‘His Voice Sounded Good,’ One Says After Phone Talk : Friends Expecting Sakharovs in Moscow by Midweek

Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, are expected to return to their Moscow apartment by the middle of this week, family friends said Saturday.

A friend who spoke by telephone to Sakharov in Gorky said: “His voice sounded good. He sounded pleased.”

Moscow buzzed with excitement about Friday’s surprise announcement that the Sakharovs had been released from internal exile in the closed industrial city 250 miles east of here and would be able to live in the Soviet capital again.

Cleaning the Apartment

Two family friends were busy Saturday cleaning the exiles’ mid-town apartment in preparation for their arrival, but they said they did not know exactly when or how the couple would come to Moscow.

Another family friend said, however, that they are not expected before Wednesday, since they must pack and close their Gorky apartment.

(The New York Times reported that Sakharov indicated in a telephone interview from its Moscow bureau to Gorky that he intends to carry on with his human rights activities when he returns to Moscow. It quoted him as saying: “ . . . I am going to live as I lived before my exile, and resume all my activities from before my exile, including my scientific research.”

(Sakharov, according to the interview, confirmed that Soviet leader Mikhail S., Gorbachev spoke with him last Tuesday “for several minutes” over a newly-installed telephone in the Sakharovs’ Gorky apartment.

(He said Gorbachev made no demands that he refrain from “political activities.”)

Meantime, Western news agencies reported the freeing of another well-known dissident, Crimean Tartar activist Mustafa Dzhemilyov, 43, from a Siberian prison camp.

Dzhemilyov was jailed for demonstrating on behalf of Tartars, deported from the Crimea in 1944 by Josef Stalin on suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis, who wanted to return to their Crimean homeland. Most of the Tartars now live in Central Asia, and Dzhemilyov makes his home in Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan.

Friends of his family said he telephoned news of his release from Magadan in northeastern Siberia.

Short Item in Pravda

Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, published a short item on the granting of permission for Sakharov to return to Moscow and the pardon for Bonner that cuts short her five-year sentence of internal exile. Sakharov has been confined to Gorky since Jan. 22, 1980.

Some Muscovites who admire the dissident physicist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize said they were delighted by the decision and surprised that it was reported in Pravda and on Soviet radio and television.

In Newton, Mass., his relatives said he asked Gorbachev during the Tuesday conversation to free all “prisoners of conscience,” the Associated Press reported.

“This would be the carrying out of justice,” Sakharov told Gorbachev, according to a four-page statement read by Tatiana Yankelevich, the scientist’s stepdaughter.

“Gorbachev’s reply was noncommittal,” the family’s statement said.

The decision on Sakharov, the release of Dzhemilyov and permission for Soviet poet Irina Ratushinskaya to travel to the West last week for medical care appeared to be a coordinated effort to improve the Soviet Union’s image on human rights issues.

Sakharov, as a member of the elite Soviet Academy of Sciences and father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, lent his prestige to the short-lived dissident movement in the 1970s.