Sakharov’s Memoirs Are Smuggled West

The memoirs of Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov have been smuggled out of the Soviet Union and will be published as soon as they are translated from Russian, officials at Alfred A. Knopf said.

Ashbel Green, a Knopf senior editor, said Knopf officials are not able to say what areas Sakharov, who has been living in exile since 1980, focused on in his memoirs.

Officials said details on the contents of the book by the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner would not be released before its publication.

The terms of the deal as well as information on how the still-untitled book was smuggled out of the Soviet Union were not available.

Word that the ailing 65-year-old Sakharov’s memoirs had arrived in the West came at a news conference in Frankfurt, West Germany, as well as in statements made in New York by Knopf officials.

Efrem Yankelevich, Sakharov’s son-in-law and his spokesman in the West, said Knopf, a division of Random House, had been assigned world publication rights. The book will also be published in at least nine other countries.

Yankelevich said in Frankfurt that Sakharov, credited with helping develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was able to complete the memoirs even though agents of the KGB, the Soviet secret police, stole drafts of the book four times.

The announcement that Knopf had acquired the rights to Sakharov’s book came just days before the scheduled publication of “Alone Together,” the memoirs of Sakharov’s wife, Yelena Bonner.

Bonner’s book, to be published Oct. 17, deals with the couple’s years in exile.