Andrei Sakharov’s universe

Two years ago a large scale Moscow-based media project with the weird title “The Name of Russia” placed him 28th among the 50 most outstanding Russians. Five times more Russian nationals voted the Bolshevik leader Ulyanov-Lenin and twice as many for Nicholas II of Russia. This is, after all, not surprising, considering the way Russia is these days.

Meanwhile, Sakharov’s whole life served as a refutation of Lenin’s well-known thesis that the “intelligentsia is not the ‘brain of the nation,’ it is the ‘shit of the nation.’” He would have never written in his diary what Nicholas II did: “Had to read for a long time in the evening and because of this grew totally weak in the head.”

The name of this extraordinary man is Andrei Sakharov.

Those past their forties must well remember the first congress of “people’s deputies of the USSR” and that most of those in the audience hated the guts of the man, yesterday’s dissident, fresh from political exile, who dared “defile the honor of the Soviet internationalist soldiers” [i.e., officers and men in the Afghan war] and how the Ukrainian delegation — save for a couple of sober-minded and decent individuals — joined in that uproar. Their mass hatred was aimed not so much against Sakharov as a person as against his being an embodiment of free intellect and conscience that could not let him remain silent even when speaking the truth was dangerous.

In the limelight of the official press was a certain Komsomol functionary from Cherkasy (I will not mention his name; this character doesn’t deserve the honor) found himself after hurling bucketfuls of dirt at Andrei Sakharov and all the other “extremists” — in other words, democrats — among them Georgians and people from the Baltic States who were allegedly forming storm troops and vilifying the “honorable Soviet soldiers”; at those “vicious and smart guys in the Vzgliad [TV] program,“ and so on.

Indeed, the whole show was well directed. For half a day all who took the floor (except one) would lash out at the dissenting academician. Among them was a woman, a schoolteacher, who said,” You have insulted the whole army, the whole people.” Note that the army was mentioned first. A case study in the Soviet way of thinking. That character from Cherkasy ended his speech with these words: “Our Fatherland! Our State! Communism!” Almost everyone in the audience (including the Ukrainian delegation) greeted this with standing prolonged applause. But of course, who would question this formula of the Soviet regime, even if an awkward paraphrase of Nicholas I’s “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality”? This was the formula (with all its versions) that Academician and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Andrei Sakharov fought against all his life.

He died half a year later, leaving us with memories about his personality.

He seemed to have everything a Soviet citizen could dream of. He became an academician at 32; at 41 he was three times Hero of Socialist Labor, winner of the Lenin and Stalin prizes, an acknowledged authority in the secret Soviet physicists’ quarters (there were enough such scientists to spare). He had every opportunity to enjoy his life — or join the intellectual opposition if he disagreed with the communist system, the way Kapitsa and Goldansky did — leave the secret quarters and take up “public physics” or cosmology, win a Nobel Prize the way the two did, write a popular scientific book. What more could one want?

Yet there must have been something that prevented this Russian intellectual from living not only the way everyone did, but even the way the selected few free-thinking intellectuals did. Instead, he started to use his scientific authority to pressure the Soviet leadership. He played a major role in the USSR signing the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1965. Using his typewriter, he produced the essay Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom (May 1968). Samizdat copies were disseminated and translations appeared in the West. Now this was a blatant violation of the rules of the Soviet system, something no other academician had dared perpetrate. Then, step by step, Andrei Sakharov ventured outside the borders of this system, thus beginning his duel with it. I was about to write “his losing battle,” but couldn’t. Where is that system now? It turned out to have less moral potential than a single individual — be his name Sakharov, Stus, Kovaliov, or Sverstiuk — who wasn’t intimidated by the whole giant government machine.

In the mid-1970s, after Sakharov was conferred the Nobel Peace Prize, the Politburo of the CC CPSU reportedly decided that this insolent renegade had no place in the ranks of Soviet academicians. Aleksandrov, the president of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, was instructed to implement this decision through the academic channels. During a meeting of the Academy’s Presidium, he sighed heavily and said:

“Comrades, we have to make an unprecedented decision on the expulsion of Andrei Sakharov from our academy.”

“Why unprecedented?” exclaimed Kapitsa. “There was a precedent in the 1930s. After Hitler came to power, the Prussian Academy expelled Albert Einstein.”

Silence. Aleksandrov finally said, “This item is removed from the agenda.”

Take the biography of, literally, every Soviet prisoner of conscience, every dissident persecuted by authorities. You will find Sakharov’s name there. He protested against unlawful reprisals against human and ethnic rights champions (at that period every trial over dissidents involved flagrant violations of justice, and it couldn’t have been otherwise). He attended court hearings, organized picketing, took part in them, gave interviews to Western journalists, and collected money for the convicts’ families, including those of Ukrainian dissidents. Sakharov tried to protect each of them. He also paid serious attention to the fate of the Crimean Tatars who had been forced to part with their homeland. He appeared to be playing a losing game, as even to the Western free-thinking intellects the Kremlin’s regime that occupied one-sixth of the globe’s land looked rock solid, while Sakharov’s ideas — utterly Utopian, especially in 1980 when, in retaliation for his protests against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Sakharov was exiled to Gorky and actually isolated from the rest of the world.

Or maybe the world isolated itself from him? Six years of exile ended with Gorbachev’s permission to return to Moscow under the perestroika campaign. Shouldn’t he feel grateful to the man who had liberated him, allowed him to work effectively in the scientific and public domains, who had helped bring about changes for the better in the political system? Maybe, but for Sakharov the truth came first and personal motives second. Gorbachev found himself a target of Sakharov’s consistent and deep-reaching criticism as a politician who was incapable of completing changes he had started in order to establish a true democracy.

At the abovementioned congress Sakharov also made a program speech, stressing that the country was “in the throes of an economic catastrophe and tragically worsening interethnic relations… one of the aspects of these powerful and dangerous processes is the overall crisis of confidence among the leadership, mounting tensions that threaten to explode and produce most devastating consequences for our society.”

He went on to say that the Soviet Union had inherited a structure from Stalin which was branded by an imperial way of thinking, the divide-and-rule imperial policy, and that among the victims of this imperial system were not only non-Russian peoples, but also the Russian nation that “had to shoulder the heaviest burden of the imperial ambitions and suffer the consequences of the adventurist and dogmatic foreign and domestic policies.” The impression is that this statement has been made today. Apparently there are enough politicians and intellectuals in Russia who believe that the imperial policy was the best and the only possible one for their country.

Be that as it may, persecuting an outstanding personality brings considerable dividends, provided one is in the right place and at the right time and suffers no pangs of conscience afterward.

I believe, however, that we should remember those who built temples, not those who burned them down. Read this excerpt from Sakharov’s speech during the Nobel awards ceremony in 1975. There is a different kind of Russian; it is strikingly different from neo-Soviet bureaucratese:

“Thousands of years ago tribes of human beings suffered great privations in the struggle to survive. In this struggle it was important not only to be able to handle a club, but also to possess the ability to think reasonably, to take care of the knowledge and experience garnered by the tribe, and to develop the links that would provide cooperation with other tribes. Today the entire human race is faced with a similar test. In infinite space many civilizations are bound to exist, among them civilizations that are also wiser and more ‘successful’ than ours. I support the cosmological hypothesis which states that the development of the universe is repeated in its basic features an infinite number of times. In accordance with this, other civilizations, including more ‘successful’ ones, should exist an infinite number of times on the ‘preceding’ and the ‘following’ pages of the Book of the Universe. Yet this should not minimize our sacred endeavors in this world of ours, where, like faint glimmers of light in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of dark unconsciousness of material existence. We must make good of the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.”