Soviets May Recall Bonner

NEWTON--The wife of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov has no guarantee that her temporary visa will be extended so she may undergo eye treatment, the Soviet consulate has reportedly told her family.

"Contrary to what they told us before, they said the matter of extension was still under consideration," said Efrem Yankelevich, the son of Yelena Bonner.

Yankelevich also said yesterday that Bonner may spend next week in New York meeting with, among others, the producers of a television special on the couple.

She also has scheduled meetings with the National Academy of Sciences, which suspended talks on scientific exchanges with its Soviet counterpart in 1984 because of concern over Sakharov's fate.

Meanwhile Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), on a tour of Moscow, yesterday praised Sakharov before a group of Soviet scientists. Kennedy, in the Soviet Union as the guest of the nation's parliament, later met with Premier Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Bonner is recovering from heart surgery performed three weeks ago at Massachusetts General Hospital, and should be well enough to travel to New York "if she takes it very easy," Yankelevich said.

Bonner came to her family's home in the Boston suburb in early December on a three-month medical visa.

"Of course, she's very unnerved now because she really doesn't know what to expect, whether they will grant the extension or not, and how soon," Yankelevich said. "That's probably precisely what they want her to experience."

"If she doesn't get the extension, she will have to return. What can you do? She will have to return without being able to finish her medical treatment."

No one answered the Soviet consulate telephone in Washington yesterday afternoon.

Bonner requested the extension last month so she could recover fully from her operation and undergo treatment for glaucoma, set for March, her son-in-law said.

Yankelevich said she was told in late January that the extension was granted, but a secretary at the consulate said yesterday that the decision would come next week.

"They probably want to play on nerves of Yelena," Yankelevich said. "Why? They don't like her."

In 1984, Bonner was sentenced to five years of internal exile in the remote Soviet city of Gorky, where her husband was banished in 1980.

"They might not want her to go back, but I don't think they really would go so far as to prevent her from returning to her husband," Yankelevich said.