Sakharov, Seeking Peace and Quiet, Will Visit Gorky

Andrei D. Sakharov said Thursday he will return to Gorky, where he was forced to spend seven years of exile for advocating human rights, to pick up his possessions and get some work done in peace.

He also met a fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Henry A. Kissinger, when the former secretary of state arrived at the dissident physicist’s Moscow apartment with other members of a delegation from the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.

While waiting on the sidewalk for the visitors to arrive, Sakharov told reporters that he and his wife, Yelena Bonner, “must go to Gorky because we left our belongings there, and I also want to spend some time working there in peace.”

No More Interviews

He said last month that, for the sake of his research on lasers, elementary particles and other physics problems, he would give no more interviews to the Western reporters who thronged his apartment after his return to Moscow on Dec. 23.

Asked when they would return to Gorky, a city closed to foreigners 250 miles east of Moscow, he said the trip will be made “after the general meeting of the Academy (of Sciences) in the middle of March.”

Kissinger and his companions pulled up outside the building at 8 p.m. in a black Soviet-built limousine, and he moved through a ring of journalists to the scientist.

“This is very moving,” Kissinger said. “We are meeting for the first time.”

Kissinger and Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam were chosen as joint Nobel Peace Prize winners in 1973 for their Paris negotiations toward an end to the Vietnam War. Sakharov, a leading nuclear physicist who became the Soviet Union’s most noted dissident, won the prize in 1975 for his work in favor of disarmament and against human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. He was sent to internal exile in Gorky in 1979 and his wife was sent there later.