ANDREI
SAKHAROV
Compared to
the might of a State, especially a State as ruthless as the Soviet
Union has
been for most of this century, it is easy to think of the individual as
a
ridiculously weak, even helpless entity. Even when the individual in
question
is as distinguished and influential a scientist as Andrei Sakharov, he
can be
scooped up out of his life, the way the KGB seized Sakharov after he
criticized
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and hurled on to the garbage heap
of
history, in this case the remote town of Gorky.
And yet the
meaning of a life like Sakharov's is that individual weakness can be
turned to
strength, if one has the will and moral courage to do so. Now that the
power of
Soviet communism is crumbling, while the ideas and principles to which
Sakharov
dedicated his days are changing the face of Europe, the great
physicist's
endurance and refusal to be broken give his autobiography the status of
an exemplary
life.
This first
volume of Sakharov's memoirs takes the story up to his release from
internal
exile by President Gorbachev in 1986; a second book, detailing his last
years,
including his frequent clashes with Gorbachev in the Congress of
People's Deputies,
is promised. Sections of the typescript were confiscated on four
occasions (one
time he lost 1,400 pages of work). That it exists at all is proof of
the
determination with which its author kept at it.
It isn't
easy to live a symbolic, even iconic, life; it isn't easy to write
about one
either. Andrei Sakharov's rather flat style can be heavy going. His
desire to
write as a witness, to detail just about every dissident cause in which
he
participated, every battle he fought, results in many turgid (if
unfailingly
noble) passages. It was clearly difficult for him to write about
personal
matters, and that reticence, too, can be frustrating, as can its
opposite, the
understandably idealizing gushiness which sometimes overcomes him when
he
writes about his beloved second wife, 'Lusia', the formidable Elena
Bonner. He
speaks at one point in these memoirs of his dislike of books thick
enough to be
used as doorstops. This extremely thick doorstop would have been a more
vivid
self-portrait, though a less complete testament, at half the length. As
it is,
what we're given is an account 'for the record', a thorough, often
plodding
version of a great life.
The Sakharov
who emerges from these pages is a boy who loved science-fiction novels,
Uncle
Tom's Cabin and Mark Twain, who was something of an awkward
character and made
few friends. The boy grew up to be, like many scientists, better at his
work
than at his private life. In one of the relatively rare intimate
passages in
his book, he faces up to this: 'In my private life, in my relations
with Klava
[his first wife] and with the children after she died, I always tended
to avoid
confrontations, feeling myself psychologically unable to cope with them
... in
all honesty, I never spared my time or my physical strength. Afterwards
I
suffered. I felt guilty, and then made new mistakes, since guilt hardly
improves one's judgement.' After Klava's death, his growing involvement
with
human rights and his new love for 'Lusia' were the things that turned
him
outwards toward the world, and made him whole. His description of
falling in
love is, however, characteristically laconic. 'For months, Lusia and I
had been
drawing closer and it was becoming more and more dificult for us to
hide our
feelings. Finally ... we confessed our love.' That's it.
Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, among others, has suggested that Sakharov was an
innocent,
unworldly figure who was manipulated by the ferociously articulate and
highly
motivated Elena Bonner, and Sakharov repeatedly defends her against
these
charges. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is
impossible to
read these memoirs without believing that Sakharov knew exactly what he
was
doing when he espoused human rights causes in the USSR; but one also
gains a strong
impression of a reserved, inward personality who needed, or felt he
needed, his
wife to help him with his public utterances.
It was Elena
Bonner who insisted, 'My husband is a physicist,
not a dissident,' but of course he was both. His memoirs fall roughly
into two
halves, the physicist's book and the dissident's book, and each half
really
needs a different reviewer. As a scientist, Sakharov was in the same
league as
Stephen Hawking, but as a writer he makes far fewer concessions to the
lay
reader. As a result, his long and important descriptions of the Soviet
nuclear
weapons programme, and also of his theoretical work, can be
bewildering, even
for those non-scientists with a keen interest in such matters.
Nevertheless,
these chapters are in many ways the most informative in the book, in
the sense
of opening up to us a world we knew almost nothing about-for example,
the secret
city, 'The Installation', where the Soviet hydrogen bomb was built.
It's also
clear that the theories Sakharov developed around the notion of 'baryon
asymmetry’ -crudely, the relationship between matter and
antimatter-prefigured
the Grand Unified Theories of the 1970s. (Sakharov plainly regretted
not having
become involved in the GUTs.)
Sakharov
was, in a sense, a Russian version of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The
'father of the
Russian hydrogen bomb', he came passionately to oppose the testing and
proliferation of these weapons. What makes him fascinating is that
there was
also a part of him that was a Russian version of Edward Teller,
Oppenheimer's
more hawkish colleague and opponent, who believed that in the late
1940s and
1950s 'only American military strength could restrain the socialist
camp from
an expansion that ... might trigger a third world war.' Sakharov is
almost
lyrical about the theoretical beauty of thermonuclear explosions. For
him, to
participate in such work was to be able to witness, in microcosm, the
unleashing of the same forces that created the universe. The cruel
paradox that
these might also be the forces by which life could be destroyed was not
lost on
him; but the ambiguity of “his position allows us a richer
understanding of
nuclear issues than any simple hawk/dove antithesis. Sakharov was both
hawk and
dove.
There is
much more information of great value, both scientific and political, in
these
pages: Sakharov's attack on the absurd Stalin-endorsed theories of
Trofim
Lysenko, who believed that 'modified' plants and animals could pass on
their
new characteristics to succeeding generations, thus offering a 'quick
fix' for
Soviet agriculture; his campaign to save Lake Baikal from pollution;
portraits
of Beria, Khrushchev and other Soviet bosses; and a notably
unsentimental
account of the dissident movement, especially of the emergence of a
breed of
'professional dissidents' with whom Sakharov plainly felt he had little
in
common. His dispute with Solzhenitsyn in which he rejects the writer's
ultraist
religious ideas and dissents from Solzhenitsyn's contempt for Western
values,
is one in which this reviewer's sympathies, at least, are firmly on the
Sakharov side.
Ultimately,
however, this book is a monument to the triumph of the human spirit
over
adversity. But Sakharov's victory was not complete (perhaps no
individual
victories ever are). There are many Russians today who blame President
Gorbachev for the scientist's death in December of last year. They say
that
Gorbachev may have ended Sakharov's long exile in Gorky, but that he
then
hastened the great man's demise by his harsh and humiliating public
criticisms
of Sakharov in the Congress of People's Deputies. We'll have to wait
for volume
two of these memoirs to find out how Sakharov felt about Gorbachev's
behavior.
But whether the story is true or not, the fact that people believe it
emphasizes the widespread Russian distrust of Gorbachev, and also the
extent of
public sympathy for the elite academician who became the Soviet
system's most
distinguished dissident, the boy who made friends with difficulty but
who grew
up to be, as the Estonian deputy Marju Lauristin said at his funeral
service,
'the incarnation of intellectual courage and conscience, of the true
Russian spirit’.
1990
Salman
Rushdie: Imaginary Homelands
