Soviets Bar Bonner’s Return to Moscow From Gorky, Friend Fears
Yelena Bonner failed to return to Moscow as planned Sunday, and a friend who was waiting for the Soviet dissident said she fears Bonner was prevented from leaving the closed city of Gorky.
Bonner, 63, returned to the Soviet Union on June 2 from a six-month stay in the West, where she underwent medical treatment and met relatives. The next day, she rejoined her husband, physicist and leading dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, 65, in internal exile in Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow.
Before leaving, she told reporters she intended to return to Moscow by June 15 to collect luggage that had been sent by air freight from the West.
“If I’m not back here by the 15th, then they haven’t let me come. That’s exact,” Bonner told reporters before her departure for Gorky. Bonner was not on any train arriving in Moscow from Gorky on Sunday.
If allowed to return to Moscow, Bonner might have been able to provide Western reporters with an up-to-date report on Sakharov’s health.
Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, was exiled to Gorky in January, 1980, after criticizing the Soviet Union’s December, 1979, invasion of Afghanistan. Sakharov was never formally charged with a crime.
In May, 1984, Bonner was detained in Gorky on charges of anti-Soviet slander and three months later sentenced to five years of exile there.
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