Sakharov, in 1989 visits the Adnkronos: “Freedom to conquer and defend”

Andrei Sakharov wants to “meet in person the interlocutors of Gorki’s days”, the journalists who were for him at the time a tenuous thread with the outside world. For this reason, on his trip to Italy in February 1989, he visited the editorial office of the press agency, then in via di Ripetta, welcomed by the director Giuseppe Marra. Read also 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 1984, during Sakharov’s exile, Adnkronos 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. . “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 to maintain. Freedom must never be separated from the responsibilities that must accompany anyone who aspires to the possibility of expressing themselves and moving freely “. The new freedom he was enjoying then, reminded him – he said – of a story from his wife” when at the end of the war she she was a military doctor and found herself in plain clothes, sitting on the sack with her personal effects at the station, and wondering: what do I do now? For four years she had been at war, only receiving orders, never being free to make decisions on her own . Suddenly she found herself having to decide everything. Well, on that train I felt, exactly the same way. “At that moment,” there was something very s similar to what Elena had experienced in 1945. I had to decide what to participate in and what not. I had before me a whole series of problems and also the fear of making mistakes, inevitable mistakes, which are part of the freedom of choice. Setting foot at the Moscow station I realized all this. “Bonner was received by the Pope in 1986. On that occasion she said to John Paul II:” ‘I am here alone, but my dream, the true one that I I bring inside, is that one day Andrei may be here to talk to her “.” Yesterday the dream came true “: on February 6, in fact, Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner had an hour and twenty minute interview, 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, in the headquarters in via del Corso, before crossing the street and arriving at the press agency.At the end of the day, the Sakharovs had made a wish: a walk, alone, in via Veneto.