Soviets Step Up Intimidation, Bonner Says

WESTWOOD, Mass. —  Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, have been subjected to more open intimidation since her return from a U.S. visit, relatives said Monday after a phone call to the couple.

Bonner said that agents of the KGB security police who last year filmed the couple with hidden cameras now take their pictures openly in Gorky, a closed city 250 miles west of Moscow where the couple lives in internal exile, her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich, reported.

“We’re being filmed everywhere, openly, both still and moving pictures,” Alexei Semyonov quoted his mother as saying.

Yankelevich said that in another intimidation tactic, Soviet secret police refused to allow the couple to hire a porter to carry Bonner’s luggage when she returned to Gorky in early June.

Bonner, 64, came to the United States late last year to undergo a heart bypass operation.

Recurrence of Heart Pain

Her daughter said that since returning to the Soviet Union, Bonner has suffered two recurrences of the kind of heart pain she had endured five and six times a day before the surgery.

“Other than that her heart seems to be much better,” Yankelevich said. “When asked, ‘How are you feeling?’ she said, ‘Normal for my condition and for our age.’ ”

But Bonner told her family that she could not take walks that were suggested for her heart condition because of her weak legs.

The 20-minute phone call was the first of a series the family hopes to make on the first Monday of every month. Family members invited the media to Semyonov’s suburban home in an effort to maintain the world’s focus on the couple’s plight.

Sakharov, 65, a physicist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his human rights work, was sent to Gorky in 1980 after he criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His wife was banished to Gorky in 1984 after her conviction on charges of slander against the Soviet state.

Relatives at Semyonov’s home, which included Bonner’s 86-year-old mother, Ruth, had trouble hearing Bonner and Sakharov during most of Monday’s phone call.

“The connection was so poor it seems that it was done on purpose,” Yankelevich said, repeating a contention the family has voiced about other calls to Gorky.