Passing Along the Word

The call came late at night. "Hello, it's me," said a voice at the other end. "Can you come over for a few minutes? I have something to tell you." The American reporter recognized the caller: it was a Soviet citizen with close ties to the dissident community. He was eager to pass along word that Nobel Peace Prize Recipient Andrei Sakharov had ended the hunger strike he began more than three months ago and was being held in a hospital. The news came from friends who had spoken to Sakharov's wife Yelena Bonner. She reportedly also told them that she was awaiting trial on charges of "anti-Soviet slander," a crime punishable by up to three years of hard labor. She had incurred the authorities' wrath by acting as her husband's link to the West.

One day after the telephone call, other Soviets told Western reporters that Bonner had written two letters to friends in Moscow in which she said she did not know what had happened to her husband, but that she was expecting to go on trial soon. Her friends believed the letters were intercepted and then released by Soviet authorities in order to let the world know of the impending trial.