Sakharov under siege

Whatever face Moscow turns toward other countries, it remains a thug at home. Bad enough to send the Soviet Union's leading advocate of human rights, Andrei Sakharov, into ''internal exile.'' Now, he charges, KGB security police drugged him, then broke a window in his car and stole hundreds of pages of personal papers, including an unpublished memoir on which he had been working for several years.

This is a superpower? When Moscow mistreats a Nobel Peace Prize winner - not to mention the lesser-known dissenters subjected to much harsher measures - it seems more like a tin-horn dictatorship. Whether Mr. Brezhnev proclaims balm or blun-derbusses from his high podium, he must realize how small his government looks when it cannot suffer a few free-thinkers to live in peace.