At War with the KGB

When it became clear, well in advance of last week’s release of Newsman Nicholas Daniloff from the Soviet Union, that some dissidents would be included in the deal, the tantalizing, inevitable question was: Would Andrei Sakharov be among them? His wife?

The question was answered on Tuesday. Not yet, not this time. Sakharov, 65, spiritual godfather of the Soviet dissident movement, who was sent into internal exile in the city of Gorky in 1980, would be a prisoner of conscience a while longer, maybe a very long while. So would his wife of the past 14 years, Elena Bonner, 63, herself sentenced to five years of exile in 1984.

But if the Sakharovs remain penned up, they by no means remain silent. This week Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., is publishing, and TIME is excerpting, the book that Bonner wrote during her six-month visit to the West (Alone Together; 272 pages; $17.95). In it she recounts the fight that she and her husband waged to get her to the U.S. for medical treatment. She also confirms that Andrei Sakharov’s memoirs, repeatedly stolen and repeatedly reconstructed, a document certain to be of surpassing interest, have somehow survived. “(His) book will come,” says Bonner. “It already exists.” And it is in the West.

Bonner, who returned to the U.S.S.R. on June 2, writes with stark directness of life under the baleful eye of the Committee for State Security, better known as the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti). A policeman is posted outside the door to the Sakharovs’ Gorky apartment virtually round the clock. They cannot step outdoors without a KGB escort. They are denied a telephone (they use pay booths or a special phone center). Because of jamming, they must go to the edge of town, where reception is good, to listen to the radio. There are touching moments of warmth between “Andryusha” and “Lusia” (or “Andryushenka” and “Lyusenka”), as they address each other. But the KGB’s chilling presence invariably reasserts itself. As Bonner’s title puts it, she and Sakharov are truly alone together.

Toward the end of the book, Bonner says of the isolation in Gorky: “From there you can’t call out, you can’t shout loud enough to be heard.” The following excerpt shows that, given a voice of sufficient strength and conviction, yes, you can call out, you can indeed be heard.

I have very little time, and I do not have very much strength. I do not want to remember — I want to forget, because the life we live in Gorky is so different from life in the U.S. and normal life in general. These are not memoirs — everything is too close and too painful for that. A diary would be good, but in our life it is impossible to write a diary; it is bound to end up in the wrong hands. More than anything else, this is a chronicle.

In the fall of 1982, I had begun to be aware of my heart. It had hurt before, but only in passing. I was aware of it, but I never thought much about it; I really didn’t have time to think. By this time, I had already made more than 100 round trips between Moscow and Gorky, 250 miles away, to which Andrei had been sent in exile in 1980. Many of our friends were in trouble, some arrested, some searched, some interrogated.

In November, in Gorky, I was no longer simply aware of my heart, I could feel it burning, in flames. The Academy of Sciences Hospital in Moscow took ! an electrocardiogram and said there was nothing wrong. I went back to Gorky, taking with me a new book by Nikolai Yakovlev, CIA Target — the U.S.S.R., which attacked both Andrei and me. (Yakovlev is a Soviet historian whose specialty is the U.S.) On April 25, 1983, I suddenly felt something sharp pierce me. I could not move or cry out. Then, slowly, almost creeping along, I reached Andrei’s nitroglycerine pills by the side of his bed. The pain subsided after a moment, and I could call Andrei and lie down. That was the start of constant nitroglycerine and other medicine. I still had bouts of nausea and incredible weakness. Since I am a doctor, I did everything for myself — patient and doctor at the same time. I knew it was a heart attack, but I tried to deny it subconsciously.

Then we received a telegram saying that the trial of Alexei Smirnov was beginning. On May 12, I went to Moscow. Smirnov would be tried the next morning.* I pictured the stairs to the bridge over the railroad tracks — it had to be crossed to reach the courthouse. So many had been tried there: Bukovsky, Krasnov-Levitin, Tverdokhlebov, Orlov (Yuri Orlov, a dissident, and his wife Irina Valitova are being released in the wake of the Daniloff affair), Tanya Velikanova, Tanya Osipova, among

others. And I felt sick — not in my mind, but actually sick: my head spun, my heart contracted, my nails turned blue.

“Forgive me, but I can’t go to the courthouse,” I said. “Have someone come tell me what happened, and I’ll inform the press.” There were now police posted at my door every day. The press would not be able to get through to me. I was not permitted to have a telephone in my apartment, and I could not use the phone booth near my house to call because it had been disconnected. Somehow I would have to find a phone.

While arguments with the doctors went on, worse things began. On July 3, 1983, Izvestia ran a letter from four academicians replying to Andrei’s article in Foreign Affairs, “The Dangers of Thermonuclear War.” Though Andrei stressed “the absolute inadmissibility of nuclear war” and called for “complete nuclear disarmament based on strategic parity in conventional weapons,” the Izvestia letter charged that Sakharov “calls for nuclear blackmail directed against his own country.” A flood of letters began, as many as 132 one day, that berated and maligned Sakharov. Soon, the magazine Smena published an article by Yakovlev expanding on what he had written in his CIA book. The flood of letters changed direction, and many became openly anti- Semitic (since Sakharov is not Jewish, the letters were obviously aimed at Bonner, whose mother is Jewish). Threats increased, particularly against me. We were threatened at the market in Gorky, on our balcony, out in the street. On Sept. 4, when I was leaving Gorky on the 6:20 a.m. train, two middle-aged women and a man were in the compartment with me.

“Are you Sakharov’s wife?” one of the women asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“He should have been kicked out of the academy a long time ago,” the man said. “And as for you . . .”

Then one of the women announced that she was a Soviet teacher and could not ride in the same compartment with me. The other women and the man agreed with her. Everyone was talking loudly, shouting. Some people demanded that the train be stopped and I be thrown off. They shouted things about the war and about Jews. The conductor took me to her work compartment, and I stayed there until we reached Moscow. It had been very frightening.

Andrei thought it was necessary for me to sue Yakovlev for attacking me in his book. He said among other things that I had been “wanton,” that I manipulate Sakharov on orders from the CIA and “international Zionism,” that I have a habit of persuading him by “hitting him with anything at hand.” As part of my defense, I wrote the court a brief autobiography:

I was born in 1923. My father, a dedicated Bolshevik since 1917, was arrested in May 1937 as a traitor to the homeland (he was executed soon afterward) and posthumously rehabilitated in 1954. My mother was also arrested in 1937. I moved with my younger brother from Moscow to Leningrad to live with my grandmother. After I finished secondary school in Leningrad in 1940, I joined the army as a nurse when the war broke out.

On Oct. 26, 1941, I was badly wounded and suffered a concussion on the Volkhov front. After two months in the hospital, I went back to being a nurse and reached the rank of lieutenant of the medical corps. I was demobilized in August 1945 as an invalid — almost total loss of vision in the right eye and progressive blindness in the left as a result of the concussion.

In 1947 I entered the First Leningrad Medical Institute, where I completed a six-year course. I worked as a district doctor and a pediatrician in a maternity home until retirement.

Neither while in the army nor in subsequent years did I feel a psychological right to join the (Communist) Party as long as my parents were listed as traitors to the homeland. After the criticism of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress and especially the Twenty-Second, I decided to join and in 1965 became a member. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 I considered this step a mistake, and in 1972 I left the Communist Party.

I have two children — a daughter Tatyana (born 1950), and a son Alexei (born 1956). Their father Ivan Semyonov had been at the First Leningrad Medical Institute with me and still works there. We separated in 1965.*

At the regional courthouse in Moscow I had to wait for hours before I could see a judge, who said she couldn’t accept my papers until I got permission from the court’s chairman. Up another flight of stairs. This judge had a large, tired face. He was heavyset, and had on a gray, worn suit, with ribbons and medals on his chest. When he got up, his prosthesis creaked — he was missing a leg (must have been a war invalid). He read my papers for almost half an hour. Then he said, “You go see the judge again; I’ll make sure she accepts your suit.” Downstairs the judge said she would let me know within a month when my case would be heard.

October passed without a word. I went to see the chairman of the court, the one who had promised that my complaint would be heard. Now he said, “I cannot accept your case.”

“Why not?” He shrugged and then tucked his head into his shoulders. “I can’t.” I asked, “Tell me, were you given orders from a high level not to accept my case?”

He gave me a sharp look, not with the dead eyes he had during our conversation, and said, “High enough.” I said, “I understand. But I’ve written the truth and Yakovlev is lying.” He went on, “I checked a few things.” We both fell silent. Then I got up to leave, and I wanted to shake his hand. He came out from behind his desk, prosthesis creaking, with my file in his hands. I extended my hand, he extended my file, then understood my gesture and shook my hand. “Would you like me to hold onto your file? I’ll put it in my safe. Maybe it will lie here long enough. Maybe they’ll start rehabilitating again.”

I came out with a strange, mixed feeling of respect for this man because he told me a lot; and surprise that he understood; and regret that he could work within that system.

We lived quietly until May 2, 1984, though I dreaded the fact that Andrei would soon begin a hunger strike to persuade the authorities to allow me to visit the West for medical treatment. I had to go back to Moscow, and for some reason I carried in my purse the letters and appeals that Andrei had written, along with copies of my letters to the children revealing the hunger strike, and to Andrei. Why was I carrying them around? I don’t know to this day what I was thinking of. As I was being led to board the airplane in Gorky, I was suddenly surrounded by about five men.

They took me by the arms and led me to a small van like a Black Maria. They drove me to an office where a man in civilian clothes introduced himself as a senior counselor of justice, Gennadi Kolesnikov. He charged me with violating Article 190-1 of the criminal code, which deals with “slander of the Soviet state or social system” and can lead to up to three years in a labor camp. In the next room, two women in Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) uniforms did a body search and looked through my bag. They took copies of the letters that were supposed to reach my children before Andrei’s hun ger strike. Kolesnikov barely glanced at them, so it was clear that he was already familiar with them.

I do not remember a single question from the first interrogation, but I remember my answer. Throughout the investigation I answered every question by saying, “Since I never at any time anywhere under any circumstances deliberately spread slanderous fabrications defaming the Soviet state or social system, or the state or social system of other countries, or private persons, I will not participate in the investigation and will not answer the question.” The search and interrogation lasted two or three hours.

I was summoned for more questioning the following day, then put into a van and driven home. When I got out, a man said to me, “Elena Georgievna Bonner? Allow me to introduce myself.” “Get away!” I said, thinking someone was trying to meet me in front of all the KGB people with me. “You’ll get into trouble if you don’t.”

“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said again. “I am chief of the KGB of Gorky Oblast.”

It was a ludicrous situation. I silently went in, and he followed me inside our apartment. Andrei rushed over to me and said, “Lusenka!” I replied, “Andryusha, this is the chief of the KGB of Gorky.” By then I was dying to go to the bathroom, since I had left the house four hours before. When I ^ came out of the bathroom, they were shouting at each other. The KGB chief was yelling, “Bonner is an American spy, an agent of the CIA and a Zionist spy. We will try her under Article 64 . . .” That is the provision covering treason, and can result in the death penalty. The KGB man ran out the door, still threatening me, and Andrei followed him into the hallway, still shouting.

A few seconds later Andrei returned, and I learned that he had already begun his hunger strike. He had seen them take me away in the van, and he realized that I had been arrested. He sent a telegram to the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and to the KGB letting them know that he was on a hunger strike to get me my trip.

On May 7, I was summoned for more interrogation, and Andrei went with me in a taxi. Afterward, Kolesnikov called Andrei into his office, and said, “Doctors have come for you, and you must go to the hospital.” Andrei began arguing. Five or six people in white coats came in, and that made it useless to resist. Then Andrei asked that I be allowed to go with him.

We were taken to the hospital in an ambulance. My back had been very bad — I felt bad in general — so I lay down on Andrei’s bed, and he lay down next to me. Just then Dr. Oleg Obukhov, the chief physician, came in and said I had to leave. Several men came in to remove me by force. Andrei put his arms around my waist. They tried to pull me out of his arms. He pulled me toward him; they pulled me away. I could hear Andrei shouting as I was dragged down the corridor.

The next morning I was awakened by a ring at the door. Kolesnikov and several underlings presented me with a search warrant. They took away an enormous quantity of Andrei’s papers. They listed 319 items, and several were files with up to 300 pages each. They removed many books, all the English and German ones. Also the typewriter, tape recorder, camera and movie camera and most important, the radio. They knocked on the walls and the furniture, looking for secret hiding places. One man took samples of our food and medicines, apparently looking for drugs. The search lasted until 10 p.m.

The next morning I decided to go to the hospital. On the way I asked the taxi driver to stop so I could buy some flowers. I saw we were being followed. Two KGB agents asked what I was doing. I said, “Can’t you see? I’m buying flowers. What’s the matter? I’m not allowed to?”

“No, you’re allowed to buy flowers,” one of them said. “But you can’t go to the hospital. And don’t even think of getting near the hospital. You will not be let inside, and you’ll experience more unpleasantness.” I said that I couldn’t imagine any more unpleasantness, that we had all that was possible already.

So I went home. I did not know until later that Andrei suffered a stroke on May 11, the tenth day of his hunger strike, after an intravenous injection. His condition had deteriorated sharply, and they were worried about losing him because of the force-feeding. For quite some time he could barely walk, spoke with hesitation, could not write.

On July 20, Kolesnikov and I talked about my getting a lawyer. I told him I wanted Elena Reznikova from Moscow. He insisted for several days that I must have a Gorky lawyer but then gave in. When Reznikova came on July 25, I was given the charges against me — six whole volumes, the record of my interrogations, various papers, even letters from workers demanding that I be punished.

The first main charge involved the press conference I gave on Oct. 2, 1975, in Florence, to discuss the Italian publication of Sakharov’s My Country and the World. I was asked to talk about women in political camps. I didn’t speak about the human rights activists who were in the camp, but about Maria Semyonova. This woman, a member of the True Orthodox Church, had spent almost her entire life in camps. I referred to her “tragic fate.” While I was not speaking of just or unjust sentencing or anything else about the verdicts, I did use the word tragic. This was said to be a “slander” because Semyonova had been correctly sentenced.

The other charges were similar. At another press conference in Florence, after representatives of the official Orthodox Church had declared that there was total freedom of religion in the Soviet Union, I had said, “That, to put it mildly, is untrue.” In Oslo, where I had gone to accept Andrei’s Nobel Prize in 1975, I had said that the U.S.S.R. has national discrimination; I cited as one example discrimination against Jews who apply to institutions of higher learning. I had also said that there are two forms of money in the U.S.S.R., regular money and certificates that top people can use at special stores.

The trial began on Aug. 8 in the regional courthouse on the main street of Gorky. Did I admit that I was guilty? My answer was “I categorically do not consider myself guilty because I never, under any circumstances or in any place, spread deliberately slanderous opinions that defamed the Soviet state or social order, the government or social order of any other country, or any private individuals.” If I really had committed crimes, then why was I being tried now, when the majority of them went back to 1975?

For some reason the prosecutor attached particular importance to my statement that we have two kinds of money. Knowing that this charge would figure in the trial, I brought two rubles, an ordinary one and a certificate. I also had a document confirming that Andrei received certificates for the publication of scientific articles abroad.

The prosecutor exploded. He began screaming that I was a paid agent of the CIA and that they compensated me with those very certificates. I began yelling too — that I certainly was not a CIA agent, that the CIA did not pay me, that Andrei had received that money legally for publication of his scientific articles in the West. “The prosecutor has insulted me,” I said, “and if he does not apologize I will not participate in this trial.”

I did not merely say that, I shouted it even louder than the prosecutor was shouting. The judge agreed with me: “The prosecutor must apologize to the defendant.” The prosecutor muttered into his chin, “Excuse me.”

In my final statement, I repeated that I did not consider myself guilty and that they would be better off letting me go abroad than putting me on trial. An hour later the judge announced his verdict: five years of exile.

How did I live that summer of 1984? On the one hand, with great difficulty, overburdened. But I also continued working on my flower garden. I planted Matthiola and Malva. I made jam, lots of jam. If Andrei continued to be separated from me, he would at least have jam for the whole winter.

In mid-August I was summoned by Dr. Obukhov, who told me that Andrei was gravely ill, with serious arrhythmia and profound disturbances in the brain vessels. They insisted that he could not be discharged from the hospital and that any visits from me would be dangerous to his health.

After the appeals court confirmed the verdict against me in early September, an MVD official took my passport and gave me a certificate saying I was an exile. He told me that I could not travel beyond Gorky and that I retained all the rights of a citizen of the U.S.S.R. except the right to leave Gorky.

The next day Dr. Obukhov again called me in and said that Andrei was on the brink of death, that his extrasystole was very bad, that he was suffering from grave atherosclerosis in the brain vessels and that he either had Parkinson’s disease or symptoms of it. And that I should not worry him. I yelled, saying that as doctors they should understand that a man in that state of health cannot be kept isolated for four months from the only available person dear to him; I also accused them of having brought on his worsened condition by giving him digitalis, which had a bad effect on him. I told them that giving him that medication was the only thing they did that was not premeditated, that they had simply lost their heads out of fear of the KGB. Everything else they were doing to Sakharov was a crime.

Dr. Obukhov implied that Andrei’s treatment was not his fault, but he was a victim of circumstances. I walked out of the hospital. A nurse suddenly appeared, leading Andrei by the arm. He was wearing the same light coat in which he had been taken away in early May and his beret. It didn’t seem as if he had lost weight; he looked almost bloated. We embraced, in tears. We got in the car. We just sat and wept with our arms around each other. About 20 minutes passed.

Then Andrei began describing what had happened to him. He had kept a diary of everything. How they tormented him with talk that he had Parkinson’s disease and how Dr. Obukhov brought him a book on Parkinsonism and said he had got the disease from his hunger strikes, adding, “You will become a total invalid, unable to unfasten your own trousers.” Judging from what Andrei told me and the symptoms that partly remain (involuntary jaw movements), I think he suffered a stroke or a severe cerebral vascular spasm because of force- feeding or inoculations.

At home, Andrei’s condition was rather strange. On the one hand, he was very happy we were together again; we literally were not apart for a minute’s time. On the other hand, he began berating himself for not continuing his hunger strike and for giving in to them. He had threatened another strike for Sept. 7, but when they discharged him he did not embark on it, unable to be apart from me any longer.

His condition and mood were complicated and rather grim. When I told him he had to learn to lose gracefully, he said, “I don’t want to learn that, I want to learn to die with dignity.” He kept repeating, “Don’t you understand, I was not just on a hunger strike for your trip but for my window on the < world. They want to turn me into a living corpse. You kept me alive, giving me a connection to the world. They want to cut that off.” By late September, Andrei said he would start another hunger strike: “They tried to scare me with Parkinsonism, which I don’t have; they scared me with this and that; they think that they have broken me. No, I will go on a hunger strike.”

Living under the surveillance of the KGB is very strange and unpleasant. Wherever you go, you feel the KGB watching, sometimes making films, sometimes harassing. Sometimes you find that your house has been entered and things moved or taken. When this first happened, I used to hiss at Andrei that he was being forgetful, that the KGB had nothing to do with it. But then it started happening with my things too. I began keeping notes. For instance, this apparently silly notation: “My toothbrush is gone, and both Andrei and I have looked in the bathroom in the glass,” with the date. Then, more than a week later: “Hurrah, the toothbrush is in the glass,” with the date.

When I lived alone for ten months, I often felt an inner anxiety from the knowledge that the police were constantly entering the apartment while I was out, looking for things. What would they take away? What would they leave? For the past two years, we have left the key in the front door because people go into our apartment all the time when we’re out, and they kept breaking the lock, and I got sick and tired of it.

Once, when a packet of scientific publications arrived for Andrei, a dozen huge cockroaches scrambled out. It was nauseating and frightening. Later Andrei wrote about it in his diary: “Yesterday, when I opened a package from the Lebedev Institute of the Academy of Sciences, cockroaches began running from it in all directions. I managed to kill five. I doubt that they climbed into the package at the Lebedev Institute. More likely, this is a demonstration of the KGB’s scorn. As if to say, you are starving roaches. Of course, this is an interpretation, maybe the fruit of my imagination.”

On April 16, 1985, Andrei began another hunger strike to get me permission to leave the country. He had wanted to start it in March, but I asked him to wait until Easter — I wanted to bake kulichi, the traditional cakes. So we agreed that on Easter he would eat kulichi and paskha, the Easter cheesecake, and then he would begin his hunger strike.

I did not have the physical strength to do what Andrei was doing. I was just being cowardly, I suppose, but in those days I realized as never before how illness changes a person.

Around 1 p.m. on April 21 our doorbell rang. It was Dr. Obukhov with six men and two women. He said he had come to take Andrei to the hospital, but Andrei refused to go. The women suddenly pushed me into a little room off the corridor, sat on either side of me and shut the door. From the main room I heard a shout: “Lusia! They’re giving me an injection!” Then Andrei shouted: “Bastards! Murderers!”

I called out to him, but I didn’t know if he could hear me. There was a scuffling noise, and then silence. I heard the door slam and then footsteps. The women went away. A man who obviously was in charge of the whole thing stood alone in the corridor. I rushed up to him and said, “Where can I find out about my husband?” He said, “You’ll be informed.” Then he added, “All the best,” and left.

I sent telegrams to friends, asking them to get in touch with our lawyer Reznikova. I sent Reznikova herself a telegram. But instead of my telegrams, my friends received completely different texts, indicating no troubles.

On May 21, Andrei’s birthday, I could tune in Radio Liberty without any jamming. There was our friend Ira Kristi, who had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union (she now lives in the Boston area) saying she could assert with confidence that even if Sakharov had been on a hunger strike, he was not on one at present. The sound was so clear and pure, that it was as if the KGB were saying to me, “Here, listen, and do what you want. Beat your head against the wall — no one will ever know.”

I was furious with Ira for two or three days. Then I learned on the radio that my children had realized that the telegrams were fake. I stopped being angry with Ira and even worried that she might be taken for a KGB spokesman. I knew she would rather die than knowingly do something the KGB wanted. Later, in the U.S., I read the forged postcards and telegrams. Not one contained my own unadulterated text. All were signed as if Andrei and I were together. I write this as a warning — not to believe anything except direct contact.

In late May 1985 I was summoned to the KGB, and I began to think they were calling me in because Andrei had died. I was in a stupor. Climbing to a third- floor office in the KGB, I was panting and using nitroglycerine. I was met by a familiar-looking man about my age — sleek and solid, wearing an elegant gray suit. He said that we had met before, during one of his investigations, and that his name was Sokolov. I could tell from the look on his face that Andrei was alive, and I began crying. He kept asking, “What’s the matter?” I explained that I thought Andrei had died. “Oh, no,” he said with a smile. “Everything is fine with Andrei Dmitrievich, fine.”

“How can it be good when he’s on a hunger strike?” I said through my tears.

“What hunger strike? There’s no hunger strike.”

I went on crying. I began to see that they felt that if there was force- feeding, then there was no hunger strike. That was such a convenient way to present it to the world. No hunger strike; it’s just a fantasy of Western propaganda.

I went on living. I listened to the radio and was aware that the whole world was worried about Sakharov. But it was horrible that there was no news about him. I had no idea what they were doing to him. On rainy days I tried to find work in the house. I spent almost two weeks making shelves for the pantry. Once, as I sawed and planed boards on the balcony, two Gorky women walked by and one of them said loudly, so I would hear, “There’s Sakharov’s wife making a coffin for herself.”

I had rather severe attacks of myocardia that summer, three so bad that I prescribed bed rest of several days for myself. I developed an aversion to food from the moment Andrei was forcibly hospitalized and kept losing weight, from 147 lbs. to 109. All my bones stuck out. I developed abscesses under my arm. To disinfect the skin, I went to buy some vodka; neither alcohol- saturated pads nor alcohol was available. When I came out of the store, a bottle of vodka in each hand, my KGB escort said, “Elena Georgievna, you didn’t use to drink, did you?” “You’d drive anyone to drink,” I told him.

On July 11, the doorbell rang, and Dr. Tolchenov appeared — Dr. Obukhov’s deputy, the very one who took Andrei from our house after that forced injection nearly three months ago. He told me that Andrei would be home in two hours. Andrei was not well — he had extra heartbeats — but the doctors had decided to send him home, where he would be better off. Before, the doctors maintained that it was bad for him at home. I spoke very harshly, as I always do with those doctors: “Why are you here then? Andrei will come home, and he’ll explain everything to me himself.”

“We wanted you to know, so you could meet him.”

I didn’t understand that I should do just the opposite. I went down and waited for an hour. A black car drove up, and Andrei got out. We kissed and went inside. Only later, when I was in the West, did I realize why they wanted me to go out to meet Andrei. They secretly filmed the scene so that it looked as though Andrei was brought home from the hospital like an ordinary sick man, and his wife calmly greeted him.

Once he was home, Andrei told me many of the things that had happened to him. The first thing he told me was why he had been discharged: he had stopped his hunger strike that morning. He had stopped because he had written a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Communist Party chief, and it occurred to him that the letter would be viewed more positively if he suspended his hunger strike. But the speed and alacrity with which they discharged him made him think he was making a mistake. A few hours after he announced his decision, he sent a note to Dr. Obukhov saying if he did not receive an answer from Gorbachev in a reasonable time, which he considered to be two weeks, he would resume the hunger strike.

He was very thin. But he was calm and had greater inner strength than in September 1984 when he was released from the hospital. He had the feeling they were giving him psychotropic drugs in the force-feeding and that it was under their influence that he had wanted to write the statement about ending the hunger strike. But the main factor had been his concern for me and not knowing what was happening to me.

That first evening we went to bed around midnight, but we were still excited and went on talking. Andryusha was trying to convince me that he had to start a hunger strike again in two weeks. Then he said that he had hope that maybe we could manage without a strike. I think he was afraid and really wanted to avoid a repetition. When we stopped talking he soon fell asleep. I lay with my hand on his chest, feeling his heart beat. First there would be several normal beats, then uneven beats, then two or three, followed by such a long pause that I thought . . . God knows, I thought everything. Those extra beats had never worried me until they had done all those things to him in Gorky. The first time I felt them I had thought — big deal, one or two a minute, just like an adolescent’s heart. There were different breaks in the rhythm now, and I did not understand them. This was no longer an adolescent heart.

Andrei slept badly. He cried in his sleep, and I woke him twice. In his sleep he thought he was still in the hospital.

Even so, these two weeks were a radiant time. Our breakfasts literally took hours, because that was the time when we talked to each other the most — about how we had lived without each other. We were outside a good deal during the day. We drove to small groves and gathered mushrooms. The KGB followed us constantly — two cars of them — and they walked in the woods between the trees, secretly filming us.

In fact we were never alone for a minute. One day we went to the market and bought various kinds of fruits. Then we drove down to the bank of the Volga to have a light lunch of fruit and buns. That day was filmed by the KGB and shown as a typical day in the life of Sakharov. The films depicting Sakharov’s life that I saw in America were edited to create the impression of a normal life, a normal state of health. Actually, it is one big hoax, a horrible lie. Another time, the world could watch films about our well-being when we are no longer alive.

On July 25, two weeks after Andrei was released from the hospital, he began another hunger strike. Once again he sent a telegram to Gorbachev. Two days later, as we were just about to go out, the doorbell rang, and Dr. Obukhov appeared again with his crowd of eight followers. There was something almost playful in his voice when he said, “Well, Andrei Dmitrievich, we’re back for you.” When I pictured them throwing Andrei down on the couch and giving him an injection again, I couldn’t stand it. I said to him, “Andryushenka, just go.”

They took him by the arms and half-dragged him, but he didn’t resist too much. I was alone again, and again I did not know for how long. Again with the feeling that he was completely in their hands, that they could do whatever they wanted, beat him, inject him, kill him, anything.

And another string of empty days, fast and slow. Reading, mending things no one needed, washing walls, sometimes necessary and sometimes not, fussing with the flowers. In the evening, pacing about the balcony, I read poetry aloud to keep from forgetting how to speak.

On Sept. 5, I was just planning to go out when Andrei walked in. I rushed to him, and he said warily, “Don’t be overjoyed, I have only got three hours.” I must have looked puzzled, because he immediately added, “Sokolov came to see me again, he wants me to write certain papers.” Without listening to anything else, I got upset and shouted, “The KGB can go f itself!” Andrei said calmly and quietly, “Just listen to me. They want you to write that if you are given permission to travel to see your mother and children and to get treatment, you will not hold press conferences, see reporters, or this or that.” When I realized that all they wanted was for me to keep my mouth shut in the presence of the press, I said, “With pleasure!” Then I asked, “What do they want from you?”

“The same.” Andrei said that Sokolov had come to see him that morning and had said that Gorbachev had given him orders to handle the situation with Sakharov. So I sat down at my typewriter, and wrote: “In case I am allowed to travel abroad to see my mother, children and grandchildren, and also for treatment, I will not hold press conferences or give interviews. Elena Bonner. Sept. 5, 1985.” Andrei’s statement said, “. . . If my wife is allowed to travel abroad for treatment and to see her relatives, I plan to concentrate on scientific work and on my private life; however, I retain the right to make statements on social issues in extreme situations.”

After we wrote the statements, we went out onto the balcony. We stood there with our arms around each other’s waists. September is autumn in Gorky, and I felt it physically when I was standing with Andrei on the balcony, feeling his ribs even through his jacket. My dear, sweet, skinny love!

I tried to talk to him about the duress under which he had agreed to write his statement — the four months of separation, the isolation, the force- feeding. But he said he didn’t see anything wrong with his statement. He really didn’t want to deal with social issues any more because he didn’t have the strength for them. He felt sick, tired, and all he wanted was to do scientific work and be with me.

After Andrei returned to the hospital, I was sure he would be home soon, that everything would be made right. But the days passed. October came, and the first snow, and it was very cold in the apartment. I stopped sewing and mending; I sat bundled up in everything I could find, and waited. For what?

The morning of Oct. 21 the doorbell rang. One of the most obnoxious of our guards stood at the door. “You are ordered to appear at the MVD Directorate at 11 a.m.”

“I won’t be able to get there by 11; it’s already 10.”

“I don’t know about that. You must be there at 11.”

I reached the MVD building around noon. I was angry at my legs and my heart for hurting, and at the wet snow and the piercing cold. When I found the right office, I was surprised to see it was the visa office, but there was a sign saying that it was closed. I asked a young woman at the reception desk what I was supposed to do.

“Are you blind or illiterate?” she barked with a practiced air. “There is the sign — we’re closed today.”

“But I was called in,” I said, raising my voice and speaking loudly, so that everyone in the bureau would hear my usual opening: “I am the wife of Academician Sakharov . . .”

A man ran over and simpered, “Elena Georgievna, come this way.” He led me to a woman in a major’s uniform. She said she needed me to fill out the forms for an exit visa.

“You mean right here and now by hand?” I asked. “But you require that it be typewritten and in two copies.” “It is all right, it can be handwritten and in one copy.” When that was done, she told me to get pictures taken and bring them back the next day. I realized that they wanted me to leave soon, without seeing Andrei.

In the morning, when I arrived at the visa office with the photographs, I told the major I wanted my application back because I had to make some changes. For one thing I would not leave as soon as I got the visa, but only after being reunited with my husband. At first she resisted; then she went off to telephone. She was gone for more than an hour. Upon her return, she gave me back the application, and I changed it.

It was late afternoon of the next day when Andrei suddenly appeared in the doorway, in his fur hat and jacket, which seemed too big for him. A very thin, small face, all gray. He did not even kiss me, but said, “What’s happening?”

“You don’t know? I have been called in to the visa office.”

And suddenly his face was transformed, in fact his face disappeared; all that was left were his eyes, alive and glowing. And he wiggled his rear end, as if he were dancing. I’d never seen Andryusha make a movement like that.

“Well, then, did we win again?”

“We won!”

Elena Bonner flew to the U.S., by way of Italy, on Dec. 7, 1985. After visiting briefly with her mother, children and grandchildren in Newton, she underwent a sextuple coronary-bypass operation in Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. In her five months in the U.S., Bonner traveled to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to Miami, visiting old friends and appearing at many ceremonies in Sakharov’s honor. She also paid a discreet visit to the White House, where National Security Adviser John Poindexter received her. In what little spare time she had, she wrote this book. She liked America and the Americans, but there was never any doubt in her mind that she would return to the Soviet Union. Sakharov asked her to bring him back a pair of blue jeans — “my old ones have fallen apart” — a “roomy” jacket and “whatever else God prompts you to get; He won’t suggest anything useless.”

In New York, I was riding in a taxi and the driver said, “I’m from Minsk.” I began asking him questions, so persistently that he asked, “You wouldn’t happen to be in the KGB, would you?” I persuaded him that I wasn’t, and toward the end of our talk, he suddenly asked, “Aren’t you Sakharov’s wife?”

He had come here five years ago, not knowing any English. He had to borrow from a bank to buy his taxi medallion, but now the loan is almost paid off. He is over 50, and he has spent his life — both here and there — behind the wheel. He says, “The Russians are a good people, what fine people! But America is the best country in the world. It is not true that there is no work. You just have to want to find it, and they’ll help you and there will be work. And there is such an abundance of things, and there’s freedom.” At the end of his speech, he said, “Now how could I, an old Jew from Minsk, ever think that I would see Canada and Florida and Spain and Israel?”

There, that’s freedom. Memories of that cab driver ate at me. Freedom, the freedom to go wherever you want. I am always free to think what I want, but to go? I know what is awaiting me back in Gorky — and I am not talking about external things. Not about checking in and the 8 p.m. curfew, not about the fact that I cannot talk to anyone but Andrei, that that strange and alien city makes me ill. Maybe if I were there of my own free will, and without humiliations, without cockroaches scurrying from packages of books, I might come to like it, but you can’t force love, and I don’t love it, I don’t love it at all.

And now I have the freedom to go there or not to go there — the freedom of choice. For a dissident, I have had a unique experience in freedom of choice. I have been abroad several times, and I never chose to stay. Each time it was very difficult to return. For from there you can’t call out, you can’t shout loud enough to be heard.

Every time that I have returned, a heavy fog, a darkness befell my soul as soon as I crossed the frontier. In the past I had always gone back to a large family: husband, mother, children; I had returned to my own house, my home, and even then it had been hard, indescribably hard.

It takes incredible willpower to force yourself to learn once again how to breathe without air, swim without water, walk without ground. You force yourself to live, to do your routine, daily chores. Gradually, everyday duties heal you. But it is a difficult healing process. It is hard to undergo the cure.

Each time, it was harder. As my family here grew, life got emptier there. Now I do not have a home there — just walls. All that is left is a strange city, a strange apartment filled with strange government-issue furniture, countless guards, like dogs on a single leash. And cameras constantly pointed at us.

And beyond all that, there is Andrei — alone, sad without me, happy and calm with me. All right. Somehow we will get over yet another depression, somehow we will manage.

And good things have happened. I was sick, I was dying, and all that has passed. I came to the U.S.; I was treated; it was very bad, but it passed. I used to carry nitroglycerine constantly, taking as many as 25 pills a day, and now there are days when I simply forget that nitroglycerine exists. I saw my mother. I embraced her. My grandchildren are charming.

I have most of the ingredients for a Christmas tale. Now all I need is the happy ending, but where do I find one? Maybe it is in the fact that Andryusha and I remain together. And in the fact that there, beyond the border that separates us from the world and from all of you, dear family and friends, we are still free to be ourselves. Yes, that must be it, the happy ending.

FOOTNOTE: *Smirnov, 35, a computer engineer arrested for working on the dissident publication Chronicle of Current Events, was sentenced to six years in a labor camp and four in internal exile.

FOOTNOTE: *Bonner’s two children emigrated to the U.S. in 1977 and 1978. Her daughter-in-law, however, was forbidden to go with her husband. Bonner and Sakharov staged a 17-day hunger strike in 1981 until the authorities allowed the daughter-in-law to emigrate.