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

The cause was complications of myasthenia gravis, a deterioration of the muscles, his wife, Jill, said.

Mr. Kline became the principal contact in the United States for Andrei D. Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Russian physicist and human rights campaigner who was confined in domestic exile in the Volga River city of Gorky, east of Moscow, from 1980 through 1986.

In collaboration with Robert L. Bernstein, the president of Random House and himself a human rights advocate, he shepherded Sakharov’s memoirs into publication in the United States and for worldwide distribution.