West, Emigres Applaud Gorky Exile Release

Western governments and Soviet emigres welcomed the end of internal exile for Soviet physicist Andrei D. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, but they called on the Kremlin to follow it up with tolerance of other dissidents.

Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir F. Petrovsky announced Friday that Sakharov, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the most famous Soviet dissident, is free to return to Moscow after almost seven years in the closed city of Gorky.

Bonner’s conviction on anti-Soviet slander charges was set aside so she could accompany him.

“We’re pleased,” said White House spokesman Larry Speakes. “We welcome this as a personal victory of courage for the principles of human rights that the two have publicly exemplified in the Soviet Union.”

Others Remain Incarcerated

He said the United States noted, however, “that the system of abuses of human rights continues. There are countless others who remain incarcerated for no reason other than their desire to express their viewpoint.”

British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe hailed the release but said “many others” deprived of human rights in the Soviet Union should not be forgotten. He called the Kremlin move “a long-delayed reaction to the weight of world opinion.”

Amnesty International, which has also won the Nobel Peace Prize, welcomed the Sakharovs’ release from internal exile but urged Soviet authorities to place no conditions on their return to Moscow.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s conservative Christian Democratic Union credited worldwide appeals on behalf of the Sakharovs. “Without the public pressure of the free world, Sakharov and his wife would have been long forgotten,” said Heiner Geissler, general secretary of the party.

Role of Western Criticism

Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist and human rights activist freed in October from eight years of prison and internal exile, also said Western criticism played a role in the lifting of the couple’s banishment.

Orlov said in New York that the Kremlin made the concession “because criticism of the Soviet Union has reached its maximum in connection with the death of (dissident) Anatoly Marchenko.”

Marchenko died in a Soviet prison Dec. 8 reportedly after a long hunger strike.

In France, Human Rights Minister Claude Malhuret said people should not forget that the internal exile of Sakharov “resulted from totally illegal procedures, even by Soviet laws.”