Bonner Unable to Get Packages, Son Reports : Sakharov Says He Is Like ‘Living Dead’

WASHINGTON —  Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov said in a telephone call from the Soviet city of Gorky that KGB police follow him everywhere and he has no rights “except to be a living dead,” his stepson said today.

Andrei Semyonov, 29, also said his mother, Yelena Bonner, was not allowed to go from Gorky to Moscow to pick up luggage she brought from her six-month stay in the United States, where she underwent heart-bypass surgery.

Instead, the luggage was delivered to Gorky but the presents she brought for friends and medical prescriptions from U.S. doctors remained in the Sakharov’s apartment in Moscow and the flat “was locked by police,” Semyonov said.

On returning to Moscow June 2 in transit to Gorky where her husband is in internal exile, Bonner said she would return to the Soviet capital in two weeks to pick up the luggage. But authorities prevented her, Semyonov, a computer specialist, said in a telephone call from Newton, Mass., where he lives.

Semyonov said that in the 40-minute call, his stepfather said the KGB internal police had increased surveillance of the dissident couple since Bonner returned to Gorky, a city closed to foreigners 260 miles east of Moscow.

“It is more or less to what it was before, only there are even more KGB and police,” Semyonov said of the exile in Gorky, where the Nobel Prize laureate Sakharov was sent in 1980 for speaking out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“He’s being filmed everywhere--in the street, in the apartment and in the medical offices, and because of that he refused to go to see the physicians in Gorky,” Semyonov said.

Semyonov, who said the Soviets tried to jam the static-filled phone call, reported Sakharov said:

“I don’t have any rights except to be a living dead.”

(Reuters news service reported that the call was jammed when Sakharov tried to make a statement about the Chernobyl nuclear accident.)

Semyonov said Bonner’s heart first worsened on her return to the Soviet Union, but his 65-year-old mother is now all right, though she did have some trouble walking.