For Sakharov, a Living Death

The world’s most famous political prisoner is 65 years old today. For Andrei D. Sakharov--physicist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human-rights activist--this anniversary also marks a poignant and infamous milestone: One-tenth of Sakharov’s life has now been spent in internal exile, under house arrest. Other prisoners in the Soviet Union have suffered far worse physical punishment. But for Sakharov, separated from friends and colleagues and cut off from the life of the mind that was the core and the substance of his being, no punishment could be more severe than the isolation that he now endures. His wife, Yelena Bonner, has summed up his situation with grim realism. Soviet authorities will try their best to keep Sakharov’s body alive, she has said, even as they do their utmost to kill him intellectually.

And what exactly was it that prompted the Soviet regime to banish Sakharov in 1980 from Moscow to the Volga River city of Gorky? It is noteworthy that no formal accusation has ever been made to justify Sakharov’s captivity, and no trial has ever been staged. Instead, there was only a statement from Tass, the official press agency, accusing Sakharov of “conducting subversive activities against the Soviet state,” and announcing that he had been stripped of the many awards and honors earlier granted for his work in the Soviet nuclear program, including the development of the hydrogen bomb.

Sakharov took the first steps on his road to Gorky in the late 1950s when, concerned over the international perils of radioactive fallout, he tried to bring about a halt to Soviet nuclear-weapons testing. A decade later he circulated a manifesto warning that “the division of mankind threatens it with destruction,” and calling for U.S.-Soviet detente based on informed public opinion. He was a founder in the mid-1970s of the Soviet Human Rights Committee, whose purpose was to monitor compliance with the noble commitments of the Helsinki Agreement that had been so solemnly endorsed by his government and then so indecently ignored. Shortly before his arrest in 1980, in a final gesture of independence he condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The record of Sakharov’s “subversive” activities, if never officially enumerated, thus is clear. He repeatedly committed the crime of responding to the moral imperatives of conscience.

Some of what Sakharov wrote decades ago about the perils of the arms race now finds ironic echo in certain speeches of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The significant difference, of course, is that Sakharov passionately believes all that he has said about the need to lift the awful threat hanging over mankind. The sincerity of the regime that now repeats his concerns is yet to be demonstrated.

When Soviet authorities defied international opinion by arresting Sakharov six years ago, a dispirited fellow dissident lamented that “it means they are afraid of nothing.” On the contrary. It was precisely because they were mortally afraid that the leadership acted to banish and silence Sakharov, for the truths that he spoke--about the folly of the arms race and even more about the absence of freedom in the Soviet Union--were a direct challenge to the sweeping powers uniquely held by the leaders of his country.

In a letter to American physicist Sidney Drell, published three years ago in Foreign Affairs, Sakharov wrote: “Citizens have the right to control their national leaders’ decision-making in matters on which the fate of the world depends.” Andrei Sakharov’s courage and integrity are defined by his willingness to speak such thoughts. The nature of the regime under which he lives is defined by the shameful punishment that it has inflicted in response.