Andrei D. Sakharov

Term Paper TitleAndrei D. Sakharov
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Andrei D. Sakharov

Human-rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov met Soviet leader
Mikhail S. Gorbachev for the first time yesterday and gave him a list of 200 citizens he said are still imprisoned for their views.

Gorbachev received the 66-year-old dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate along with about two dozen other members of the board of a new organization called the International Fund for the Survival of Humanity.


American industrialist Armand Hammer, a board member and the fund's biggest benefactor, said Sakharov used the opportunity to draw Gorbachev's attention to the continued plight of political prisoners.
Since becoming Communist Party general secretary in March 1985, Gorbachev has been waging a campaign for glasnost, or openness, in discussing the nation's problems.

Yesterday's meeting with Sakharov was Gorbachev's first personal encounter with a dissident, although he has talked to Sakharov on the telephone.

In its report on the meeting, the evening television news program ''Vremya" identified Sakharov as one of the participants and briefly showed the physicist seated at the table and smiling.

The Tass news agency reported Sakharov's comments to journalists later in which he praised Gorbachev as a "dynamic leader" and called for an early Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

However, Tass did not report that Sakharov had told reporters he favored a rapid Soviet pullout from Afghanistan "without any conditions whatsoever."

Sakharov has maintained a lower profile since returning from exile 13 months ago and has praised Gorbachev's reform policies. But he continues to speak out against human rights violations and matters of Kremlin policy he disagrees with, such as the presence of 115,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

Hammer said the Soviet leader was "very respectful" and listened attentively to Sakharov during the exchange in Gorbachev's offices yesterday.

Sakharov, who was released from exile and allowed to return to Moscow in
December 1986, spoke with reporters about Gorbachev but declined to say what subjects he raised during the three-hour meeting in the Kremlin.

In Paris, meanwhile, writer Elie Wiesel, a Boston University professor, called on Soviet authorities to allow Sakharov to go to France next week for a conference ...

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