Soviets Honor Sakharov as Conscience of Nation : Human rights: 70th anniversary of birth of the man once reviled as a ‘traitor’ stirs an outpouring of tributes.

Reviled as a “traitor to his socialist motherland,” exiled for his relentless campaign for human rights and jeered even amid the Soviet Union’s reforms for insisting they be fully democratic, the late Andrei D. Sakharov was honored on Tuesday, the 70th anniversary of his birth, by a nation that has finally recognized him as its conscience.

In an outpouring of tributes, both official and personal, Sakharov was honored by compatriots who said they miss his wisdom, integrity and courage as their national crisis becomes increasingly acute.

“Sakharov was one of the great figures of the 20th Century,” Sergei B. Stankevich, the deputy mayor of Moscow, said as he unveiled a memorial plaque on the apartment building where Sakharov, a prominent nuclear physicist before becoming a human rights campaigner, lived and where he died in December, 1989.

“We miss him dearly today. . . . Much of what we have managed to do we owe to him; much of what we must do and what we hope to do also begins with him,” Stankevich said.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who freed Sakharov from internal exile but then chafed under his criticism, and Boris N. Yeltsin, the populist Russian leader who formed an uneasy alliance with him, joined ceremonies marking Sakharov’s birthday and the opening of an international congress on the theme of his 1975 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, “Peace, Progress and Human Rights.”

They were tartly reminded by his widow, Yelena Bonner, that Sakharov’s ideals remain largely unrealized, his hopes unfulfilled but his fears for the nation’s backward slide toward totalitarianism dangerously close as the economy collapses and the impulse grows to reimpose order with a “strong hand.”

“The chief purpose of this congress is to declare altogether what Sakharov used to say alone,” Bonner said. “The important thing now is to speak truthfully and professionally about the most acute issues of the modern world.

“But to say this is just part of the task. We would like to be heard by those who will decide the problems--and be heard not in 10 or 20 years but today.”

Gorbachev, sitting in the presidential box at a Moscow concert hall, listened attentively as Bonner spoke. His last encounter with Sakharov, at a session of the national Parliament, was a sad one, for he had cut the human rights campaigner off as Sakharov tried to read telegrams demanding that the Communist Party yield its monopoly on political power--a move that followed three months later.

Bonner, a prominent human rights campaigner herself, was toughest on what she called the government’s efforts to force the country’s 15 constituent republics to sign a new Union Treaty, preserving the Soviet Union with socialism as its declared ideology.

“If we want to have a free future, we should be looking toward a confederation (of sovereign states),” she said. “Whatever they say about a ‘renewed federation’ is just lip service.”

A civil war is already raging in many parts of the country, she continued, “between the old Stalinist structure and the newly emerging (political) structures” built democratically by the people.

“Whatever happens,” she concluded, “no armies, no police, no special forces can stop us from moving towards a new society. All they can do is put the brakes on to slow the process.”

Bonner, often an acerbic critic of Gorbachev, nonetheless welcomed the Soviet leader’s presence at what was a gala gathering of government and political officials, former political prisoners, prominent writers, artists, musicians and scientists and some of the Kremlin’s severest critics from abroad.

Alexander Dubcek, ousted by Moscow as Czechoslovakia’s leader for his efforts to develop “socialism with a human face” during the 1968 “Prague Spring” reforms, credited Sakharov with helping bring Eastern Europe “along the road from totalitarianism to democracy.”

Sakharov’s seminal essay, “Thoughts of Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” coincided with the Prague Spring. He was barred from “secret work” as politically unreliable, and he began his human rights campaign in earnest.

“Look how far we have come,” said Dubcek, now the chairman of Czechoslovakia’s federal assembly. “We know how far we still have to go, but let us praise the man who never let us forget the direction in which we must head.”

Yuri Karyakin, a former political prisoner and longtime associate of Sakharov, also spoke at the unveiling of the plaque, which says simply, “Here Lived Sakharov.”

Soviet lawmakers began their sessions on Tuesday with a minute of silence in Sakharov’s memory.

The Soviet press, which once vied to denounce him, was lavish in its praise. Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, said that Sakharov “made a major contribution to strengthening our state’s defense capacity, continued the humanist tradition of the Russian intelligentsia . . . and helped prepare for the renewal of our society.”

“Were it not for him, we Russians would have covered ourselves with shame,” historian Dmitri Likhachev, the doyen of Soviet intellectuals, wrote in the government newspaper Izvestia.