Sakharov Praised as Champion of Freedom

World leaders from President Bush to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev today praised Andrei D. Sakharov as a tremendous force for freedom who outlived his Soviet persecutors and saw the liberty he championed take root throughout Eastern Europe.

The 68-year-old scientist and human rights activist died Thursday of an apparent heart attack in his Moscow apartment.

The Soviet Congress stood for a minute of silence for their colleague, once considered a national hero for discovering the Soviet hydrogen bomb but later reviled by Kremlin leadership for his uncompromising stands for human freedom.

Gorbachev, who freed the physicist from seven years of internal exile, called Sakharov a “man of conviction and sincerity.”

“It’s a great loss,” Gorbachev said. “He was a person who had his own ideas, his own convictions which he expressed openly and directly. This doesn’t mean I agreed with him, although on many things we did agree.”

One Soviet lawmaker called Sakharov a man “such as maybe appears once in a hundred years.”

Bush said that “all of us are diminished” and that Sakharov “embodied all of what is good and decent in the human spirit.”

Bush, in a message of condolence to Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner, said: “All of us who knew him will never forget his courage and devotion to freedom. . . . Just as he truly enriched all of us with his life, all of us are diminished by his untimely death.”

Aase Lionaes, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that awarded Sakharov the Peace Prize in 1975, said he “fell in the struggle for democratic reforms. His death represents a great loss, especially at a time with hopes of a positive development in the Soviet Union and in all Eastern Europe.”

Political leaders worldwide commended Sakharov as a man whose causes went beyond ideology.

Lech Walesa, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said Sakharov’s death was “a great loss for reform both in the Soviet Union and everywhere else.”

“He was just a remarkable person,” said British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “He was one of those who would always say the truth must be found and was never afraid of stating that and letting everyone know.”

“It is just sad he will not be preeminent in the freer future of the Soviet Union,” she told reporters in London.

In Strasbourg, France, the 518-member European Parliament unanimously paid tribute to Sakharov, whose name it had given to its Human Rights Prize.

In Brussels, the NATO foreign ministers hailed Sakharov as a pioneer who helped change Soviet society. NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner said, “The ministers expressed deeply felt sense of loss at the passing of Andrei Sakharov.”