TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052190/0521533.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.5 KB | 163 lines

                                                                                SAKHAROV, Page 52

Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn: a Difference in Principle

By Andrei Sakharov


[From Memoirs. (c) 1990 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Translated by
Richard Lourie]

[Despite their common struggle against the arbitrariness of the
Soviet system, Sakharov and fellow Nobel laureate and dissident
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood far apart on fundamental questions
of Soviet life.]


    We first met at the apartment of a friend of mine on Aug.
26, 1968. With his lively blue eyes and ruddy beard, his
tongue-twistingly fast speech delivered in an unexpected treble
and his deliberate, precise gestures, he seemed an animated
concentration of purposeful energy.

    He voiced his disagreements with me in incisive fashion. Any
kind of convergence is out of the question. The West is caught
up in materialism and permissiveness. Socialism may turn out
to be its final ruin. Our leaders are soulless robots who have
latched onto power and the good life and won't let go until
forced to do so.

    Solzhenitsyn claimed that I had understated Stalin's crimes.
According to one estimate, 60 million people had died as a
result of terror, famine and associated disease. My figure of
10 million deaths in labor camps was too low. I was also wrong
to differentiate Stalin from Lenin: corruption and destruction
began the day the Bolsheviks seized power, and have continued
ever since. It's a mistake to seek a multiparty system; what
we need is a nonparty system.

    I felt enormous respect for him, since reinforced by
publication of his epic work The Gulag Archipelago. Real life
is never simple, however, and our relations are now difficult
-- perhaps unavoidably so, since we are not at all alike and
differ markedly on questions of principle.


    [The two continued meeting into the early 1970s, not always
amicably. Once, Solzhenitsyn's first wife scolded Sakharov for
harping on the issue of Jewish emigration and fretting about
the harassment of his wife's children, pointing out that the
Russian people faced greater worries. As Sakharov writes, Lusia
was "outraged by the lecturing tone" and burst out, "Don't give
me that `Russian people' s---! You make breakfast for your own
children, not for the whole Russian people!" Still, the
Sakharovs were soon rallying to Solzhenitsyn's defense.]


    Right after New Year 1974, Solzhenitsyn's 13-year-old
stepson visited our apartment, disappeared into the bathroom
and returned with a book that had been concealed under his
clothing: The Gulag Archipelago. The book was a shattering
experience, evoking a somber world of gray camps surrounded by
barbed wire, investigators' offices and torture chambers, icy
mines in Kolyma and Norilsk.

    On Feb. 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was taken from his home and
placed under arrest. The next day a group gathered in our
apartment and drafted the "Moscow Appeal" demanding
Solzhenitsyn's release and an investigation of the crimes
described in The Gulag Archipelago. But Solzhenitsyn was
expelled from the country and flown to West Germany.

    Before discussing the issues that divide us, I wish to
emphasize my profound respect for him, for his talent as a
writer and for his historic achievement in uncovering the
state's crimes. I agree with a great deal of what he says. But
even where I share Solzhenitsyn's general thesis, I often find
troubling the peremptory nature of his judgments, the absence
of nuance and his lack of tolerance for the opinions of others.
He displays a marked anti-Western and isolationist bias, at
times lapsing into an exaggerated Russian nationalism.

    In Solzhenitsyn's view, the West is losing its battle
against totalitarianism, which is on the offensive everywhere.
Inconsistent, disunited, lacking firm religious or moral
guidelines, it is wallowing in the pleasures of the consumer
society, in permissiveness. It is heedlessly destroying itself
in the smoke and fumes of its cities and the din of hysterical
music.

    Certainly there is much bitter truth in Solzhenitsyn's
complaints. I too have called attention to the West's lack of
concerted action, its dangerous illusions, the factional
gamesmanship, shortsightedness, selfishness and cowardice
displayed by some of its politicians. Yet I believe that
Western society is fundamentally healthy and dynamic, capable
of meeting the challenges life continually brings.

    The West's lack of unity is the price it pays for the
pluralism, freedom and respect for the individual that are the
sources of strength and flexibility for any society. It makes
no sense to sacrifice them for a mechanical, barracks unity
that may have a certain utility if one's goal is aggressive
expansion but has otherwise proved to be a failure.
Solzhenitsyn's mistrust of the West, of progress in general,
of science and democracy incline him to romanticize a
patriarchal way of life and craftsmanship, to expect too much
from the Russian Orthodox Church.

    Solzhenitsyn suggests that there are already clear signs of
a national and religious renaissance, that Russians have always
been hostile to the socialist system and even that they
harbored defeatist sentiments during World War II. These ideas,
which I may have oversimplified somewhat, are little short of
myths. If our people and our leaders ever succumb to such
notions, the results could be tragic.

    Unlike Solzhenitsyn, I see faults and sound principles in
both the socialist and the Western systems. I believe that
their convergence is possible, and I welcome that prospect as
a chance to save humanity from the confrontation that threatens
it with destruction.

    I do not share Solzhenitsyn's antipathy toward progress. If
mankind is the healthy organism I believe it to be, then
progress, science and the constructive application of
intelligence will enable us to cope with the dangers facing us.
Having set out on the path of progress several millenniums ago,
mankind cannot halt now -- nor should it.

    Solzhenitsyn and I differ most sharply over the defense of
civil rights -- freedom of conscience, freedom of expression,
freedom to choose one's country of residence, the openness of
society. I have no doubt whatsoever as to the value of
defending specific individuals. He assigns only a secondary
importance to human rights and fears that concentration on them
may divert attention from more important matters.

    In The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn makes a great deal of
my supposed naivete, my impracticality and especially my
susceptibility to "pernicious" influences. Among those who (in
his view) have hitched themselves to "this strange, huge,
conspicuous balloon, which was soaring to the heights without
engine or petrol" -- me -- Solzhenitsyn's sharpest, if covert,
thrusts are aimed at my wife. Her "deleterious" influence, he
suggests, led me to harp on emigration by Jewish refuseniks --
people "who did not feel that Russia was their own country."

    It's a shame that Solzhenitsyn understood so little about
me, my thoughts on emigration, human rights and other matters,
and about the real Lusia and her true role in my life. Late in
1974 a German correspondent brought me a gift from
Solzhenitsyn, a copy of The Oak and the Calf, with a warm and
complimentary inscription from the author. I already knew what
was in it, and when I saw the inscription, I couldn't help
exclaiming, "Solzhenitsyn really offended me in this book!"

    The correspondent grinned, "Yes, of course, but he doesn't
realize it."