Soviet Dissident Sakharov’s Widow Inaugurates Library : Russia: Yelena Bonner opens archives in building where writer lived. Yeltsin, secret police donate files.

With a belated assist from the former KGB, the widow of Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov inaugurated a library Saturday with thousands of pages of writings by him, letters to him and secret police files on him.

The archive, neatly arranged in cardboard boxes on tall metal shelves in the apartment building where Sakharov lived, is the first collection of such material in one place for public examination.

“We talk about the influence of his ideas,” his widow, Yelena Bonner, said after welcoming reporters and guests to the three-room apartment, remodeled and air-conditioned with a $51,500 grant from the U.S. Congress. “But have we read Sakharov?”

Later, at a government forum marking the 73rd anniversary of Sakharov’s birth, the head of Russia’s Federal Counterintelligence Service made a surprise contribution to the project, handing Bonner two thick blue folders containing 62 KGB “reports on you and your husband.”

“I am afraid you will feel pain when you read all this,” said Gen. Sergei V. Stepashin, whose spy agency succeeded the KGB. “But the truth must be known. It is your right to use these notes the way you like.”

“What is happening now would have seemed like a Christmas fairy tale a few years ago,” Bonner replied, musing on the changes wrought by the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse. She joked that her car would not have been stolen if the police had kept up the surveillance. “I am deprived of your attention,” she said.

The KGB reports date from 1968, the year of Sakharov’s seminal essay, “Thoughts of Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” to Dec. 8, 1989, six days before his death. The last was written by Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, then head of the KGB, to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and complained that Sakharov’s “ambitions” and “anti-Soviet activities” were undermining the state.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin sent his chief of staff to the anniversary forum to hand Bonner a smaller folder of documents on Sakharov from the presidential archives and to read a message extolling the late nuclear physicist as a “great son of Russia who almost alone rose up against the arms race and championed human rights” in a totalitarian state.

Sakharov’s outspokenness earned him the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize and Soviet punishment by internal exile in the city of Gorky from 1980 to 1986. Rehabilitated under Gorbachev, he won election to the Soviet Parliament in 1989 as the conscience of the democratic movement.

On four occasions, KGB agents in Gorky purloined parts of his diaries--hundreds of pages in all--before Bonner spirited out a reconstructed version for publication in the West. The handwritten diaries are now held at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and are being copied for the library here.

Speaking in an auditorium of the former Soviet Central Committee headquarters, under a larger-than-life photograph of the famous dissident, Stepashin said all the seized memoirs had been burned on Kryuchkov’s orders in 1990 as “revenge against the dead.”

He announced that Sakharov’s KGB dossier had contained 520 volumes in all--”a Guinness record. . . . No other person in the former U.S.S.R. had such a file.”

The burned memoirs and the 62 reports turned over Saturday are believed to be a tiny fraction of Sakharov’s KGB file. In a brief interview after the forum, Bonner said that the government is still holding “a lot of documents” on her late husband.

Saturday’s low-key ceremonies, attended by a few dozen human rights activists, reflected the disarray of their cause in a country where violent crime and economic hardship threaten to undermine democratic gains.

But Carl Gershman, president of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, which channeled the aid money to the new library, said Sakharov’s works on democracy and arms control “will keep the spirit of this great man alive” and “serve as a beacon for Russian democracy.”

The library also includes “tens of thousands” of letters from ordinary Russians “containing moral support as well as curses,” Bonner said.

Bonner also announced plans to establish an international human rights museum in Moscow in 1996. The museum will be named for Sakharov.

Russia will soon get another major library after another superstar dissident and Nobel laureate, Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, returns to Russia this week after 20 years in exile.

The 75-year-old author will bring his personal collection of memoirs from more than 700 Russians describing their lives during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and two World Wars, and he will make them available to scholars researching those periods.