SOVIETS DO NOT DELAY REPORTING OF NOBEL PRIZE
Author: By Andrew Rosenthal, Associated Press Writer
Date: Saturday, October 12, 1985
Page: 5
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
The official press announced almost immediately yesterday that a group
cofounded by a Soviet physician won the Nobel Peace Prize, a sharp contrast to
the delayed, angry reaction when dissident Andrei Sakharov won in 1975.
Only the 1975 and 1985 Nobel peace awards have involved Soviet citizens.
The selection committee in Oslo awarded the Peace Prize yesterday to
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The group has two
presidents, Dr. Yevgeny Chazov of the Soviet Union and Dr. Bernard Lown of the
United States, who also were the joint founders.
Tass, the official news agency, announced the award within an hour and
then transmitted a separate story from Geneva, saying the two men had given a
news conference there.
There was no immediate official comment, but a positive reaction was
expected. Chazov is among the nation's most prominent physicians, attending
the late Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin
Chernenko.
The physicians' group has received strong support in the official press,
which often quotes policy statements from the doctors that coincide with the
Kremlin's positions on nuclear arms.
Tass quoted Lown and Chazov as saying yesterday that they supported the
Soviet Union's announced moratorium on nuclear testing and that a
comprehensive test ban would be an important step toward agreement on arms
control.
Lown is a professor at Harvard University. Chazov is with the USSR
Cardiological Institute.
No formal announcement was made in the Soviet Union when Sakharov won the
Peace Prize in 1975. By that time, the prominent physicist had become the
spiritual leader of Soviet dissent.
Soviet media did not mention that prize until nearly 24 hours after it was
awarded.
Initially, Tass merely quoted a French communist newspaper that denounced
the award as anti-Soviet and anti-detente. A later commentary by the agency
itself took an angry tone:
"The fact that the 'peace prize' has been awarded to a man who has taken a
stand against his own country and its peaceable policy and only shows that the
persons who awarded this prize were guided by interests other than the
interests of peace."
A series of press attacks on Sakharov followed, and the government would
not let him to to Oslo to receive the prize. His wife, Yelena Bonner,
collected it.
The Kremlin also has been selective in its reaction to other Nobel prizes.
Izvestia, the government newspaper, denounced the 1970 literature award to
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of "The Gulag Archipelago," the day after it
was revealed.
It was "deplorable that the Nobel Committee allowed itself to be drawn
into an unseemly game which was started by no means in the interests of
development of the spiritual values and traditions of literature, but was
prompted by speculative political concerns," Izvestia said.
AA0709;10/11,13:50 CORCOR;10/13,12:56 MOSCOW12
|
