Sakharov Lauds Candor of Gorbachev : But Lack of Progress on Rights Could Hurt Peace, Dissident Says

Dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov praised Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s new policy of greater public candor Wednesday, but he warned that lack of progress on human rights could reduce the chances for world peace.

Sakharov, released this week after seven years of internal exile in the industrial city of Gorky, spoke to several Western reporters in his two-room apartment on Moscow’s Garden Ring Road.

It was like the old days, before he was banished on Jan. 22, 1980, when Sakharov was the godfather of the short-lived dissident movement in Moscow. One big difference this week was that no police or KGB security agents interfered with visitors.

Plea for Amnesty

Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, herself exiled for slandering the state, issued a Christmas Eve appeal for a worldwide amnesty for political prisoners--those jailed only because of their beliefs. Sakharov was sent into exile after he criticized Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.

Chatting with a Reuters news service reporter in a separate interview over a lunch of cabbage soup and fried fish, the Nobel Peace Prize winner said the biggest change since his departure into exile was the beginning of the policy of glasnost, or openness, in public discussion and frankness by leaders in communicating with the people.

“The sort of articles that are now appearing (in the newspapers) read like some of the declarations from dissidents that were issued in the 1970s and for which many of my friends were jailed,” the 65-year-old Sakharov said.

He added: “There was practically no glasnost before, and this change is a very important move forward which promises a great deal. It is necessary for any healthy society. And it is an essential condition for other changes. I welcome it with all my heart.

‘Historic Necessity’

“It is to the great personal credit of Mikhail Sergeyevich (Gorbachev) that we have it now, even though it was in fact an historic necessity for our country.”

Recalling his telephone conversation with Gorbachev on Dec. 16, in which Gorbachev informed him of his release from exile, Sakharov said he mentioned a Feb. 15 letter that he wrote to the Kremlin urging the release of all Soviet prisoners of conscience.

The Kremlin chief said that many of the people named in the letter have already been freed. Then, according to Sakharov, Gorbachev added, “But some were special kinds of people.” At that point, Sakharov said, he insisted to the Soviet leader that they were all people who had been jailed because of their views and had not committed any violent acts.

“Then I told him that freeing of the prisoners of conscience was vital to increase international trust, for the sake of world peace and, indeed, for the success of the very changes he was initiating,” Sakharov said.

‘Patriotic Work’

Gorbachev listened but did not want to discuss the matter further, Sakharov said. They ended their conversation with the Kremlin leader urging him to return to “patriotic work.”

In another interview, with American television networks, Sakharov said he feels there was no improvement in the human rights field while he was away.

Sakharov, who returned to Moscow with Bonner early Tuesday, went to his old workplace, the Physics Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, on the same afternoon to attend a seminar. Some of his colleagues welcomed him with bear hugs, and others applauded when he entered the lecture hall, he reported.

One of the speakers even credited Sakharov by name with a scientific discovery. Bonner commented: “That wouldn’t have happened before last week.”

While the government-run news media has not disclosed that Gorbachev personally told Sakharov of his release, word of the call spread quickly among academy members.

Thinking About Others

At the holiday season, Sakharov said he is thinking about “those who are in prison, who are alone.”

Bonner, 63, her feet curled up beside her husband on a kitchen sofa, added, “Like my husband, I think about all those who are incarcerated, who are in exile, isolated from those near and dear to them, about those we call prisoners of conscience.

“I believe that the problem of prisoners of conscience should be positively resolved both in this country and elsewhere,” she said. “The whole world, all nations, need an amnesty for prisoners of conscience, not only this state of ours.”

Sakharov agreed, adding that he hopes that 1987 will be a year of liberation for all prisoners of conscience.