On December 19, 1986, the Soviet Foreign Ministry announced that Soviet physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov was being released from his five-year internal exile in Gorky. The Ministry said that the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner would be allowed to resume his work at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and that his wife, the physician Elena Bonner, had been pardoned for her "anti-Soviet slander."
During a visit to the United States last year to undergo multiple bypass surgery, Bonner wrote Alone Together (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), an account of the past three years of her life in exile with her husband (The Scientist, November 17, 1986, p. 14). In concluding the book, she seemed al most to anticipate her forthcoming release just five days before Christmas:
"Since time immemorial the genre of the Christmas tale has existed in Russia.... Yes, I have most of...
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