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- WORLD, Page 38World NotesSOVIET UNIONDissident Diplomacy
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- Seems only yesterday that he was a pariah in his homeland,
- condemned to internal exile. But since the fateful phone call
- came from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev two years ago
- informing Andrei Sakharov that he could return to Moscow, the
- Nobel laureate and human-rights activist has assumed an
- increasingly public role in Soviet life. Two weeks ago,
- Sakharov, 67, led a fact-finding mission to the strife-torn
- republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan -- reportedly with
- Gorbachev's personal blessing.
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- Sakharov's delegation visited Baku, Yerevan and
- Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian
- enclave in Azerbaijan that has been at the heart of the ethnic
- clashes that have been rocking the Soviet Union since February.
- He also stopped in Spitak, the town virtually destroyed in the
- Dec. 7 earthquake that the Kremlin now estimates took 25,000
- lives.
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