From H-Bombs to Human Rights
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
From ?-Bombs to Human Rights Sakharov: A Biography By Richard Lourie University Press of New England. 465 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor emeritus of...
...Besides plunging into his old causes of human rights and curbing nuclear weapons, he tried to aid beleaguered national minorities, from the Armenians to the Crimean Tartars...
...Sakharov was not allowed to go to Norway, however, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him in 1975...
...All this was closely followed by the death of his wife at the age of 49, a blow that left him in a state of shock for months...
...The notion was anathema to the Soviet power structure, as it was to American conservatives...
...and divorced—not an unusual Soviet biography...
...The daughter of revolutionaries, Bonner saw her parents purged in 19 3 7, along with most believing Communists...
...he was Spartan toward his family...
...After another trip to Europe and the U.S., Sakharov returned to Moscow in December for the start of the Second Congress of People's Deputies...
...The KGB repeatedly represented him as a tool of the strong-willed Bonner, but it was not alone...
...They saw their children who had immigrated, were lionized by the press, and met President Ronald Reagan...
...He would fail to ask for privileges...
...The explanation of his contribution to the design of the Soviet hydrogen bomb is cursory, and the uninitiated reader may find the context of his subsequent dissidence, particularly the Mikhail S. Gorbachev years, confusing...
...The Soviet intervention against the Prague Spring opened an unbridgeable chasm between the dissidents and the Soviet regime...
...A writer of both fiction and history focusing on Russia, he is also a translator of Russian and Polish literature—including Sakharov's own memoirs, finished by the physicist just before his death in 1989...
...The biographer takes a strictly chronological approach, highlighting his subject's step-by-step transformation from a brilliant but dutiful scientist to a fearless champion of human rights and democratization...
...This prompted him to hunger strikes that were countered by forced hospitalization and feeding...
...Sakharov was born in Moscow in 1921 to a family of the old Russian intelligentsia, who imparted their traditional values of excellence and service...
...He was unmoved by Sakharov's pleas on the missile defense issue...
...Sakharov did not hesitate to exploit his post-Gorky freedom to press Gorbachev hard, perhaps underestimating his fear of the Parry and his desire to avoid a fate like Khrushchev's...
...Then, in the courageous role of dissident truth-speaker, he led the way toward the dissolution of the Communist system...
...Soon afterward, remarkably, both he and Bonner were allowed to travel to the United States...
...married and had two children...
...The 1966 trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli M. Daniel provoked Sakharov into open efforts to help the new dissidents...
...Since the collapse of Communist rule, Yelena Bonner has seemed to carry on Sakharov's legacy by unflinchingly berating both the Boris N. Yeltsin and Vladimir V Putin regimes for their indifference to true democracy and human rights...
...Lourie tells a gripping tale of Sakharov's time there that enrages even now...
...In 1948, having finished the Ph.D...
...He proposed internal exile, but the Politburo initially balked...
...Sometimes, though, it is hard to follow the separate threads of Sakharov's professional accomplishments, personal life and political activity...
...both continued to profess a belief in socialism, and in its reformability in the spirit of the Prague Spring...
...The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 meant that Western opinion was going to be disregarded in any event, and very shortly Andropov had his way: In January 1980 Sakharov was arrested and consigned to internal exile in the industrial city of Gorky...
...Sakharov's personality, as Lourie depicts it, had much to do with the evolution of his political role...
...He became a central figure in the valiant band of dissenters— mostly scientists, but including the writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn and the historian Roy Medvedev—who rallied around the defense of human rights...
...Had he lived, he would have transformed it again...
...She drew Sakharov even more deeply into promoting dissent, while the KGB warned him about his "anti-Soviet activity," and the Academy of Sciences scandalously denounced him...
...Sakharov's Gorky years proved to be an era of unsettling change in the Soviet Union, with the rapid leadership succession from Brezhnev to Andropov, to Konstantin U. Chernenko, to Gorbachev...
...Almost immediately he conceived his "First Idea," a new kind of detonator for the fusion bomb...
...Andropov decided Sakharov should be silenced, if that could be done without excessive damage to the Soviet Union's reputation abroad...
...The hunger campaigns continued during Gorbachev's first months in 1985...
...The last three eventful years of Sakharov's life proved to be his finest hour...
...author, "The End of the Communist Revolution,' "Russia's Transformation" Andrei D. Sakharov was one of the 20th century's most remarkable figures...
...Solzhenitsyn, whose Slavophilism had distanced him from the scientist's Westernism, thought Sakharov was "under her heel...
...Once the Congress convened, in May, the nation was riveted by the televised spectacles of Sakharov and other hardy souls boldly pressuring Gorbachev to accelerate democratization, despite the outcry from the majority of deputies, who were still subservient to the Party apparatus...
...The Academy of Sciences was allotted one special deputy, and Sakharov was elected to that slot...
...He considered his work here a patriotic duty as well as a scientific challenge...
...It would win him top honors, monetary rewards and the rank of Academician when the Soviets successfully tested their H-bomb in August 1953...
...In this milieu, in 1970, Sakharov met Yelena Bonner, who soon became his second wife and a stalwart support in his political career...
...Cut off from direct contact with fellow activists and the foreign news media, he technically had the freedom of the city...
...The perplexed KGB tried to excuse him as a political innocent...
...His work in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb was instrumental in making the USSR the world's other superpower...
...In 1968, Sakharov suddenly experienced a series of crises...
...Steered naturally in that direction, Andrei discovered his extraordinary intellectual ability and formed an undying enthusiasm for science...
...His concerns helped persuade Soviet Party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev to accept the 1963 Test Ban Treaty...
...He was 68...
...In December 1986, the KGB showed up to install a phone in their apartment, so that Gorbachev himself could call to tell Sakharov he was free to return to Moscow...
...Richard Lourie is well qualified to undertake this task...
...Bonner was free to come and go to Moscow, and scientific colleagues were occasionally allowed to visit, keeping him in touch with the outside world...
...He quotes physicist Yuri Orlov, who fled to the United States, as saying: "Sakharov has already transformed Russian history...
...He was able to take advantage of his exceptional prestige and get away with acts of defiance that would have landed anyone else in jail...
...Rarely in history has a single individual exerted such decisive influence in exactly opposite directions...
...Bonner, who after agonizing efforts had gained permission to go to the West for eye surgery, accepted the honor in his stead...
...But Sakharov, older and an outsider, came to these positions much earlier than Gorbachev, younger and an insider...
...In January 1988 the two finally met face to face, and that October Sakharov was reinstated in the Academy of Sciences and elected to its Presidium...
...But all one can say for certain now is that his spirit lingers...
...Then, aiming to defuse Cold War tensions through summit diplomacy, Gorbachev eased up on Sakharov and let Bonner go to the West again for heart surgery...
...bastards," this mild-mannered man called the doctors...
...Lourie draws his account mainly from the ample sources already available in English, especially the KGB files at the Andrei Sakharov Archives at Brandeis University, with their chilling comments by one-time KGB chief Yuri V Andropov based on his surveillance of Sakharov...
...Perhaps, indeed, Sakharov could have become the sort of benevolent national leader Russia needs...
...From that point on, the politics of protest prevailed over science in Sakharov's life...
...But in 1944 his father got him into graduate study at the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences under Igor Y. Tamm, a man of unusual independence who remained Sakharov's mentor for many years...
...His father, Dmitri, was a well-connected teacher of physics...
...Hejoined the new "Interregional Group" of deputies demanding real democracy, but Gorbachev remained immovable...
...At one stage Gorbachev lost his patience and cut off Sakharov's microphone, but he had made his point: The Communist Party's monopoly on power had to go...
...In the case of the latter, he could be utterly dauntless about his own fate, yet still view his role as one of loyal opposition to what he called "my government...
...In March 1989, pursuant to his new Constitution, Gorbachev held partially democratic elections for a new Congress of People's Deputies...
...Only after Khrushchev's fall in 1964, when the Party leadership under Leonid I. Brezhnev showed signs of reverting to Stalinism, did Sakharov become overtly political...
...in reality, he suffered every form of harassment, extending to repeated thefts of his manuscripts...
...But the overall story, spiced as it is at every turn with the grubby details of existence in the strange Soviet world, is highly readable...
...There was an ascetic, quixotic, even saintly character to his devotion to science and later to human rights...
...After graduating from Moscow University during its World War II relocation in Central Asia, Sakharov was assigned to work as an engineer at a munitions factory...
...Between Sakharov and Gorbachev there was a notable, albeit imperfect, parallelism...
...equivalent, Sakharov was recruited into the hydrogen bomb project at the secret "Installation" known as "Arzamas-16...
...For Sakharov this final effort was too much: During the evening after the Second Congress' third day, his heart finally gave out...
...Through the rest of the '70s, a time of unrelenting KGB torment and rigged trials of dissidents, Sakharov led appeals based on the human rights provisions of the newly-concluded Helsinki Agreement...
...was wounded in the War...
...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor emeritus of history, University of Vermont...
...Under Andropov and Chernenko, the treatment of Bonner and Sakharov became especially brutal...
...Oddly enough, Sakharov's unique life and achievements have not been the subject of a full biography until now...
...When his manifesto of dissent, "Reflections on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," was published in the West, he was fired from the "Installation...
...Nevertheless, by the mid-'70s Sakharov enjoyed international celebrity—enhanced by the publication of his essay, "My Country and the World," on the need for reform and convergence with the West...
...For a time Gorbachev kept his distance from the man he had unleashed, but, Lourie contends, he was quick to appropriate Sakharov's ideas on the arms race...
...Both men grew to reject the totalitarianism inherited from Stalin...
...Lourie wonders what difference Sakharov would have made for Russia had he lived longer...
...Naive, physically awkward and socially aloof, he had none of the instinct for intrigue and manipulation that was almost a sine qua non for survival, let alone success, in the Soviet system...
...and he gave away all his prize money after his first wife, Klava, died in 1969...
...By the mid- 1950s Sakharov was worrying about the threat nuclear weapons posed to all of humanity, beginning with fallout from test explosions...
Vol. 85 • January 2002 • No. 1
