rights issues.

“I have not the slightest desire to return (to the Soviet Union),” she said at a Milan airport news conference. “I think anyone who is in a sound mental state would not want to return from freedom to prison.”

But she said she had gone abroad to receive medical treatment and not to leave her country, adding, “If I had wanted to emigrate, I would have applied to emigrate.”

An Uncertain Fate

Bonner returns to an uncertain fate in view of the critical statements she made while in the West about Soviet authorities who banished her husband to Gorky in 1980 after he became a leading human rights advocate. Gorky, an industrial city about 250 miles east of Moscow, is off-limits for foreigners. The big diplomatic contingent at the airport, together with a crowd of Western correspondents, reflected the intense interest in Sakharov’s case outside the Soviet Union.

Bonner, however, was not given any VIP treatment by Soviet customs officials, who spent about half an hour searching through her luggage and inspecting some of her personal papers.

The congressmen stood by her side during the customs check, which was completed without incident.

Lungren, speaking with reporters, said he and Frank wanted to emphasize by their presence that Bonner and her husband will not be forgotten while they remain in Gorky.

‘A Hero for Many People’

“She is a lovely person and a strong person and a hero for many people,” Lungren said.

“We hope by our presence to demonstrate to the Soviet Union and to the world our desire that Sakharov be treated with dignity and respect,” Frank said.

Bonner said she last spoke with Sakharov by telephone on May 15 and could not call him from Moscow since there is no phone in their Gorky apartment.

“I left a whole family behind,” she said, referring to her mother, son, daughter and grandchildren in the United States, “but my husband is here, so it’s difficult to talk of feelings.”

Before Bonner arrived, police detained a friend of hers, Serafim Yevsupov, 53, who came to the airport to join in the welcome. Yevsupov’s daughter, Ludmilla, said police gave no reason for the detention and also took her passport away.

35 Families to Emigrate

Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, a Soviet official said Monday that another 35 families involving more than 80 people with relatives in the United States have just been granted permission to leave the Soviet Union.

The disclosure by Yuri Kashlev, head of the Soviet delegation at the multilateral conference in Bern, Switzerland, on human contacts, came after the Soviet Union approved exit visas for 36 families with 119 people to join their families in the United States.

Kashlev provided no details except to say that for each of the 71 cases, about three family members would be allowed to emigrate.

A U.S. Embassy official, however, said no list of the families has been received by American diplomats here and that he only knew what had been reported by the news media.

Consistent With Plans

In Washington, State Department spokesman Charles Redman said he could not confirm the report but that it was “consistent with our understanding of Soviet plans.”

Soviet officials, meeting with U.S. representatives last week in Bern, announced that 117 people will be allowed to emigrate, resolving 36 of the 120 cases of divided families on the State Department’s “representation list.” At that time, Redman said, the Soviets said they planned to resolve a total of 71 cases in the near future.

However, unlike the situation last week, he said the State Department has not received a list of names or heard anything official from Moscow.

On a related matter, Redman confirmed that the Romanian government has approved about 1,000 requests by Romanian citizens to emigrate to the United States during the last few weeks. He said these approvals apparently reversed an emigration slowdown that had been in effect earlier this year and “brought the level back to the relatively high levels of recent years.”

The Administration is in the process of reviewing Romania’s “most favored nation” trade status. “Our policy for 10 years has been to use the annual review of MFN to encourage the Romanians to take constructive actions,” Redman said.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this article from Washington.