Sakharov1
Once long ago, it seems in the early 1970s, a nasty heckler wrote sneeringly about Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, “He’s a simpleton!” He had wanted to sling the filthiest mud possible at him but – unwittingly – he spoke the truth. All of Andrei Dmitrievich’s life was total, inexpressible, incredible simplicity. He thought deeply and clearly; he said what he thought and acted as he thought and spoke. It was very simple. Essentially, he never had a choice. This was how he was constructed. He didn’t have a choice of what to say and how to act because truth, responsibility and conscientiousness were inseparable traits of his talent, his human genius. He did not have a choice to intercede or not intercede – he always interceded. He did not have a choice to remain silent or not remain silent.
He didn’t have a choice when some thugs calling themselves “Black September” came to his apartment and threatened him with a gun, demanding that he sign a retraction of what he had said about the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 in the Middle East. He was handed a text. He said very simply, as he always said, “I never sign anything that I have not written myself or with which I don’t agree.” He didn’t have a choice even when he stubbornly came up to the podium of the Congress of People’s Deputies again and again, to whistles and stamping of feet, to hissing and shouting, and said what he thought, although his vilification was given a standing ovation by the highest authorities of the government. He didn’t have a choice, and that was a feature of his talent. And he had yet another profound human gift: Andrei Dmitrievich was able himself to sense keenly another’s pain. This acute talent, acute and subtle, compelled him never to be indifferent. Unwillingly, indifferently, without trying, he went down in History; he was known there. As the saying goes, “There is no village without a righteous man.”
***
On December 12, 2014, in connection with the 25th anniversary of Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov’s death, Western journalists came to me with a request to write a commentary on two key issues directly related to modern Russia. The commentary was written and read at the Conference on Memory, and today I would like to share it with readers.
What Would Sakharov Think of Russia Today?
Unquestionably, Sakharov would not have reconciled himself to Putin’s model of statehood. This statement needs no proof. The idea of the “open society” was central to Sakharov’s notions about Russia’s social and state system – Putin built a maximally closed system which serves the “power vertikal” or line of authority, reconstructing and modernizing the Soviet mechanisms of suppression of freedom. It is impossible to imagine a Sakharov who would regard passively the anti-constitutional laws, for example, about extremism, about the defense of the rights of believers, the so-called “Dima Yakovlev’s Law” banning adoptions by US citizens, the law on the pre-trial blocking of web sites and so on. It would be hard to imagine Sakharov silently witnessing the destruction of independent media and the frenzied rampage of false and malicious propaganda on state news channels which make up a clear majority of the information systems. Andrei Dmitrievich would obviously refuse to concede even the appearance on the political scene of a KGB lieutenant colonel in the role of Russia’s president. Sakharov knew perfectly well the political aims, traditions, and mores of that outfit, from which the second president brought the backbone of his team.
Now as to the main topic – the expansion of Putin’s Russia (and even before Putin) and relations between East and West. Actually, there is nothing to say about expansion. I think no one would have to guess today how Sakharov would regard the seizure of Georgian territory and the creation of pseudo-states under Russia’s control. Or how he would perceive the annexation of Crimea, the direct pressure on Ukraine, the military support of pro-Russian rebels, and the incitement of civil war in Ukraine. His pointed statements against military interference are well known. He paid for his protest against the war in Afghanistan with an arduous exile without trial.
The most important aspect of Sakharov’s position to my mind is the supra-natural nature of his political thinking. Earlier and more profoundly than anyone else, he understood the global danger of the lawless acts committed in totalitarian countries, above all in the USSR, the center of totalitarianism, which spread its corrupting influence broadly and actively. Sakharov was convinced that humanity was indivisible. Everyone remembers his calls to the West to put constant pressure on the USSR. They were perceived simultaneously as blasphemy and as a suicidal move.
I am entirely certain that today, Sakharov would approve the West’s sanctions related to Russian expansion. But I also realize that he would very much fear the consequences of the invariable Western political pragmatism – the cessation of efforts that do not bring immediate and clearly tangible results. Historical experience shows us how many of the long procession of Soviet and post-Soviet crimes of our country provoked the outrage of the international community. But after a little while, valid reasons would be found to forget them. Who remembers now how the Soviet government treated 100 million Europeans who lived more to the East than other Europeans? Ah, yes, there was Stalin’s regime! And the German Democratic Republic in June 1953, was that also a Stalinist regime? And Hungary and Poland in 1956? And then came Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia…And was that really all? And suddenly in the middle of this rampage, there was the strange idea of “rebooting relations.” Was it really not understood that impunity encourages the aggressor?
How Does the Motherland Think of Sakharov?
The shortest and most precise answer to this question: it doesn’t at all. Details only provide commentary to this answer.
For the majority of the population, the image of Sakharov has blurred and lost the distinctions of personality. Quite a few very young people will wrinkle their brows trying to recall where they heard his name. Those who 25 years ago [in 1989] stood freezing for many hours in a line to pay respects at his casket, carrying the posters “Forgive us, Andrei Dmitrievich” now remember him as the father of the bomb, cossetted by the authorities, but who rejected all his privileges “for the sake of the truth.”
The types that cry “Crimea is Ours,” who make up the majority today, do not remember anything and do not have a thought in their heads, least of all about Sakharov. They deify Putin and at a subconscious level hate anyone who could be suspected of contradicting their idol. Officialdom of course realizes the danger of this once popular image to their own existence. And they would like to declare this deceased academician to be the general of a “fifth column,” but it is somehow awkward now. Thus, it cannot be ruled out that Mr. Putin will respond to the anniversary of Sakharov’s death with a fake eulogy, something like “a great patriot who fortified the Motherland, who reacted keenly to the historical shortcomings of his country, which are the legacy of our heroic and ambiguous past.”
The living image of Sakharov in all its complexity has been preserved only among a small circle of people who are seriously concerned with the problems of an open society. These people are from civic organizations such as the Sakharov Center2, Memorial3, and others which are the target of increasing persecution. For them, he was a person who, as befits a major scientist, sought fundamental decisions to social problems as well and at the same time, a person who keenly felt another’s pain. That compelled him to spend all his time and efforts on endless protests, while understanding well their pointlessness and yet nevertheless their necessity. He lived according to the formula, “Do what you must, and what will be, will be.” And he paid in full for his commitment to this credo. Perhaps this is not simply a Christian virtue, accepted by an agnostic. Perhaps this was also the idea of a physicist, who reflected on the role of small perturbations in the behavior of complex systems.
In this circle, people understood and remembered that Sakharov thought above all about how to break out of the traditional Machiavellian political model, that he was not “the conscience of Russia,” but a citizen of the world. Because for him, conscience could not tolerate epithets, especially national ones. Just like democracy, which could not be socialist or bourgeois, managed or sovereign; just like correctness, for which “political” was unsuitable because correctness is accuracy, reliability, substance, restraint, and politeness – anything but political hypocrisy.
“The circle of these intellectuals was small,” as the poet Yuliy Kim put it.
***
Andrei Sakharov was an outstanding fighter for human rights and an outstanding thinker, who advanced two fundamentally important theses. The first was that only by overcoming political divisiveness and enmity would humanity have a chance for survival and development and the opportunity to cope with the global challenges of the era and ensure universal peace and progress on our planet. And the second thesis was that the only reliable bulwark for our efforts to overcome political divisiveness was human rights, and above all, intellectual freedom.
Freedom of thought is the foundation of all the other liberties. Only freedom of thought exclusively can withstand fear. This quality which Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov possessed to an unusual degree made him invincible to fear. And seeing him, other people were freed from fear.
In one of his interviews, when asked the question, “Does Mr. Sakharov count on changes in Soviet policy?” Andrei Dmietrievich replied, “No, I do not count on them in the foreseeable future.” Then the journalist asked, “Then why do you do what you do?” And Sakharov, as always, briefly and unassumingly said, in my view, touching quite closely on the interwoven nature of responsibility, shame, and fear: “What can the intelligentsia do? Only one thing: construct the ideal. Let everyone then do what he can.”
***
Sakharov was an indisputable magnitude in science. He was one of a kind. As were the magnitude of his scientific creativity and his awards, which in fact were stripped from him – and yet he was indeed granted those awards.
He was thrice given the Hero of Socialist Labor award, but he was not the only one among the academicians. There were several others. What, were they stupid, did they not understand anything? Now Sakharov was such a genius that he realized in which country he lived. Yet the others could not understand?
I estimated that there are 150 real scientists in the Academy of Sciences. Let us imagine if 10 percent of them – 15 people – joined Sakharov. And they didn’t have to have such frankness and stubbornness as Sakharov did. Just ordinary human stubbornness would have been enough. “You constantly force me to say that black is white. I’m not going to do that!” Like the cat in the play by Evgeny Shvartz in the 1970s, “The Dragon,” who said, “Damned lizard! Ugh!” What could they do to them? Would they send them all to Gorky, would they imprison all of them? Sure, one of them might have ceased to be director of the institute. But even so, for a scientist, that’s not the most important thing, right? And if that is the most important thing for him, then I think he is not a scientist, who must satisfy three negatives, since real science is moral because it is impartial, unselfish, and fearless.
I knew Yuliy Borisovich Khariton relatively well and knew Nikolai Nikolayevich Semyonov quite well. Both of them played a certain role in my own fate. And I very much valued our relationships and treasured them. But even so, they were not brave enough to take Sakharov’s position or anything close to Sakharov’s position. I recall how Andrei Dmitrievich and I even had an argument about this subject. He was complaining for some reason that he had gone around to scientists he knew, who cited some sort of excuses for why they did not want to sign a letter against Article 190-14, and others said, “Andrei Dmitrievich, you’re a fighter, but I’m not a fighter.” It seems there was something else with which certain academics were smeared before anti-Sakharov signatures began to be collected.
I said to him, “Andrei Dmitrievich, now Yuliy Borisovich and Nikolai Nikolayevich, are they stupid people? What, they don’t understand what you understand?” And Sakharov said to me, “Well, Seryozha, you don’t understand, they are good people.” “I don’t want to argue whether they are good or not. But are they as good as they should be?” He said to me, “They are good, they mean well.” And I said, “How is it that they mean well?”
“They think that somehow, gradually, thanks to their position…” he began. I then launched into a tough argument with Sakharov and said, “They don’t mean well, that’s not how you achieve good. That is, they are achieving good, but is it only for themselves? Are you sure they mean for all of us, or at least only for science?”
The argument went very far. Finally, I said in response to some of Sakharov’s objections, “Andrei Dmitrievich, there are theorems that exist, they must be proven. And there exist methods of proving theorems. A theorem is not proven in the way you are now trying to prove the good motivations of your colleagues. You are a scientist, after all!”
I spoke to him bluntly, having decided to teach Andrei Dmitrievich just what a scientist is. And he replied, “You’re right, Seryozha.” And that was the end of the conversation.
I have often recalled our conversation. I remember how proud I was that in an argument with Andrei Dmitrievich, he had said, “You’re right.” Later, I realized that in fact it was only puppy pride. In reality, I can’t say that I was right. It’s just that he was kinder than me. And without this kindness, you can’t get along. Who was I to divide people into black and white? I later encountered this type of situation often, and then recollected my debate with Andrei Dmitrievich.
***
Once Sakharov remarked, “It’s true, I don’t believe in God, but you know, maybe there is something there.” But a scientist must be a non-believer in his sphere. You can go to church, like Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, but if you mix religious hypotheses into the foundation of your scientific results, by the will of God, then you are no longer a scientist; you have another profession. So, in fact, having traced patriotism and cosmopolitanism throughout history, and other things, no wonder I concluded that a new subject of the political world – humanity – follows from the thinking of Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell. There is our madness, the typical caveman’s patriotism. It is a brutal biological need, a vestige like our vermiform appendix; we don’t need it, and only get appendicitis from it. But it is a rudiment inherent in each of us.
***
In Russian culture, Alexander Pushkin understood best of all the value of the rights of the individual, independent of any politics. And I consider one of the most remarkable “human rights texts” of the 19th century to be his poem, “From Pindemonte”:
I don’t much care for those resounding rights
That take so many heads to dizzy heights.5
These were Andrei Dmitrievich’s favorite verses.
***
In his Memoirs, Andrei Dmitrievich writes that he and I became acquainted in October 1970 in Kaluga, where the trial of the mathematician Revolt Ivanovich Pimenov and his friend Boris Vayl was underway. (Pimenov, who was later my colleague at the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR6, died in December 1990. Back then in Kaluga, he was sentenced to five years of exile for possessing samizdat).
In fact, Andrei Dmitrievich was mistaken; we saw each other somewhat earlier, in May or June, in connection with the forcible internment of biologist Zhores Medvedev in a psychiatric hospital. After Sakharov’s speech in defense of Zhores at an international biological conference, my colleague G. A. Dvorkin, a biochemist, went to see him in order to discuss what should be done next to free Zhores. Taking the opportunity, I told him about another university case, about the efforts to reinstate a senior student, Oleg Melnikov, to the Biology Department. At the end of 1968, Melnikov had been expelled from Moscow State University and fired from his job after first, he was noticed near the courthouse on Serebryanicheskaya Embankment, and second, caught with samizdat.
Naturally, Andrei Dmitrievich did not recall me from the first time – I was one of his many visitors. But at the trial in Kaluga, he could not help but remember me due to a somewhat humorous story like out of a detective novel involving a notebook with Pimenov’s writings, which Revolt had contrived to pass to his wife right under the nose of his police guard. Sakharov then whisked the notebook away. But the desperate chief of the guards asked me to come with him to the convict’s cell (!) to speak with him and try to determine where the notebook had gone.
Revolt was genuinely concerned about the “missing” notebook; I’m afraid I wasn’t as genuine in expressing confusion; then for some reason we were summoned to the chairman of the court, and as a result, Elene Bonner, who was waiting outside, and I were nearly late for the last commuter train back to Moscow. But already on the train, Andrei Dmitrievich waved his hand like a magician and brought the tattered notebook out from under his jacket. “Oh, my God! How on earth did this get here?” he said. The next day, the notebook (of course, after being re-typed) was returned to the Kaluga Prison.
Andrei and I became friends, although he was very restrained in the expression of his friendship. Misha Levin [a physicist friend of Sakharov’s] wrote that in general, Sakharov’s concept of “friendship” was unlike any other. In fact, it seemed to me, he carefully avoided a degree of closeness that would infringe on another’s independence or cause damage to his own. There was a certain border which he did not cross. Even so, Andrei Dmitrievich was very open to communication. It was very easy to start and maintain a conversation with him. He was always open and always disposed toward his interlocutor. And he possessed another very rare and attractive trait; he never hid his objections, if he had them, and always found a very friendly, kind, and polite way to express them. His objections were never offensive. I do not wish to write here the usual remarks about “the great man,” or worse, variations on the theme of “Sakharov and I.” Sakharov himself knew his own worth perfectly well; this is quite evident from his bibliography. He was no stranger to co-authorship and worked easily in a collective (I can’t even remember, most likely, all the texts that we composed together), but in certain genres, he preferred to remain alone. That was when “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” “My Country and the World,” and other works emerged.
As for membership in any dissident organizations – “commissions,” “committees,” “groups,” and so on – Sakharov definitely shunned them. “I am not a formal collective person,” he would say. Possibly, he made this rule for himself after his first – and only – unsuccessful experiment with collaboration in the Committee for Human Rights, formed in December 1970 by himself, Valery Chalidze, Andrei Tverdokhlebov and Igor Shafarevich. After agreeing to join the Committee, I think Andrei Dmitrievich very quickly became disappointed in the very principles of its activity. Even so, he faithfully attended the Committee’s meetings right up until the end of 1972, when its chief initiator, Valery Chalidze, departed for the US (after having had a quarrel with Sakharov).
In Chalidze’s conception, the Committee was supposed to work on the problem of the rights of the individual in the USSR on a theoretical level, after reviewing certain “casus” (Chalidze’s Latin term) or cases only as an illustration of this or that thesis. “These problems are soaked in blood – how can I approach them theoretically?” Andrei Dmitrievich complained to me.
On the whole, Andrei Dmitrievich was unusually sensitive to other people’s suffering. In our circle of people accustomed to tragic accidents, he suffered over every arrest the most acutely – every report from the camps, every dismissal from work, expulsion from university, or rejection of permission to emigrate. Thus, the reproach hurled at him by Zhores Medvedev from England was completely unfair. (Zhores had emigrated in 1973). Medvedev wrote that Sakharov ran up against the authorities like a tank, protected as with armor, by his world-wide prominence, his three Hero of Socialist Labor stars, the title of academician, and his reputation as “father of the hydrogen bomb.” And that Sakharov didn’t think at all of the “infantry” who followed him and fell under fire. Aside from its monstrous unfairness, this reproach demonstrated the degree of Zhores’ misunderstanding of the arrangement of relationships in the dissident community. From the very beginning, there were never any “tanks” and “infantry,” nor “commanders” and “foot soldiers” among us. Therefore, even the turn of phrase “Sakharov and his associates” currently common among journalists had nothing in common with the reality of the human rights movement of the 1960s-1980s.
***
And now times have come that none of us ever expected. And all of us who argued about 300-year periods or didn’t think of them at all, have turned out to be fools. Except, I suppose, for Sakharov, who was a kind of synthesis of a “pure human rights defender” and, if not a political figure, then at least a person capable of thinking in “political” categories. To be sure, he often would say that he didn’t expect positive changes in his lifetime, but once added, “But the mole of history, however, burrows unnoticed….”
And of course, in the new era, the difference between the two types of worldviews of members of the human rights movement in the USSR, which before, almost played no role at all, has taken on a new and quite serious meaning. The question “rights or politics” has turned into a substantive problem.
Twenty years after “Thoughts,” Sakharov not long before he was returned from exile by Mikhail Gorbachev, became one of the board members of the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity.” To be honest, when I read Sakharov’s article in 1968, I never imagined that in my country, in my lifetime, an attempt would become possible to realize the fundamental ideas of this article in organizational form.
1. The author’s selection of articles and interviews published from 1990-2019 — Ed.
2. The Sakharov Center was declared a “foreign agent” by the Russian authorities in 2014 — Ed.
3. The International Memorial Society was liquidated in 2022 by decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation — Ed.
4. Art. 190-1 of the Soviet Criminal Code, “Dissemination of knowingly false fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system” — Trans.
5. Translated by Robert Chandler — Trans. https://poetryintranslation.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/pushkin-in-translation/
6. Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the constitute republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until its dissolution in December 1990 — Trans.