50,000 ATTEND RALLY, FUNERAL FOR SAKHAROV

Author: By Paul Quinn-Judge, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, December 19, 1989
Page: 2
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

It was a day of strikingly varied ceremonies.

Tens of thousands of people turned out for an open-air rally and "civic funeral" for the leading dissident at Luzhniki Stadium, which has become the regular meeting place for the opposition since the creation of a new Soviet parliament last summer.

Earlier in the morning, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the president, and other party leaders stood in the rain to pay their last respects outside the Academy of Sciences, where Sakharov was lying in state. Sakharov, a creator of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was a member of the academy.

Gorbachev offered his condolences to Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner, and told journalists waiting outside that "we will all feel his absence, but perestroika will go on."

"The relations between myself and Sakharov were always those of mutual respect," Gorbachev said. "Now it is clear that he deserved the Nobel Prize."

Sakharov won the prize in 1975 for his human rights campaign, but the Soviet leadership at the time refused to let him go to Norway to accept it. He was hounded for years and finally sent into internal exile in Gorky for nearly seven years.

After their early visit to the casket yesterday, the country's official leaders disappeared from the day of commemorations.

Later in the morning, Sakharov's body was moved to the Physics Institute where he had worked, and then to the Luzhniki Stadium, where he had often addressed opposition rallies in recent months.

He was finally buried in late afternoon in the Vostryakhovskoye cemetery on the edge of Moscow. About 100 people, including family members and Boris N. Yeltsin, an opposition leader, were at the graveside: Bonner had requested that the funeral be a small affair.

The bright skies and deep frosts that Moscow had had over the weekend were replaced yesterday morning by low gray clouds and a thaw that turned the city's streets into a depressing morass of puddles and sludge and left sidewalks covered with slick ice. The weather prevented Lech Walesa, the Polish labor leader, from landing in Moscow in time for the ceremonies.

The "civil funeral," which lasted nearly 2 hours at the stadium, was a strange mix of political speeches and personal reminiscences. A veteran of Afghanistan wearing the combat fatigues of the elite airborne troops helped keep order on the stage where opposition dignitaries clustered, waiting their turn to speak in memory of Sakharov. Many members of the new Congress of People's Deputies, including Gorbachev's adviser on military affairs, Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev, attended the rally, standing behind the stage in a VIP enclosure. The Congress had suspended its debates for four hours to allow members to attend the funeral.

One or two speakers compared Sakharov's role in moral and political life to that of Leo Tolstoy, who died in 1910. Most speakers, however, used the opportunity to call for support for the opposition in the coming local and republican elections. Yury Afanasyev, along with Sakharov one of the co- leaders of the radically inclined Inter-regional group of deputies, called on the crowd to unite in a "Union of Democratic Forces" named in memory of Sakharov.

But Dmitry Likhachev, the 83-year-old academic who like Sakharov has been viewed as one of perestroika's moral compasses, avoided politics in his short opening address. A veteran of the notorious Solovki political prison in the 1920s, Likhachev spoke of Sakharov as a "prophet in the ancient, time- immemorial sense of the word." Sakharov, he said, urged "moral renewal" on his contemporaries.

''And like all prophets, he was not understood and was expelled from his city." Likhachev had harsh words for the Academy of Sciences, which played a prominent role in yesterday's ceremonies. The academy also stands guilty before Sakharov, Likhachev said. When an "ominous" denunciation of Sakharov was circulated and later published in the mid-'70s, many people signed. Among them was Gury Marchuk, currently president of the academy, and a member of the official committee established to supervise Sakharov's funeral.

Likhachev and others refused to sign. "We were not forgiven for this. But we were passive in our defense of Andrei Dmitrievich.

"Now", Likhachev concluded, "we say to Sakharov, forgive us," and farewell.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko read a poem devoted to Sakharov. Former political prisoners and a metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, Piterim, spoke. Perhaps the only government minister present, Nikolai Vorontsov, a biologist, noncommunist and the newly appointed head of the state committee on environment, helped carry the coffin.

At the back of the grandstand at the stadium, one member of Parliament, the Latvian independence activist and poet Janis Peters, said he believed Gorbachev will find life more difficult in Parliament without the human rights campaigner.

"Sakharov could call for changes that Gorbachev may have favored, but could not speak of openly himself," said Peters. "At times it seemed as if the two men were working like a single mechanism."

The massive crowd carried slogans condemning Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which gives the Communist Party a monopoly on political power. Others held flags of the independent Ukraine and the Baltic republics. They were, however, subdued and almost totally silent. The crowd was matched by an enormous police and troop turnout. But the general in command of the operation, in an apparent sign of respect, wore dress uniform.

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