Andrei Sakharov

Born May 21, 1921

Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov lived several completely different lives.

He started out as a mildly autistic child from a brainy family who was taught at home and did not attend school until seventh grade. He was a gifted student physicist, and he would grow up to be a brilliant scientist.

He was also someone who lived in the insular world of a “closed” military gorodok – a sort of hothouse designed to cultivate scientific and engineering discoveries to advance Soviet military might. In 1950, when he moved to Sarov (see Russian Life May/June 2020), how did he view the world? What was life like for one of the future developers of the hydrogen bomb? How did he reconcile his parents’ reminiscences of the family’s noble past, the horrors of the Stalinist Terror, Cold War conflicts, and his work at the forefront of Soviet nuclear physics, including amazing breakthroughs leading to a deeper understanding of the universe?

Decades later, people started using his work on the hydrogen bomb against him, arguing that someone who developed a weapon of mass destruction had no moral authority to lecture the government. Actually, Sakharov followed the same path traveled by many Western intellectuals: immersion in intriguing science, work on military projects (whether motivated by patriotism or simply drawn in by the incredible research opportunities offered by the defense industry), but then a shift toward social activism after seeing the heights that human reason can attain and the horrors to which products of the human brain can doom humanity. Sakharov himself later commented on the strong impression left on him by an exchange that took place after a successful bomb test. He proposed a toast expressing the hope that such Soviet weaponry would always explode as effectively as it just had over testing grounds but never be needed over cities. A counter toast by a top military official basically told Sakharov to stay in his lane and let others decide when and how the weapons he helped develop would be used.

In any event, by the late 1950s, while he was still working on military research, Sakharov began to speak out in favor of banning nuclear weapons. He was not your typical Soviet dissident. Other human rights activists had come to the cause after living through Stalinist labor camps or because they had studied history and understood the dead end their country was heading toward. Sakharov’s path toward activism led through science. This may be why the array of questions he took on was so broad – he didn’t limit himself to the usual causes of denouncing Stalinism and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Sakharov applied his penetrating intellect and vast knowledge to big questions: How should human society develop? What is the role of liberty in human life? What is the price of progress?

In the 1960s, his life entered a new phase. For a time, his exceptional position enabled him to sign protest letters, publish abroad, lend his support to persecuted human rights advocates while himself remaining unscathed, but the time came when he began to be punished for his outspokenness. First, he was deprived of the ability to conduct his research. Next came the personal attacks. As was the custom in the 1960s, the political education classes held throughout the Soviet Union started to insert in passing the important information that Sakharov “was not actually Sakharov, but Sakharovich, or maybe even Zukerman.” Insinuating that someone was a Jew was a smear in and of itself, but also hinted at contacts with the West. Then a new variation on this theme appeared: Sakharov himself just wanted to engage in science, but once he married a Jew, she led him astray – as if a towering intellect like Sakharov lacked a mind of his own.

In the 1970s, the anti-Sakharov campaign reached a new level. A large number of scientists and writers, including some highly respected ones, were forced to sign a series of open letters condemning Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. What compelled them to do that? This was no longer a time when they were in danger of being sent to a labor camp if they refused. Indifference, a reluctance to give up their privileges, the fear of losing work and the ability to be published – different people had different motivations, which is a separate and very sad story. For Sakharov, what was it like to read letters full of insinuations and signed not just by the “bosses,” but by his own colleagues and comrades? What was it like to step outside of his building and encounter “ordinary people” demonstrating the public’s outrage? Sakharov apparently had the backbone to endure all this and even found it in him to speak out against the death penalty while continuing to ponder not just the specific needs of the moment but also the development of the entire world. In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

And, then, in 1979, he had the courage to speak out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He paid for that outspokenness with seven years of exile in Gorky (a city on the Volga that has since reverted to its prerevolutionary name of Nizhny Novgorod). The authorities certainly didn’t want to send someone with Sakharov’s knowledge of the Soviet military industry out of the country, and they knew arresting him would cause quite an international uproar, so they simply stuck him in a city that, at the time, was closed to foreigners. For a while, his wife and fellow activist Yelena Bonner helped him maintain a connection to the outside world, traveling back and forth by train between Moscow and Gorky. The authorities demanded repentance from Sakharov but did not get it. The couple continued to be harassed: on a train to Gorky Bonner was attacked by “ordinary people” who just happened to be there and just had to express their outrage; Bonner was, at first, not allowed to leave the country for treatment for a dangerous heart condition; and Sakharov was force fed during one of his hunger strikes (which he undertook in support of his wife’s request to travel abroad for treatment).

Then came perestroika and a new life for Sakharov, starting with the fact that a telephone was installed in his Gorky apartment, previously cut off from the rest of the world. Sakharov used that telephone to call Gorbachev. Before he knew it, Sakharov was back in Moscow, where he was universally venerated and extolled, at least on the surface. Only two years passed before Gorbachev began publicly deprecating the great thinker, and some poor veteran of the Afghan war was put in front of a microphone and compelled to express his outrage over the academician’s behavior.

Perhaps what came next is most surprising and saddest of all. Sakharov’s death on December 14, 1989, was a cause for national mourning, followed by total silence. Moscow has a Sakharov Center devoted to the great man’s legacy and the history of human rights activism. It is the target of regular expressions of “outrage” by those same “ordinary people.” A major street in the capital bears Sakharov’s name, the site of many demonstrations and protests in recent times.

Despite these symbols of veneration for Sakharov, it still feels as if Sakharov has been forgotten. He is never studied in schools, no children’s books are written about him, no university courses address his legacy. He lives on in a few reminiscences as an idol of the intelligentsia, but his legacy has never been truly appreciated. Perhaps that’s the root of many of today’s problems. Until we give serious and attentive thought to what Sakharov said and wrote, we’ll continue to be stuck in place. But will that ever happen?