Sakharov’s Contribution

I would like to add my small voice to those mourning the loss of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.

I interviewed Sakharov 10 years ago (about a year before his internal exile to Gorky) for a group of Ivy League college newspapers. We met for more than four hours in his cramped, dim Moscow apartment--and I can still recall every moment of it.

My two friends and I arrived before dawn at his building on Moscow’s Garden Street. On the first floor, two men were repairing an elevator that didn’t need fixing--they picked up a blow torch and pretending to weld something as they watched where we went.

Sakharov had no idea who we were, but he sat down with us for more than four hours, while his mother-in-law made us tea and served us black bread (cursing Brezhnev the whole time). It amazed me: here we were, sitting across a tiny kitchen table from one of the most influential men in the world. And all we had to do was knock on his door and ask.

Sakharov was gentle and scholarly, not at all a radical.

He wanted pluralism for his country, but also more mundane things, like fresh tomatoes and a few bottles of aspirin. For this, he was exiled.

But how different those memories of him were from what my TV showed me over the last year. There he was again, but not at his kitchen table; rather at a steady podium, addressing the Soviet Parliament as one of its members.

It is heart-breaking that Andrei Sakharov is gone. But he died after living a dream he must’ve thought would never become a reality. That makes his loss bearable.

JOSEPH FERULLO

Los Angeles