Word: sakharovs
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...Moscow, the dwindling ranks of dissidents still at large mourned the loss of their leader. Said Literary Scholar Lev Kopelev: "Sakharov incarnates the conscience of Russia." There were demonstrations in several Western capitals, where governments expressed outrage at the treatment of Sakharov-as did a number of Communist leaders. The White House said that the Soviet action was "a blow to the aspiration of all mankind to establish respect for human rights." Italy's President Alessandro Pertini sent a cable of protest to Brezhnev. The West German government demanded that the Sakharovs be allowed to return to Moscow. France...
...Soviets did show a certain restraint by merely banishing Sakharov, instead of putting him on trial. Said one State Department official: "Being exiled to Gorky is a little like being sent to Detroit; it ain't great but it ain't so bad." Still, the Soviet press attacks on Sakharov suggested that he might ultimately be charged with high treason. The government newspaper Izvestia, for example, claimed that the physicist had "repeatedly blurted out things that any state protects as an important secret" to U.S. diplomats and correspondents. Some Soviet officials, however, assured Western journalists that Sakharov would...
...Sakharov's banishment may be the signal for an intensification of a domestic crackdown that has paralleled the hardening of Soviet foreign policy. According to a report by Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, more than 40 Soviet dissidents have been arrested or tried in the past three months. These have included religious leaders, Jewish "refuseniks" and activists for the rights of such national groups as the Ukrainians and the Lithuanians. Two weeks ago, Father Dmitri Dudko, 57, was arrested and imprisoned in Moscow's Lubyanka Prison. As revered a figure among Russian Orthodox Christians...
These new victims of Soviet authoritarianism will miss Sakharov; for more than a decade he has tirelessly called the world's attention to oppression in his country and castigated the Soviet regime for its aggressive policies. Still, Sakharov is not a man to give up easily. Two days after his banishment he phoned several friends in Moscow and issued an appeal to "all people of good will, including sportsmen and sports lovers" to demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and to support human rights everywhere...
...second week in a row, Italy's Communist Party daily L'Unità flayed Moscow with a front-page attack on its policies. The arrest and internal exile of Dissident Andrei Sakharov, said the paper, "demonstrated an inability to resolve in tolerant terms and free confrontation tensions affecting Soviet society " A few days earlier, L'Unità had printed the charge of Party Boss Enrico Berlinguer that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was "an open violation of the principles of national independence and sovereignty." France's Communist daily L'Humamté also scored the arrest...