East-West Brief Respite

For nearly half an hour, five customs officials carefully inspected her four suitcases. They counted her foreign currency--lire and dollars--and raised their eyebrows at the four jars of caviar she had with her, before a guard finally checked her travel documents. Then, for the first time in six years, Yelena Bonner, 62, wife of Soviet Dissident Andrei Sakharov, was finally free to leave the Soviet Union.

The trip marked a victory for the Sakharovs. Ever since Bonner had been forced to join her husband in exile in the city of Gorky (pop. 1.4 million) in May 1984, he had waged a campaign of letter writing and hunger strikes to secure an exit visa for Bonner, who suffers from glaucoma and heart trouble, so that she might receive medical treatment in the West. Before she left for Italy, where she consulted her ophthalmologist, then met briefly with Premier Bettino Craxi and Pope John Paul II prior to leaving for heart treatment in the U.S., Bonner explained that her three-month visa had been approved on the condition that she not talk to the press. "I have to be able to come back," she told reporters. "I know you don't want to see Andrei left on his own any more than I do."

Family members who met Bonner in Italy did not feel similarly bound. At a press conference in Rome, Alexei Semyonov, Bonner's son by her first marriage, and her son-in-law Efrem Yankelevich offered a glimpse of the painful isolation that has been endured by the Sakharovs, who were kept under constant surveillance by police. Neighbors and shopkeepers were barred from talking to them. Bonner and Sakharov, 64, were separated at least twice. When the Soviet government released film footage purportedly showing the Sakharovs strolling through Gorky last summer, he was actually on a hunger strike in Semashko Hospital, where Soviet doctors resorted to force-feeding him through the nose. The couple tried to get out word of their plight, but their messages were often altered to give the impression that all was well.

Moscow apparently approved the Bonner trip as a gesture of goodwill before last month's summit between President Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. At those talks, however, Gorbachev showed no signs that he is ready to ease restrictions on dissidents or would-be emigres. President Reagan made it equally clear that substantial changes in the Soviet attitude on human rights are essential before there can be any significant improvement in superpower relations.