Yelena Bonner, wife of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, arrived here Monday night for medical treatment and disclosed that she suffered a heart attack in May and that her husband ”is doing very badly.”
Bonner, 62, looked weak and pale after her flight from Moscow, but she walked unaided and smiled at a crowd of reporters waiting at Leonardo da Vinci Airport.
Sakharov, 66, developer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his human-rights stand, stayed behind in internal exile in the closed Soviet city of Gorky. He was banished to Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow, six years ago after he publicly criticized the government and its invasion of Afghanistan.
During a stopover in Milan, Bonner was asked about her husband, who staged three hunger strikes over 18 months to win his wife`s three-month visa to the West.
”I cannot answer,” she said, explaining that she had signed a document with Soviet officials in which she agreed that she would talk to Western reporters only about her health. But after a brief pause she added, ”My husband is doing very badly.”
”For some time I have felt very ill,” Bonner said. ”I am very tired and weak after the heart attack I suffered last May.”
She was joined in Milan by her son, Alexei Semyonov, a computer scientist, and her son-in-law, Efrem Yankelevich, both of whom live in the Boston suburb of Newton, Mass. The three then left together for Rome.
Bonner, a physician, said she came to the West because Soviet doctors cannot treat her adequately.
Friends said she was spending the night in a Rome hotel, but airport police said she was driving directly to Siena, 120 miles north of Rome, where she will have her eyes examined.
After the examination Thursday at the University of Siena Ophthalmic Institute, where she underwent surgery for glaucoma in 1975 and 1977, she plans to travel to Boston for a possible coronary bypass operation.
Airport officials said friends have booked her on a Thursday flight to New York.
Before leaving Moscow, Bonner told reporters she was under orders not to speak to them if she hoped to return to her husband in the Soviet Union.
”I intend to return and I have signed a document not to talk to the Western media. I hope you understand,” she told Western reporters in a strained voice at Moscow`s airport.
Bonner had told her son earlier by telephone that she would be refused permission to re-enter the Soviet Union if she held any news conferences or gave interviews during her stay in the West.
The decision last month to allow her to travel was widely seen as a pre-summit gesture by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to defuse President Reagan`s criticism of Soviet human-rights abuses.
