No Rights, No Humanity

The indignant family of Yelena Bonner and her Nobel-laureate husband, Andrei D. Sakharov, has revealed new information about the captivity, abuse and deprivation of rights of the couple. It is a story that confirms the worst suspicions, that reconfirms the reports of past atrocities, that reveals the desperate fear that seizes those in authority in the Soviet Union.

There is today, as through past generations, no room for dissent. There is no recognition of fundamental human rights, including those affirmed by the Soviet leaders at Helsinki a decade ago in the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The story is remarkable even against a background of hundreds of other revelations of the brutality of life in the Soviet Union. The deception that has been practiced by the Moscow government to conceal its cruel and outrageous treatment of the great physicist is a frightening caution in the search for detente. Just as the leaders in Moscow seem unable to trust anyone, so must they be the objects of mistrust. And their flagrant violation of agreements on human rights, which they openly and freely negotiated, places in doubt their reliability as parties to any international accord.

At least Bonner has been allowed to seek medical help in the West. But her husband remains in internal exile at Gorki, his own physical condition worsened apparently as a result of the brutal force-feeding that sustained him when he refused food. It was that hunger strike, by that lone brave man, that seems to have prevailed over the ugly apparatus of police controls, finally forcing the government to grant his request that his wife be allowed to seek the care that she has needed for at least two years.

There may be an assumption in the Kremlin that Bonner’s release will distract a peace-hungry world from the repression with which those leaders rule, from the crudeness with which they flout international obligations. That is not the case. Indeed, the promise of committed negotiations that emerged from the Geneva summit only makes more urgent a demonstration within the Soviet Union of respect for the rule of law, without which agreements have little meaning.