Growls from a "Wounded Bear"

Moscow angrily rejects Western inquiries about Sakharov

Near the end of two days of meetings with Soviet officials in Moscow last week, Australian Foreign Minister Bill Hayden finally broached the diplomatically ticklish topic. He asked his counterpart, Andrei Gromyko, for information about the health of Andrei Sakharov, 63, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient who is believed to have begun a fast on May 2 to gain official approval for his wife Yelena Bonner to receive medical treatment outside the Soviet Union. A look of irritation and anger flickered over Gromyko's dour features. Moscow "will not be told how to deal with the Sakharovs by other countries," he snapped. "The conversation on this subject ends here."

That response to the mere mention of Sakharov was consistent with the ultrahard line that Moscow has shown the world in recent weeks. After Gromyko rebuffed Hayden's appeal, Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Talyzin told the visiting Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, that the Soviets had no intention of reversing their decision to withdraw from the Los Angeles Olympics no matter how many emissaries came around. In ironic counterpoint to Moscow's vociferous complaints that Soviet athletes would not be safe at the Games, American officials revealed that a U.S. consular officer had been attacked by "goons" on the streets of Leningrad in broad daylight in April. The Soviets, a senior U.S. diplomat summed up last week, are behaving "like a wounded bear."

Hayden was not the only foreigner to receive a chilly blast from the Kremlin in answer to inquiries about the missing couple. French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson announced last week that the Soviets had rejected an appeal from the European Community, labeling the Sakharov case an "internal affair."

Cheysson said that French President Francois Mitterrand still planned to visit Moscow this year but noted that Sakharov's death "would be such a shocking thing that it would affect relations between the Soviets and any country." The Reagan Administration continued to mute its protests last week, fearing that a direct challenge to the Kremlin would only make the situation worse for the Sakharovs. Confessed a State Department official who has monitored the case closely: "We feel we simply don't know what's happening. It's very worrisome."

No display of Soviet hostility and rage has seemed more perplexing than the Kremlin's handling of the Sakharov case.

Family friends who on three successive nights drove past the Sakharov apartment in Gorky, the city to which the dissident physicist has been exiled since 1980, said they were convinced no one was there because they had seen no lights in the windows. Soviets with access to official information claimed that Sakharov had been hospitalized two weeks ago and that officials were "very, very concerned" about his health.

Yet in a commentary titled "Healers from the CIA," the Soviet news agency TASS provided a cryptic but decidedly upbeat report on Sakharov's health. "What of his hunger strike?" asked TASS. "Let us cite exact medical facts: Sakharov feels well, is eating regularly and is leading an active way of life." Considering that the scientist suffers from heart trouble, the reference to his new-found vigor strained credibility. But the tone of the commentary seemed calculated to assuage fears that Sakharov might still be fasting and close to death.

U.S. officials regarded the attack on Consular Officer Ronald Harms outside a restaurant in downtown Leningrad nearly two months ago as another reflection of "the sour Soviet attitude toward the U.S."

Last week U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Arthur Hartman personally delivered a strongly worded protest to Leningrad officials. Harms had apparently finished talking to a Soviet citizen who was in trouble with the authorities, when three youths accosted him in the doorway, knocked him to the ground and kicked him. U.S. diplomats had no doubt that Harms' attackers were engaged, as one official put it, in a "public-sector activity" with government approval.