Edward Kline

Department store heir who devoted life to supporting Soviet

Edward Kline who, bored with the department store chain he inherited, devoted his career to supporting Soviet dissidents in Russia and promoting their causes abroad, died on 24 June in Manhattan. He was 85.

Kline became the principal contact in the United States for Andrei D Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Russian physicist and human rights campaignerwhowasconfined in domestic exile in Gorky, east of Moscow, from 1980 through 1986. In collaboration with Robert L Bernstein, the president of Random House, he shepherded Sakharov’s memoirs into publication in the US and for global distribution.

Kline was also the president of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation,ahumanrightsorganisation based in Virginia. Kline was so close to Sakharov and wife Elena Bonner that in 1981 he was a stand-in bride for their son’s wedding in Montana after Soviet authorities refused to let his fiancee leave the country to marry him.

Thecouple’sfour-yearappeal that the bride be allowed to join her husband-by-proxy was finally granted after the Sakharovs mounted a 17-day hunger strike.

Kline also established Chekhov Publishing in New York, which printed books in Russian by Joseph Brodsky, Nadezhda Mandelstam and other authors who were banned in the Soviet Union. The books were spirited past