Dissent into hell

Published on Sunday 28 April 2002 01:00

Sakharov

Richard Lourie

Brandeis University Press, 21

IT WAS one of the defining images of ‘perestroika’. In 1986, a frail, dignified man stepped onto the platform of a Moscow railway station: Andrei Sakharov - inventor of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Nobel Peace Prize winner and moral conscience of his nation - had returned from exile, freed by Mikhail Gorbachev. When Sakharov died three years later, the Soviet Empire teetered on the verge of a collapse he largely helped bring about.

This rich, authoritative biography is written by an American Russophile who knew Sakharov personally. Lourie translated Sakharov’s memoirs, whose story neatly encapsulates the mixture of pettiness and tyranny characterising the cat and mouse game played out over three decades between Sakharov and the KGB.

Sakharov began his memoirs soon after he was exiled to the closed city of Gorky. By 1981 it filled a large satchel, but was stolen by undercover agents. Sakharov began the book again, and 12 months later had produced 900 pages of handwritten manuscript. These were in his car one day when a man approached, asking for a lift. An aerosol narcotic was administered and the documents were snatched. Despite being "suicidally depressed", Sakharov started his precious book yet again within days. "Andrei has a talent," his wife Elena Bonner said. "I call it his main talent, to finish what he starts."

This was the talent that made Sakharov a national hero, long before he became the Soviets’ biggest headache. As a newly graduated physicist during the Second World War, Sakharov devised an improved way of testing artillery shells. Soon he was head-hunted by the innocuously named Ministry of Medium Machine Building: code name for the Soviet nuclear effort.

The project was headed by Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s murderous lackey, whose management strategy was "Medals if you succeed, bullets if you fail". Largely thanks to Sakharov, they succeeded. The first device went off in August 1949, and Beria immediately phoned Stalin with the good news. "I already know," said Stalin, and hung up. Four years later, with Stalin dead and Beria awaiting execution, the first Soviet hydrogen bomb was tested in Kazakhstan. Unfortunately, civilians were hit by the blast, and a young girl was killed. Hitherto, it seems, Sakharov felt few qualms about his grim work - a moral blindness one wishes Lourie could have probed deeper. Sakharov later called it his ‘Edward Teller’ phase, in comparison with America’s real-life Dr Strangelove.

But now began Sakharov’s ‘Oppenheimer’ phase, when, like the father of the US atom bomb, he woke to the reality of his creation. Calculating the potential effects of fallout on civilians, he advocated a worldwide test ban: Kruschev saw its political value, and complied. But in 1961, when Kruschev proposed resuming tests, Sakharov passed a note to him at a presidential dinner, advising him to reconsider. When he stood up, Kruschev brought the note from his pocket and turned on his finest scientist.

Lourie’s description of the scene is chilling. A novelist himself, Lourie shows a keen awareness of narrative pace, and an eye for detail. His familiarity with Russian history and culture enriches this book throughout. But Lourie does not attempt to tackle Sakharov’s scientific work, instead quoting briefly from others’ explanations. While this is entirely understandable, it does leave a significant gap.

Sakharov’s awkwardness continued, his prestige and military value forcing his superiors to excuse him as "naive". He began attending the silent vigils at Moscow’s Pushkin memorial honouring prisoners of conscience. And during the Prague Spring, he wrote an essay on the future of world politics that turned him into a dissident himself.

Sakharov’s essay was indeed naive, in its advocacy of world government and in its unbridled celebration of scientific progress. But when it appeared in the New York Times in July 1968, it suddenly transformed him into the unwitting spokesman for an entire movement. He was dismissed from his research post, then suffered the added blow of the death of his first wife. The KGB began bugging him, giving him the code name ‘Ascetic’.

Sakharov found a new love in human rights campaigner Elena Bonner, marrying her in 1972. But his children never liked her, and she became a hate figure for those unable to comprehend how their former hero had turned "traitor". The KGB called her ‘Vixen’, using petty vandalism to intimidate the couple.

Sakharov went on hunger strike in 1974, in support of political prisoners. Not content with petty misdeeds, the KGB now gave Bonner’s infant grandson a poisoned biscuit that nearly killed him. Much of the couple’s efforts subsequently went on enabling their own family to emigrate to the West. Sakharov, of course, could never be allowed to escape, nor could he be killed; there were too many valuable military secrets in his head. So when the Nobel Prize was awarded in 1975, it was Bonner who went to collect it, while the Soviet press, and much of the public, jeered.

During the detente era, the Soviets were careful not to give the West too much propaganda ammunition. But when the war in Afghanistan began, and East-West relations collapsed, Sakharov no longer mattered. He and Bonner were bundled on to a plane, and found themselves in Gorky with a KGB landlady and 30 intelligence officers stationed across the street. There followed seven years of isolation, intimidation, further hunger strikes, hideous force-feeding, and the autobiography that Sakharov refused to give up.

The change, when it came, was sudden. Soon after Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985, Sakharov wrote to him, pointing out the falsity of Gorbachev’s claim that the Soviet Union had no political prisoners. Lourie describes the almost surreal consequence. An engineer showed up at the Sakharovs’ flat with a telephone, and proceeded to install it. "You’ll get a call tomorrow," he told Sakharov. When the phone rang, it was Gorbachev. "You can return to Moscow together," he told them.

Gorbachev’s political coup was also his downfall. Elected in 1989 as People’s Deputy, Sakharov called for the abolition of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. Gorbachev was so incensed, he cut off Sakharov’s microphone. But the viewing public heard - and only the growing opposition, led by Boris Yeltsin, could deliver.

Many felt it was Gorbachev’s humiliation of Sakharov that led to his fatal heart attack; others blamed the years of hunger strikes. But Sakharov himself seems to have foreseen the end. The day before he died, he wrote the last words of his memoir. In Lourie’s portrait of him as a brilliant and courageous man, Sakharov could not have wished for a more eloquent epitaph.