SAKHAROV'S US VISIT TO BEGIN IN BOSTON

Author: By Judy Foreman, Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, November 3, 1988
Page: 1
Section: METRO

The major purpose of Sakharov's trip, his first outside the Soviet Union, is to promote a new international, nonprofit organization based in Moscow, the first private foundation ever allowed to operate with full legal status in the Soviet Union.

Launched in January, the organization is called the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity and is dedicated to
disarmament, international security, environmental protection, international development and human rights, according to a spokeswoman from the group's Washington office. The group also has an office in Stockholm.

In October, the USSR Council of Ministers announced its unprecedented decision to allow the foundation to finance itself, be independent of the government and choose its own activities.

In addition to his official duties, Sakharov, 67, is also expected to seek medical care at Massachusetts General Hospital where his wife, Yelena Bonner, had cardiac bypass surgery in January 1986, sources said. Bonner is not expected to accompany him on this trip, the family said yesterday.

Sakharov is expected to be examined for possible implantation of a cardiac pacemaker, a small device inserted under the skin of the chest that regulates heart rhythm. Unlike open-heart surgery, the implantation of a pacemaker is done under local anesthesia and requires only about a two-day hospital stay.

In addition to possible cardiac problems, Sakharov is believed to have suffered a stroke several years ago while being force-fed during one of several hunger strikes he waged to force Soviet authorities to allow Bonner to leave the Soviet Union for medical treatment in the West.

According to a letter released in the West in June 1985 and written by Bonner to her children seven months earlier, Sakharov suffered an "arterial spasm or a stroke and lost consciousness" while Soviet authorities held his nose and forced liquid down his throat. Afterwards, he exhibited "minor Parkinsonian symptoms" such as trembling hands, though in other ways, he appears to have recovered, wrote Bonner, who is a doctor.

Bonner's son-in-law Efrem Yankelevich, who lives in Newton, declined detailed comment on Sakharov's medical condition yesterday except to note that the physicist is now 67 and his health is "not the best, though it would be if it had not been for the hunger strikes. He is also very much overburdened with all kinds of responsibilities."

Recent reports from Moscow describe Sakharov as weak, speaking softly and deliberately.

Though not a founder of the foundation, Sakharov is a board member, along with prominent Soviet scientists Roald Sagdeyev and Yevgeny Velikhov; US industrialist Armand Hammer; Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president emeritus of Notre Dame; former secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara; John Sculley, chief executive officer of Apple Computer Inc; Frank von Hippel, a Princeton University physicist, and Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of President Eisenhower.

Velikhov, with Jerome Weisner, president emeritus of MIT, proposed the foundation during a meeting of scientists, artists and scholars in Moscow in 1987. They are now the group's chairman and vice chairman.

"Usually a foundation is created because some old guy dies and leaves a legacy," Weisner told news media representatives in September. "But we're different. We have the ideas and we're in search of money."

Sakharov only learned about two weeks ago that he had been given permission to visit the West for the first time. A day earlier, in another demonstration of how dramatically his situation has changed since the end of his internal exile in Gorky in 1986, Sakharov learned he had been elected to the presidium, or governing board, of the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Sakharov is expected to arrive in Boston Sunday evening. He will stay with his wife's children in Newton before traveling to New York, Washington and perhaps San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

On Nov. 15 in Washington, Sakharov is to receive the $50,000 Albert Einstein Foundation Peace Prize for 1988 for his work on East-West relations and human rights, sources said.

Sakharov, often called the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for defending human rights against his government. He was banished to internal exile in Gorky, about 250 miles from Moscow from January 1980 until December 1986.

Bonner was also banished to Gorky for anti-Soviet slander in August 1984 and was released, with Sakharov, in December 1986, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev invited the couple back to Moscow to "participate in perestroika," Yankelevich said. Perestroika is the Russian word for restructuring, which Gorbachev often uses to characterize his economic and social policies.

Sakharov staged hunger strikes not only to force authorities to allow his wife to leave the country for treatment but to force them to release Liza Alexayeva from the country to marry Bonner's son, Alexey Semyonov.

FOREMA;11/02 NKELLY;11/03,13:26 SAKHAR03