"Beautiful! Terrific!"

"You are a disgrace to the Soviet Union," a plainclothes security policeman told Andrei Sakharov last week as he barred the Russian nuclear physicist from attending the trial of a fellow dissident in Lithuania. At almost the same moment, at Oslo University, the Nobel Prize for Peace was given to Sakharov in absentia. He was the first Russian to be so honored (13 Russians have won prizes in the sciences and literature). Sakharov was prevented by the Kremlin from traveling to Oslo, ostensibly for "security" reasons.

His wife, who was allowed to leave Russia earlier for an eye operation, accepted the prize in his stead. Standing on a flower-bedecked podium, Yelena Bonner Sakharov smilingly received the gold Nobel medal and the $143,000 check that goes with it. Then she read the five-minute acceptance speech that her husband had managed to send out of the Soviet Union. Characteristically, Russia's most outspoken champion of civil liberties took the occasion to plead for a worldwide amnesty for political prisoners. He also expressed his "deep personal longing" for "genuine disarmament." After the ceremony, Yelena Sakharov watched from her hotel balcony as 2,000 people marched from the university to the Parliament house shouting "Long live the Sakharovs!"

When the award to Sakharov was announced in October, the Soviet press dismissed the Nobel Prize as "a cold war weapon" and denounced the five-member Nobel committee for "political speculating." Still, the Kremlin last week dispatched Economist Leonid Kantorovich to collect his own Nobel Prize in Stockholm (where all but the peace awards are distributed), and sent five former Russian winners as well.

The occasion was the 75th anniversary of the first Nobel awards ceremony. The Nobel committee invited all past winners of the heavy gold medal to Stockholm. Of the 80 who made it to the ceremonies, 32 were from the U.S. Among those present: Albert Szent-Gyoergyi, 82 (Medicine, 1937) and Glenn Seaborg, 63 (Chemistry, 1951). The uniquely distinguished group was put through a tight schedule of formal receptions, sightseeing and museum visits. Mostly, though, the scholars wanted to exchange scientific gossip and give lectures on their specialties. "It's beautiful--terrific!" said the U.S.'s Gerald M. Edelman, joint winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Medicine. "There are so many scientists of stature, so many widely ranging lectures. It's enough to blow out your fuses."

Many of the past Nobel winners who made the trip to Oslo were outraged at the Kremlin's treatment of Sakharov. Linus Pauling, the 1954 winner in chemistry who lost his U.S. passport for a while in 1951 when he was under investigation for alleged Communist activities, disclosed that he had signed a cable to the Soviet leaders asking that they change their decision about Sakharov. Said he: "I feel people should be allowed to travel."

Symbolic Guests. While his wife was in Oslo, Sakharov was in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius trying--unsuccessfully--to appear as a character witness at the trial of a friend, Biologist Sergei Kovalev, who was charged with circulating "slanderous fabrications" including an underground Roman Catholic journal. Still awaiting trial on a similar charge is another Sakharov friend, Physicist Andrei Tverdokhlebov. In his award speech, Sakharov described the two imprisoned men as "noble defenders of justice, legality, honor and truthfulness," and invited them to be his symbolic guests in Oslo. As the Nobel ceremonies ended, Kovalev received the unusually severe sentence of seven years in prison and three years in exile.

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