TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/122589/12258900.031

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 9KB | 149 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.