Soviet Union: Freedom Fast

Sakharov refuses food

“I feel that a wall of misunderstanding, indifference and passivity has grown up around me,” complained Andrei Sakharov in a letter to fellow scientists in the West. To break down that wall by an action compelling enough to attract world attention, the Soviet Union’s most celebrated dissident went on a hunger strike last week. The world-renowned physicist and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize said that he was protesting the inhuman treatment given his daughter-in-law, Yelizaveta (Liza) Alexeyeva, 26, by Soviet authorities.

Sakharov explained that Liza had been denied permission to join her husband, Alexei Semyonov, 25, a graduate student in mathematics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. Semyonov had emigrated to the U.S. 3½ years ago, but Alexeyeva was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union. When they were married by proxy last summer in Butte, Mont., Soviet authorities did not acknowledge the ceremony.

Concluding that Liza was being punished for his own dissident activities, Sakharov declared: “To use my son and his wife for revenge and to put pressure on me is unworthy, illegal and intolerable.”

In 1974, during President Richard Nixon’s trip to Moscow, Sakharov fasted to call attention to the mistreatment of political prisoners, but began to take nourishment again when his health was endangered. Friends and family members are fearful that Sakharov is more serious about his current fast. Sakharov, 60, who has long suffered from heart disease and high blood pressure, developed a persistent cough on the fourth day of his food strike. He and his wife, Yelena Bonner, 59, the mother of Alexei Semyonov, are drinking only mineral water to prevent dehydration. “His will is strong—it’s his body that I’m worried about,” said Liza Alexeyeva in Moscow. Before leaving Moscow last week to rejoin her husband in Gorky, where he has been exiled since 1980, Bonner said that she and Sakharov intended “to see it through. Until Liza leaves, we do not eat.”