USSR DISSIDENT ANDREI SAKHAROV DEAD AT 68

Author: By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, December 15, 1989
Page: 1
Section: OBITUARY

A spokesman for Mr. Sakharov's stepchildren in the Boston area, Tatiana Yankelevich and Alexey Semyonov, said Mr. Sakharov's wife called Massachusetts last night and told her children the Nobel Prize-winning physicist had died. The stepchildren and their families are preparing to travel to Moscow within a few days, the spokesman said.

The cause of death was not known by Mr. Sakharov's stepchildren, the spokesman said. Mr. Sakharov had been examined for heart disease at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1988, during one of two highly publicized visits to Boston.

At the time of his death Mr. Sakharov had become a leading voice in the movement for political reform in the Soviet Union. In the hours before his death, Mr. Sakharov had met with fellow reformers to plot strategy in the campaign to end the Communist party's constitutional supremacy in the Soviet Union.

"At least he died in freedom," said Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast regional director of Amnesty International and author of a book on Soviet dissidents. ''He died in an official position. And he got what he wanted. He got a dialogue."

Just last week, Western television viewers saw Mr. Sakharov argue with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev about the Communist supremacy issue on the floor of the new Soviet Congress of People's Deputies, of which Mr. Sakharov was a leading member.

The encounter would have been unimaginable just four years ago, when Mr. Sakharov was near the end of a six-year period of internal exile in the city of Gorky.

Mr. Sakharov's long and varied career had three phases, scholars said yesterday. In the 1950s he was known primarily as one of the world's leading physicists. The development of the Soviet hydrogen bomb was a crucial step in that nation's three-decade assault on Western dominance in weaponry.

But Mr. Sakharov came to deplore the arms race his invention helped escalate. In the 1970s he became a leading voice of the international human rights movement and an uncompromising advocate for internal reform in the Soviet Union.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

For his criticisms of the Soviet state, Mr. Sakharov was sentenced to internal exile, living under house arrest in the city of Gorky. He was in exile from 1980 until 1986, when Gorbachev called him back to Moscow.

The third phase of his career began last year when he was elected to the Congress. "It was a personal triumph," Rubenstein said.

Rubenstein met Mr. Sakharov in Moscow in April 1988,and during the dissident leader's trips to the Boston area in the fall of 1988 and the spring of this year.

"He was very soft-spoken, completely unassuming," Rubenstein said. "His personal modesty was a shock to me. When I saw him in Moscow, he was in jeans and a torn T-shirt."

Mr. Sakharov looked tired and wore a rumpled suit when he stepped off a Pan American jet onto the runway of Logan Airport to begin his historic first visit to the United States on Nov. 6, 1988.

"I'm very happy to be here in the United States," he said speaking through an interpreter. "From my childhood, my attitude to this country was respect and it is indeed a great country."

Speaking haltingly, he added, referring to the United States, "I think my country, that I come from, a great country, can do a great deal together to preserve peace on Earth and eliminate hunger and violence."

The trip, he said, was also "a private joy for me because I will see my family."

Mr. Sakharov's first became known as a brilliant scientist when he was inducted into the Academy of Sciences in 1953 at age 32, the youngest-ever member. He was born in Moscow and like his father became a physicist.

In 1948, he joined physicist Igor Tamm in developing the hydrogen bomb and for the next 20 years lived and worked in secrecy, with privileges including a good apartment, driver, high salary and government awards. But, like Albert Einstein, Mr. Sakharov began to worry about the morality of developing weapons of mass destruction.

He had his first major brush with top Soviet officials in 1961, when he appealed to Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to stop nuclear weapons tests. Khrushchev responded that scientists shouldn't meddle in politics. Two years later, the Soviet Union agreed to such limits in a treaty with the United States.

After Mr. Sakharov formed the Human Rights Committee in 1970, he became better known as a dissident leader, clashing with four Kremlin leaderships over human rights, foreign policy and the morality of the nuclear weaponry he helped create.

As an emerging dissident, Mr. Sakharov appeared to be immune to official sanctions while other prominent dissidents were forced to emigrate or sent to labor camps. But in 1973, Mr. Sakharov was warned by authorities that his interviews and statements were used by the foreign press for anti-Soviet slander and that he should be aware of the consequences.

Mr. Sakharov continued to speak out, and he and his wife attended the trials of prominent dissidents and lent their names to international appeals for prisoners of conscience in all countries to be freed.

Reporters, foreign visitors and diplomats who knew Mr. Sakharov before he was banished to Gorky described him as a modest man of patience and humor but determined once his ire was aroused.

He was stripped of his Soviet awards in 1980 and then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev subsequently banished him to internal exile in Gorky, about 200 miles east of Moscow.

The physicist's tireless campaigns on behalf of disarmament and human rights won him the Nobel Prize, and he steadfastly argued that without international respect for human rights there could be no guarantee of peace.

Mr. Sakharov was recalled in 1986 by Gorbachev, and swiftly took a leading role in urging the Soviet leader to follow through on Gorbachev's twin policies of perestroika, or restructuring, and glasnost, or openness.

He was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies earlier this year, completing a remarkable comeback. In June 1989, he told the Soviet Congress he had no regrets. "I am proud of this exile in Gorky like a medal I wear."

A friend of the family at the Yankelevich home said that Alexey Semyonov, Yankelevich and Yankelevich's two children, Matvei, 16, and Anna, 14, were planning to fly to Moscow today.

In statement last night the White House called Mr. Sakharov a historical figure and praised his efforts for greater human rights.

"Andrei Sakharov is a historical figure who will be long remembered for his human rights efforts in the Soviet Union. His voice was an important dimension in the contemporary changes under way in Soviet society," the statement said.

CANELL;12/14 NIGRO ;12/15,12:08 SAKHA15