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During the summer of 1983 Yuri Andropov, then the Soviet leader, told a group of visiting American Senators who had asked about my situation that I was mentally unstable. Did these remarks indicate a new KGB strategy for dealing with "the Sakharov problem"? The authorities clearly were reluctant or unable to banish me from the country, and hesitated to imprison either of us. There is evidence that the KGB intended to portray my public activities as a delusion produced by the influence of Lusia, who would be presented as a corrupt, self-serving, loose-living, egotistical, depraved and immoral Jew prostitute, an agent of international Zionism. I would be transformed back into a distinguished Soviet (Russian, of course) scientist who had made invaluable contributions to the Motherland and world science. The KGB was concentrating its energies on her, and she was by now seriously ill.
Lusia was detained at the Gorky airport on May 2, 1984, which ended for 17 months her visits to Moscow, our principal means of contact with the outside world. She was put on trial, convicted in August of "slandering the Soviet system" and sentenced to five years' internal exile, in Gorky.
In April 1985, against Lusia's wishes, I conducted a hunger strike demanding that she be allowed to go abroad to visit her mother, children and grandchildren and to receive medical treatment. I was forcibly confined in Gorky's Semashko Hospital from April 25 and subjected to painful forced feeding until July 11, when I decided to end that hunger strike. But two weeks later, I resumed it, and on July 27 I was taken back to Semashko by force. My normal weight is around 175 lbs., but it dropped to 138 by Aug. 13. That day, they began subcutaneous (into both thighs) and intravenous drips to supplement the forced feedings. Each subcutaneous feeding took several hours, my legs would swell painfully, and I would be unable to walk for a day or two.
"You Can Return to Moscow"
In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. Though he at first defended the treatment of Sakharov, he soon decided that keeping him in exile was incompatible with the image he wished to convey of a Soviet Union committed to glasnost and perestroika.
In February 1986 I wrote a letter to Gorbachev quoting his own words in an interview with the French Communist newspaper L'Humanite: "About political prisoners, we don't have any. Likewise, our citizens are not prosecuted for their beliefs. We don't try people for their opinions." In my letter, I argued that prosecutions under various articles of the criminal code are in fact prosecutions for beliefs, including religious beliefs. I also mentioned persons confined in psychiatric hospitals for political reasons, and others imprisoned on trumped-up criminal charges. I gave brief accounts of 14 I knew personally -- Anatoly Marchenko, the writer, headed the list -- and called for the unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience.
In early October 1986 I was summoned to the regional Procurator's Office to see U.S.S.R. Deputy Procurator General Vladimir Andreyev "in connection with your statement." But Andreyev evaded the real issues. He told me that all the prisoners on my list had been properly sentenced. I told him that I was disappointed in our meeting.