ANALYSIS : Sakharov’s Historic Role: ‘Conscience of the Nation’

Twenty years ago, as the Soviet Union sank deeper and deeper into what is now described as the oppressive “era of stagnation” under Leonid I. Brezhnev, nuclear physicist Andrei D. Sakharov began outlining his vision of a free and democratic future for his country and peaceful coexistence between East and West.

Sakharov’s death Thursday deprived the Soviet Union of one of the chief philosophers of its present reforms and a rare political figure whose honesty and courage earned him the title of “conscience of the nation.”

Although Sakharov had expressed his doubts about specific policies of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and criticized the way that perestroika was being implemented, such an independent stand only confirmed and increased the moral authority he had acquired in years of political dissent.

He had embarked this week upon another struggle: to delete from the constitution the privileged position of the Communist Party as “the leading and guiding force” of Soviet society, a provision that effectively makes the Soviet Union a one-party state. And he planned to speak again at the current session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national legislature.

“Tomorrow, there will be a battle,” he told his family Thursday evening not long before his death, apparently of a heart attack. A few hours earlier, he had warned other members of the opposition Inter-Regional Group of Deputies: “We cannot take on ourselves responsibility for what the leadership is doing now. It is leading the country toward catastrophe, prolonging the process of perestroika many years.”

Others might challenge Gorbachev and the party in this way, but none will have the same stature as Sakharov.

“Among all the deputies here, he never made any claims to power or office,” Gavriil Popov, another leader of the Inter-Regional Group, said. “He was a truly great man.”

Sakharov had waged his struggle for more than two decades. It had taken him from the top of the Soviet scientific Establishment into profound political dissent and internal exile and then, with the rise of Gorbachev, back to Moscow and into the corridors of the Kremlin as a people’s deputy in the new Congress.

When he began his campaign for human rights and political liberty, his forum was his crowded three-room apartment in northern Moscow, and his audience was mostly fellow dissidents and foreign newsmen.

At his death, he commanded the attention of Gorbachev and others in the party’s ruling Politburo and the new Congress of People’s Deputies as well as leaders around the world. As a deputy, Sakharov spoke from podiums from which he had been denounced--and he took this as a measure of how much and how quickly the country was changing.

Sakharov’s return from internal exile three years ago was one of Gorbachev’s boldest steps in opening up debate in Soviet society and broadening participation in the political system.

“Sakharov realized the great significance of Gorbachev’s reforms while Gorbachev realized Sakharov’s significance in political life and helped him return to politics,” Roy A. Medvedev, another longtime dissident who was also elected to the Congress, commented.

“Sometimes Sakharov went even further and demanded from Soviet society more than it could provide, but he always treated Gorbachev with great respect and always stressed this.”

From 1968, Sakharov had called in one reasoned essay after another for the freedom of ideas, of discussion, of conscience. Human rights, and their universal observance, must be the foundation of a modern society, he held. The historic wrongs done to whole peoples under dictator Josef Stalin had to be corrected if the Soviet Union were ever to heal itself of the wounds Stalin inflicted.

Stalinism as a political system had to be uprooted, Sakharov argued, and neo-Stalinists forced from the political structure. “Developed socialism,” as Brezhnev described the Soviet economy, should be recognized as impoverishing the people to enrich the state, and the resulting economic imbalance had to be redressed to ensure the country’s future development.

The Earth’s environment is far more fragile than most people suppose, he warned, and its protection, including an end to nuclear testing, is an urgent duty. The ending of hunger in the world is both a moral duty and a political imperative for peace.

And in the nuclear era, said the man who had developed the Soviet hydrogen bomb, world peace must always be the first priority. He urged coexistence of East and West, and he foresaw the convergence of socialism and capitalism.

“Peace, progress, human rights--these three goals are insolubly linked to one another,” he declared in his address accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. “It is impossible to achieve one of these goals if the other two are ignored.”

Sakharov wrote these essays, some as letters addressed to the Soviet leaders, others intended for the international audience that his ideas and courage had won, when he seemed only a “dissident,” a brave but lone voice protesting the failure of the Communist government to deliver on the promises of socialism and demanding that it honor fundamental human rights.

But today, as Gorbachev presses his reform of the Soviet political and economic system, Sakharov’s vision seems more and more prophetic--an early articulation, to a hostile audience and in the darkest of times, of what the Soviet Union could and should become.

“What Andrei Sakharov saw as possible in the future, we are now beginning to achieve,” Yevgeny P. Velikhov, a fellow physicist, said Friday. “The same mind that turned from nuclear weapons to nuclear energy was able, far better than others, to see from within our bleak political and economic environment something brighter and greater for humankind. . . .

“He laid out the alternative, he showed the different course. His was not so much a politician’s program for change as the compelling argument of a philosopher-scientist for different goals and different methods. And perhaps most important, Sakharov provided through his personal example real hope when there was largely despair.”

Many of Gorbachev’s earliest moves appeared to come from the prescription for reform that Sakharov gave him on being released from nearly seven years of internal exile in December, 1986. While some actions, such as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, were suggested by others, a few of them, such as the next moves on arms control, clearly came from Sakharov.

Sakharov’s broader vision, outlined in such seminal works as “Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” and “My Country and the World,” has provided many of the philosophical underpinnings of perestroika , as Gorbachev’s reform effort is called.

He called for political pluralism when this was not only ideological heresy but appeared to be wholly unrealistic. He wrote of the need for glasnost , or political openness, when Gorbachev was still a regional party official in southern Russia. He urged the reformation of socialism and its convergence with capitalism to make both more humane in an era of intense ideological rivalry.

Others now active on the Soviet political scene also say that Sakharov--his ideas, his activism, his courage, his honesty--were their inspiration.

“What we are doing now, details aside, was on Andrei Sakharov’s agenda two decades ago,” Sergei Stankevich, a member of the Supreme Soviet, said. “The directions he fought for then are the ones we are pursuing now. The inspiration he provided was important then, the vision that he had remains important now.”

As Gorbachev has pressed ahead with his reforms, Sakharov supported him, but often quite critically, insisting on the fullest possible democracy and pressing the Soviet leader to go further and further in fulfilling his commitment to the restructuring of the whole political and economic system.

Acknowledging Sakharov’s stature and perhaps his own debt to him, Gorbachev recognized the human rights campaigner as the first speaker when the Congress of People’s Deputies held its first meeting last May.

Sakharov immediately criticized as undemocratic a plan to elect Gorbachev as the chairman of the congress, effectively making him chief of state, for there was no real contest for the post and Gorbachev was not pressed to declare his position on many important issues.

“I personally respect Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev very much,” Sakharov declared, “but it is dangerous to give so much power even to the initiator of perestroika .”

The last public clash between the two men came Tuesday, again at a session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, as Sakharov urged the Congress to debate a constitutional amendment ending the Communist Party’s privileged position as the “leading and guiding force” in the country.

Gorbachev allowed Sakharov to speak after ruling another deputy out of order, but he then cut him short with a curt “Thank you” as the veteran human rights campaigner pressed for a constitutional change that would make the Communist Party compete with others for power.

Unhappy over the slow pace of reform, Sakharov had come to support the formation of an active opposition group within the Congress of People’s Deputies to press the Communist Party for faster, more fundamental changes.

“Dissatisfaction is growing in the country,” he warned this week in his last speech, “and this dissatisfaction makes the revolutionary path of development impossible. The only possible path of revolutionary development is the radicalization of perestroika . . . . We need to accelerate the process of perestroika now.”