A Garland for Sakharov
Babyonoshev, Alexander
A Garland for Sakharov ON SAKHAROV edited by Alexander Babyonoshev Alfred A. Knopf. 283 pp. $15.95 hardcover. $6.95 paperback. This is a literary tribute by some forty contributors whose lives...
...Yet the essays, poems, and stories in On Sakharov demonstrate that his example still inspires his compatriots to confront their regimented reality...
...But rationalism can overcome political dogma only in "an open pluralistic society...
...In On Sakharov, readers meet this world-renowned physicist and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, quarantined far from Moscow on his sixtieth birthday like someone with a contagious ideological disease, shunned by his colleagues of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, reviled by the press as a traitor to the system that showered him with honors and privileges for his leading role in the development of the hydrogen bomb...
...This "radical change of life" found Sakharov reincarnated as a Tol-stoyan figure—a man, in Larisa Bogoraz's words, who "may hope for nothing, yet nonetheless speaks because he cannot remain silent...
...Soviet bureaucrats became so vengeful toward this gadfly that, in January 1980, they bundled him off to Gorky, without even a pretense of "socialist legality...
...From their accounts, a portrait emerges of the last angry man of the Soviet Union...
...A round-the-clock guard is posted at his door, sealing him off from family and friends...
...Western governmental and scientific protests have proved unavailing...
...Even now, Sakharov remains convinced that scientists constitute "the one real world community which exists today...
...Some prisoners were released, others exiled...
...This is a literary tribute by some forty contributors whose lives were touched by the genius of Andrei Sakharov...
...Scientists need the freedom to communicate with each other, to travel and to write without restrictions: hence basic civil rights for Sakharov become an instrument for the creation of "trust among open societies" that is required to reach agreements preventing thermonuclear war...
...By the late 1950s, he became aware that fallout from atomic tests was causing genetic damage...
...Soviet leaders responded by stripping Sakharov of his clearances...
...An old cowherd addressed him as "Minister of Rights in the Defense of Man," to complain about his loss of a war pension after a long period of imprisonment...
...Often all he could do was to express helpless indignation, as at the 1978 trial of Anatoly Shcharansky, where he cried, "Let his mother in...
...He unsheathed his only weapon, publicity, daring in 1973 to do the impossible by meeting foreign correspondents...
...as a politician, you're an idiot...
...His twenty years of work in "the military-industrial complex" came to an end, to be succeeded by a new career as a human-rights activist...
...Sakharov continues to be exposed to harassments, as in the KGB's theft of his papers...
...His initial faith in the "convergence" of the two systems, combining the openness of the West with a Marxist concern for social justice, began to wane...
...At least for the reading of the sentence...
...Harvey Fireside (Harvey Fireside, who teaches politics at Ithaca College, is the author of "Soviet Psy-choprisons...
...But Sakharov had lost his friends in high places...
...The same reasoning that had moved Sakharov to criticize the dogmas of communism and capitalism as harmful to the future of mankind now impelled him to expose the repression of individuals for crimes of political and religious thought...
...In 1968, Sakharov says, he came to "a turning point" in his life...
...The limited test ban of 1963 proved that Sakharov and his scientific allies in the United States, including Herbert York and Hans Bethe, could persuade their leaders of the dangers of nuclear testing and devise adequate monitoring systems...
...There he occupies a gilded cage that he calls his "one-man sharashka" (a laboratory employing convicts...
...Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szi-lard, and Nils Bohr in the West, Sakharov grew to dread his brainchild...
...He was compelled to speak out, first against the charlatan Trofim Lysenko and his clique who had subverted classical genetics, then against the regime that claimed to know best about matters of policy...
...Common folk, in the tradition of the khodoki, peasant "walkers" who sought to petition persons of influence, trekked across the country to tell him their grievances...
...In 1961 he pressed for a test ban, only to be squelched by Nikita Khrushchev, who told him (in an earthier version than this), "As a scientist, Sakharov, you may be a genius...
...Vladimir Voinovich recalls Sakharov of the 1970s in a Moscow apartment, "with daily crowds of petitioners, dissidents, and correspondents" who filled his days, while nights were spent turning out papers on elementary particles and the structure of the universe...
...His intercessions proved marginally effective...
...Sakharov's urge to witness against injustices led him to the barred doors of political courtrooms, even to labor camps and places of exile...
...He addressed the Kremlin with his "Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," a manifesto that he concedes even sympathetic critics found "naive and impractical...
...As a technological optimist, he expects science to solve the problems of world hunger, environmental pollution, and, above all, the "super-militarization" that devours resources and threatens human survival...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 6
