Sakharov’s Influence Remains Powerful One Year After His Death : Dissident: His widow criticizes the movement that is turning him into a cult figure.

The Communist Party used to advertise itself as the “conscience of the nation.” By the time Andrei Sakharov died, that title was more commonly accorded to him.

Since the physicist and political activist’s death a year ago this month, friends and colleagues in the human rights movement have battled for Sakharov’s cause. But they say that no one has emerged to take his place.

“The conscience of the nation--that has remained a vacant position,” said Sergei Grigoryants, editor of the unofficial journal Glasnost and one of many former political prisoners whom Sakharov pressured the government to free.

Since Sakharov died of heart failure at the age of 68, public esteem has continued to climb for the man who helped invent the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

He campaigned tirelessly for justice for Josef Stalin’s victims, nuclear disarmament, freedom of emigration and above all democracy.

In a poll published recently by the Moscow News, Soviet citizens were asked “which of the following names will have great meaning for the people of the USSR in the year 2000: Jesus Christ, Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev and Sakharov.”

Sakharov finished second to Jesus--but well ahead of Lenin, Stalin and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Moscow News, a reformist weekly, also published an unusual confession, admitting that it had “shortened” and “corrected”--effectively censored--articles by Sakharov as recently as 1988.

“If we had listened to him, our road to the truth would have been shorter and less tortured. But we shortened and corrected him; we did not listen or pretended that we did not hear,” the newspaper said.

“I don’t know whether he forgave us, but we cannot forgive ourselves,” it said.

A decade ago, Sakharov was denounced in the official press as an “utterly ignorant person” and banished to the industrial city of Gorky for criticizing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He spent seven years in internal exile before being recalled to Moscow by Gorbachev in December, 1986.

Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan last year; that war now is viewed by Soviets as a national disaster.

Sakharov’s former apartment in Gorky is being turned into a museum. His memoirs are being serialized by Znamya, a literary journal with a circulation of 1 million.

And both his grave in southwest Moscow and his apartment building on the city’s Ring Road have become unofficial shrines, decorated daily with flowers by visitors.

Sakharov’s name frequently serves as a rallying cry for reformers, including Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic; Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov, and his comrades in the national legislature.

But idolatry of Sakharov annoys his widow, Yelena Bonner.

“Why are we so inclined to create cults . . . out of Sakharov, out of me?” the magazine Ogonyok quoted her as saying in November.

“I think it is absolutely unbearable when people who are trying to develop a democratic consciousness so easily create a cult of new heroes,” she added.

Bonner commemorated Sakharov’s death at a mid-December memorial concert in Strasbourg, France. She was schedule to fly to New York, where the second volume of his memoirs, “Moscow and Beyond,” is to be published in January.

In Moscow, Sakharov’s friends and colleagues said they are dismayed that some organizations and political movements have taken his name without embracing his ideals.

At least one of the groups--the “Sakharov Union of Democratic Forces,” which recently called for a national state of emergency--is far from his political views, said Larisa Bogoraz, a human rights campaigner and widow of dissident Anatoly Marchenko.

Grigoryants, Bogoraz and others said they believe Sakharov would be embarrassed and upset at becoming a larger-than-life character, a symbol freely appropriated by politicians and movements of varying stripes.

But they also said he would be pleased by some events of the past year.

At the time of his death, Sakharov was pushing for elimination of Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which accorded the Communist Party a “leading role” in society.

Less than four months later, the party agreed to surrender its constitutional monopoly on power.

Sakharov’s proposed draft of a new constitution was rejected by the Communist Party Central Committee little more than a year ago. Today, his vision of truly sovereign republics joining in a voluntary union is widely embraced as the only way to hold the country together.

“Only now are people beginning to realize how right he was on the nationalities question and many other issues,” Bogoraz said.