Titans of History

SAKHAROV

1921–1989

The party apparatus of government … cling tenaciously to their open and secret privileges and are profoundly indifferent to the infringement of human rights, the interests of progress, security, and the future of mankind.

Andrei Sakharov, memorandum to Leonid Brezhnev (March 5, 1971)

Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who was once called the Father of the Soviet H-bomb, became the most prominent political dissident in the world, protesting against the evils and contradictions of Soviet totalitarianism. He represents both the peaks of Russian science and intellectual achievement and the courage of an individual to stand up to rampant tyranny. That stand led to rejection, maltreatment, exile and hardship. Yet, unlike most dissidents, Sakharov survived to see his efforts bear fruit.

Andrei Sakharov was an intelligent child who was able to read by the age of four. His father encouraged his interest in physics experiments, which Andrei later called “miracles I could understand.” At Moscow University in the 1940s he was recognized as one of the brightest young minds of his generation. In 1948 he was recruited to join a nuclear research team under the personal control of Stalin’s ruthless henchman Lavrenti Beria, and he spent much of the next decade involved in top secret projects in Turkmenistan.

The project in which Sakharov played the pivotal role was the creation of a hydrogen bomb—a weapon much more powerful than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Americans tested their first H-bomb in 1952; the Soviets followed in 1953. As the Cold War arms race between America and the Soviet Union accelerated, Sakharov believed that his work was contributing to world peace by helping to maintain a balance of power. But as the years passed, he began to have doubts about “the huge material, intellectual and nervous resources of thousands of people” which were being “poured into the creation of a means of total destruction, capable of annihilating all human civilization.”

In 1961 Sakharov, now in a very prominent position as his country’s preeminent nuclear scientist, urged the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to stop atmospheric nuclear tests, believing that the radioactive fallout could ultimately lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. After agreeing to look into the matter, Khrushchev simply ignored him. From this point onwards, Sakharov grew more critical of the Soviet regime. Despite a US–Soviet agreement in 1963 to refrain from detonating nuclear devices in space, underwater or in the atmosphere, there was little political commitment to nonproliferation, let alone disarmament.

The arguments about nuclear weapons led Sakharov on to broader political questions. In 1966 he urged the new Soviet leadership, under Leonid Brezhnev, to turn away from rehabilitating the reputation of Stalin. He was rebuffed—though Stalin was not in fact fully rehabilitated.

The Soviet leadership could not ignore Sakharov’s next move. In 1968 he wrote a book entitled Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, which denounced the oppressive Soviet regime and argued for closer links with the West. It caused a storm in Moscow’s dissident circles, and an even greater reaction when it was read abroad. Sakharov was a marked man. But he was not cowed and continued to protest—against the persecution of the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in favor of the rights of national minorities, and against the mistreatment of political prisoners. In 1975 he won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he was forbidden to leave the country to collect it. His second wife, Yelena Bonner, herself a courageous dissident, collected it on his behalf.

In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, Sakharov called for an international boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In January 1980 he was arrested by the KGB and transported to internal exile—and grim living conditions—in the city of Gorky. Only Bonner’s trips between Moscow and Gorky from 1980 to 1984—during which time she was harassed and publicly denounced—gave him a lifeline to the outside world. In 1984 she too was arrested, for slandering the regime, and was sentenced to five years’ exile in Gorky. Bonner joined her husband on long and painful hunger strikes in order to secure medical attention for their family.

In 1985 a new and reforming Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power, determined to end the stagnation and oppression that Sakharov had so long criticized. The following year Sakharov was released and invited back to Moscow. He returned as a hero and was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Union’s first democratically chosen body. He went on to play a prominent part in the democratic revolution that was sweeping the Soviet Union and remained in Russia until his death from a heart attack in 1989.

Yelena Bonner was a vocal critic of Russian atrocities in Chechnya and of the return of Russia to KGB-style authoritarianism, dying in 2011. She and her husband remain beacons of the struggle against tyranny.