Sakharov Prize, the dissident’s visit to Adnkronos in 1989

Andrei Sakharov, the dissident to whom the European Parliament Prize for Freedom of Thought awarded today to Aleksei Navalny is named, wants to “meet personally the interlocutors of Gorki’s days”, the journalists who set up for him, at the time of his exile, a tenuous thread with the outside world. For this reason, during his trip to Italy in February 1989, he visited the editorial office of the Adnkronos press agency, then in via di Ripetta, welcomed by the director Giuseppe Marra. In 1984, during Sakharov’s exile, the news agency had organized a press conference in Rome for the daughter of the Nobel laureate Tatiana, a communication channel between her isolated father and the world. Together with his wife Elena Bonner and friend Irina Alberti, director of the Paris-based magazine “La Pensée russe”, former assistant to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov talks about his exile and freedom. And he remembers his train journey from Gorki to Moscow in December 1986. “In that journey, which brought me home from confinement, the beautiful feeling of freedom was born in me. At the same time I also felt the sense of a new responsibility grow. , because freedom is difficult, not only to conquer, but also to defend and maintain. Freedom must never be separated from the responsibilities that must accompany anyone who aspires to the possibility of expressing themselves and moving freely “. Bonner had been received by the Pope in 1986. On that occasion she said to John Paul II: “‘I’m here alone, but my dream, the real one I carry inside, is that one day Andrei may be here too to talk to she”. “Yesterday the dream came true”: on February 6, Andrei Sakharov and Bonner had a one hour and twenty minute conversation, in Russian, with the Pontiff, a meeting that John Paul II defined as “historic”. The next day, the two leaders of a nascent opposition in the Soviet Union met the then secretary of the PSI, Bettino Craxi, and the party’s foreign manager, Margherita Boniver, at the headquarters in via del Corso, before crossing the street and arriving at the Press Agency. At the end of the day, for the Sakharovs, a walk alone in via Veneto.