Word: sakharovs
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...glasnost policy opened prison doors too. In an apparent attempt to patch up the Soviet Union's poor human rights record, Gorbachev allowed such prominent dissidents as Anatoli Shcharansky and Yuri Orlov to leave the country. And just before Christmas the leading lights of the dissident movement, Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner, were permitted to return to Moscow from internal exile in Gorky...
...Andrei Sakharov seemed determined to make up for lost time. Within moments of returning to Moscow from seven years of "internal exile" in the city of Gorky, Sakharov spoke out on precisely the issues that landed him in Gorky in January 1980. Asked by reporters to comment on Moscow's continuing intervention in Afghanistan, Sakharov responded, "I consider this the most painful part of our foreign policy." The frail nuclear physicist also tackled human rights. "It is impermissible for our country to have prisoners of conscience and people who suffer for their convictions," he said. "I will do everything within...
...protests have continued. Western officials have harped on the plight of the Sakharovs as an example of the Soviets' failures in the area of human rights. Many other activists and dissidents remain in prison, internal exile or psychiatric hospitals, to be sure, but none as famous as Sakharov and Bonner. Over the past year, Gorbachev has tried to reverse the Soviet Union's negative human-rights image by releasing two well-known activists, Anatoli Shcharansky and Yuri Orlov. Another, Anatoli Marchenko, 48, died in prison in early December, the victim of a brain hemorrhage following a hunger strike. His death...
...first sign of a new policy toward the famous dissidents came a year ago. Following a 30-day hunger strike by Sakharov to force Moscow to allow his wife to seek medical treatment abroad, Bonner was permitted to go to the U.S. for a coronary-bypass operation. At the beginning of her six-month visit to the West, Bonner adhered to a pledge she had been obliged to sign in order to obtain her visa: she would hold no press conferences and give no interviews while abroad. Later, however, she was outraged at seeing secretly recorded videotapes of herself...
Even as the Sakharov case came to its surprising conclusion, Gorbachev was absorbed, at least temporarily, by other political matters. Last week, for the $ first time, the Soviet press explicitly pinned the blame for the country's economic trouble on former Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev. In fact, the rioting in Kazakhstan was largely a result of Gorbachev's efforts to get rid of a Brezhnev crony, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, a Politburo member and local party chieftain who was noted for championing local autonomy against Moscow. Gorbachev replaced Kunaev with an ethnic Russian, a move widely interpreted as part of a drive...