TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122589/12258900.031

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.6 KB | 159 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 23

At Last, a Tomorrow Without Battle

Andrei Sakharov: 1921-1989


By Patricia Blake


    In his 68th year, modern Russia's greatest humanist and
libertarian died in the way that most befitted his life -- in
the midst of combat for his country's freedoms. He had spent the
day of Dec. 14 at a tempestuous meeting of the Interregional
Group, a coalition of liberal members of the Congress of
People's Deputies that he had helped found. Exhorting, cajoling
and arguing with his colleagues, he pressed for the
establishment of an alternative political party in opposition
to the Communists. Witnesses were shocked at how dramatically
Sakharov had aged lately, as he made his faltering way to the
podium around 6 p.m. Still, there was nothing irresolute about
his short impassioned speech. He defended his earlier,
controversial call for a nationwide strike to end the
Communists' institutionalized monopoly of Soviet political
life. "We cannot take responsibility for what the party is
doing," he declared. "It's leading the country into a crisis by
dragging its feet on perestroika."

    Returning to his tiny Moscow flat, he exulted to his wife
and friends, "Tomorrow there will be battle!" They were his last
words. He then repaired to his private study to rest and prepare
for the next day's passage at arms. Two hours later, his wife
found him dead of a heart attack. His heart had been weakened
by the stress of decades of persecution and by his hunger
strikes and their inevitable consequence: forced feedings and
deliberately inadequate medical care. "We won't let you die, but
we will make you an invalid," a doctor told him.

    "Sakharov was an honest man who was killed many times,"
said Vitali Korotich, editor of the liberal weekly Ogonyok. The
saga of the deathblows inflicted upon Sakharov and his
subsequent resurrection reads like a gripping secular sequel to
the Russian Orthodox Lives of the Saints. Sakharov had certainly
not been expected to survive the frightful ordeal that began in
the mid-1970s, when he was targeted by the regime of Leonid
Brezhnev as the nation's most dangerous dissident. Vilification
in the press, together with threats of imprisonment and
assassination, was a common occurrence.

    In 1980, after Sakharov repeatedly denounced the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan, he was placed under house arrest. He
and his wife Elena Bonner were held in confinement by KGB guards
24 hours a day in a small apartment in Gorky, 261 miles east of
Moscow. There both became increasingly incapacitated by heart
disease. Word reached Moscow's dissident community that
Bonner's lips and fingernails had turned blue and that Sakharov
could hardly take a few steps without being winded. When the
Soviets denied Bonner permission to go abroad for an open-heart
operation, her husband went on a hunger strike. The authorities
relented, but the ailing Sakharov remained under house arrest
until 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev summoned him back to Moscow.
Sakharov's first words as a free man were a demand for the
liberation of all remaining Soviet political prisoners.

    Sakharov's most lasting contribution to mankind may have
been his effort to limit nuclear testing and encourage
multilateral disarmament, for which he won the 1975 Nobel Peace
Prize. But he was best known as the indefatigable champion of
the dissident, the downtrodden and the persecuted in his
country. It was in this role that he incurred the deadly wrath
of Brezhnev and the KGB. In the decade before Sakharov's
banishment to Gorky, his two-room apartment was a haven for men
and women who had fallen afoul of Soviet totalitarianism.
Sitting at his enamel-top kitchen table, drinking apple-flavored
tea, he dispensed precious counsel and gifts of money to an
endless stream of visitors in trouble.

    Courage came so naturally to Sakharov that it heartened
others. Dressed in a worn suit and bedroom slippers, the tall,
perpetually bent-over man with shy eyes displayed a lion's
boldness when defying the Kremlin. Mocking his own quixotic
ways, he once dubbed himself Andrei the Blessed, an honorific
that in Russian connotes a kind of holy innocence. Said computer
scientist Valentin Turchin, a fellow dissident who emigrated to
the U.S.: "There are two categories of people who have left
their imprint on humanity: leaders and saints. Sakharov was in
the category of saints." One mournful colleague in Moscow
summoned up a more scientific metaphor. "We've lost our moral
compass -- the compass that showed us the way during these
decisive years of perestroika," said space scientist Roald
Sagdeyev. "He taught us to use simple words like conscience and
humanity."

    Sakharov emerged from the most improbable of backgrounds as
a human rights activist and peace advocate. In the 1940s and
1950s, he lived under security wraps as the Soviet Union's top
nuclear scientist, cut off from all normal social contacts and
followed at all times by a bodyguard. A theoretical physicist
ranking with America's J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller,
he was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy
of Sciences. After he helped develop the Soviet Union's hydrogen
bomb in the early 1950s, he became one of the country's most
decorated men. But he remained unknown because his honors were
bestowed in secret. In those years, Sakharov believed he had a
useful function: "When I began working on this terrible weapon,
I felt subjectively that I was working for peace, that my work
would help foster a balance of power."

    In the late 1950s, Sakharov grew deeply concerned about the
dangers of atomic fallout. Several times he attempted to use
his prestige to halt Soviet nuclear testing. Recalling
Sakharov's personal appeals against the atmospheric explosions,
Nikita Khrushchev described the nuclear physicist in his memoirs
as a "crystal of morality." When his behind-the-scenes lobbying
turned to open criticism of the regime, Sakharov was fired from
the nuclear program. "The atomic issue was a natural path into
political issues," he explained.

    Sakharov participated in a public demonstration for the
first time on Dec. 5, 1966, joining a tiny band of dissidents
who had assembled in Moscow's Pushkin Square to call for a new
and genuine Soviet constitution. His increasingly open defiance
of the government caused his three children by his first wife
virtually to disown him. Nonetheless, Sakharov gave them his
comfortable Moscow apartment and his dacha when he stripped
himself of the luxuries he had acquired as a nuclear physicist.
He donated his life savings of $153,000, an astronomical sum by
Soviet standards, to cancer research and the Red Cross.

    Because Sakharov was one of his nation's most distinguished
scientists, his devastating critiques of Soviet policies cut
deep. In his books, which were published only in the West, he
repeatedly pointed to the failure of Soviet society to fulfill
the promise of Communist ideology. Sakharov's writings on
domestic affairs irked the leadership almost as much as his
criticism of Brezhnev's foreign policy, which he characterized
as imperialist and expansionist. His mistrust of Kremlin
intentions was so strong that he said in 1983 that it might be
best for the U.S. to "spend a few billion dollars on MX
missiles" in order to bargain more effectively with the Soviets.

    Even with glasnost, Sakharov found numerous causes to
pursue. Encouraged by bilateral cuts in Soviet and U.S.
arsenals, he pressed for conventional-arms reductions and a
demilitarized "corridor" in Europe to lessen the possibility of
a surprise attack from either side. He was hardly placated when
Moscow admitted that the invasion of Afghanistan had been a
mistake; he criticized the government for a colonialist attitude
toward Armenia and the Baltic states. Though a supporter of
Gorbachev's basic reforms, he used the Congress of People's
Deputies as a tribune to attack him for accumulating too much
personal power. "There are no guarantees that a Stalinist will
not succeed Gorbachev," he warned. The release of political
prisoners motivated him to call ever more insistently for the
liberation of those still in the Gulag. He himself was elected
to the new People's Congress, but he continued to battle for
the multiparty system he knew was indispensable if true
democracy was ever to come to his homeland. Andrei Sakharov did
not live to see freedom flower completely, but if that day ever
does come, he will deserve much of the credit for planting and
nurturing the seed.