Enemy of the State

The life and career of the late Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov were rich in paradox. As one of the Soviet Union’s most brilliant nuclear scientists, he was instrumental in arming the regime with a second generation of nuclear weapons that undoubtedly bolstered Soviet power at home and abroad. Twenty years later, as one of the leaders of the Soviet dissident movement, he played a major role in weakening the regime and hastening its downfall, by his public support for political prisoners and by his books, articles and speeches.

From being feted as the “father of the H-bomb,” Sakharov went to being a virtual political prisoner, banished into internal exile, systematically spied upon and force-fed when he resorted to hunger strikes. The paradox was all the more striking in that his authority as a dissident derived in large part from his formidable reputation as an establishment scientist, while his dissidence reflected remorse over the consequences of the weapons he had helped to create.

It is an amazing story, a complex moral parable with multiple shades of light and dark, with elements of a political thriller and a happy ending, and though it has been told in Sakharov’s and second wife Elena Bonner’s memoirs, Richard Lourie has done a valuable service by bringing these sources together and placing them in the necessary context in “Sakharov: A Biography.”

In doing so, he displays a thorough knowledge of Russian history and the Soviet dissident movement and, through his personal friendship with Sakharov during the last years of the latter’s life, he is able to offer a valuable firsthand snapshot of the scientist at the height of his influence and fame. He also does a good job of presenting Sakharov’s scientific work in terms the layman can understand.

Like most members of the Soviet cultural elite, Sakharov was a child of the upper-middle class. His grandfather owned a country estate in southern Russian, and his father was a teacher in Moscow and the author of several books on popular science. Born in 1921, Sakharov was tutored at home until he was ready for high school and thus was shielded from the ideological rigors of a post-revolutionary education. Tall and thin, physically clumsy and painfully shy, he grew up a geek and a bookworm, shunned by most students as naive and eccentrically absent-minded.

There were two arenas in which Sakharov shone: math and physics, where his brilliance seemed to rest on a mysterious native talent. It was enough to carry him into Moscow University just before World War II and from there to the prestigious Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences, where his mentor was freethinking physicist Igor Tamm.

He twice rejected invitations to join the Soviet atomic program but was given no choice when, in 1948, Tamm was ordered to explore the possibilities of thermonuclear fusion. Eighteen months later, he accompanied Tamm to the top-secret “Installation” in far-off Kazakhstan, where he was to spend the next 18 years working on the hydrogen bomb.

As Lourie demonstrates, Sakharov’s motives for accepting such work were both patriotic and intellectual. America was threatening a first strike against the Soviet Union, and nuclear physics was, in Sakharov’s words, “a theoretician’s paradise. A thermonuclear reaction--the mysterious source of the energy of the sun and the stars ... was within my grasp.” It was a species of hubris, but he justified that hubris by producing successful formulas for not one, not two but three successful nuclear fusion bombs, placing the Soviet Union--in destructive power at least--on a par with the United States. A grateful government rewarded Sakharov with three Hero of the Soviet Union medals and large monetary rewards, and at 32 he was unanimously elected the youngest-ever full member of the Academy of Soviet Sciences.

But after the successful explosion of his second bomb in 1955, he began to experience misgivings about the effects of fallout on the population at large. At a Kremlin banquet he proposed the first toast: “May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.” It was met by Khrushchev and his ministers with an icy silence. Still loyal to the government, Sakharov lobbied for a test ban treaty, which Khrushchev accepted, rejected for a while, then accepted again. In the interval, when the ban was not in force, the Soviet Union exploded its biggest ever hydrogen bomb, Sakharov’s third and last, which he had agreed to work on despite growing doubts about the morality of nuclear war.

These doubts were eventually expressed in a seminal essay, “Reflections on Progress, Co-Existence and Intellectual Freedom,” in which he argued that nuclear war could lead humanity to “universal suicide” and, to avert it, called for complete freedom of information and the “convergence” of communism and capitalism. Within weeks of the essay’s completion, it was printed in the New York Times, and within a year it had sold 18 million copies worldwide. Hopes were high in the summer of 1968 for fundamental change in both East and West. Those hopes were dashed when the Prague Spring was answered by Brezhnev’s tanks, and Sakharov’s essay by his dismissal from the Installation. To the party, it seemed like a logical step; but in terms of silencing Sakharov, it was a grievous mistake.

Brezhnev’s repression of the marginal freedoms granted by his predecessor, Khrushchev, led to the rise of a flourishing dissident movement and, in the course of the next six years, Sakharov became one of its two undisputed leaders. The other was Solzhenitsyn, who could hardly have been more different, psychologically and politically, from the personally diffident Sakharov, and the account of their encounters is one of the highlights of Lourie’s book.

After Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion in 1974, Sakharov became the Soviet government’s “public enemy number one.” The designation was bestowed on him by the new KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, after Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. By then Sakharov’s public opposition to the regime had hardened considerably, and Lourie adroitly demonstrates how Sakharov was radicalized.

From then on, Sakharov was ubiquitous, calling for investigations of the Gulag and of the practice of confining healthy dissidents in psychiatric institutions, attending trials and accepting delegations from all manner of oppressed groups. His opposition was based on moral and ethical considerations but was also fueled by a slow-burning personal fury fanned by the vindictive treatment of his wife, Bonner, and members of her family. Lourie is circumspect about Sakharov’s family affairs, but he makes it clear that Sakharov’s first marriage, to Klavdia Vikhereva, was conventional and that he was a mostly absentee father to their son and two daughters.

His second marriage, after Klavdia’s death from stomach cancer, was a genuine love match. Bonner was (and still is) a firebrand, the daughter and granddaughter of revolutionary activists, and she brought him not only a new family but also vast knowledge of the techniques of nonviolent resistance and underground activism. Not the least of these was the hunger strike, which Sakharov resorted to first for political causes but which he used increasingly on behalf of Bonner’s efforts to go abroad for treatment of her failing eyesight and of her children’s efforts to emigrate.

These hunger strikes steadily escalated in length and intensity, particularly after Sakharov and Bonner had been exiled in 1980 to Gorky, and the most painful parts of this book are the descriptions of these dangerous and debilitating ordeals. Bonner’s role in Sakharov’s dissident activities was controversial. The KGB tried to play the anti-Semitic card by emphasizing her Jewishness, but some dissidents also questioned her role.

Lourie shows that Bonner herself occasionally tried--and failed--to dissuade her husband from hunger strikes, but he doesn’t really tackle the question of how much her volatile character swayed the steadier Sakharov. When Gorbachev came to power, Sakharov was released from exile and returned to Moscow as an international celebrity. An early supporter of perestroika, he accepted election to the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies as the representative of the Academy of Science and quickly became one of the leaders of the political opposition, steadfastly pushing for more democracy and human rights.

He also launched a campaign to persuade the Congress to abolish Article 6 of the old constitution, guaranteeing the leading role of the Communist party, but was defeated on a voice vote. That night in 1989, he rallied his political allies with a stirring speech, ate a quick dinner, lay down for a brief nap and died peacefully in his sleep.

More than 50,000 people attended his funeral, and he was held by many to have died a martyr’s death, hastened by his suffering at the hands of a cruel regime. Many speakers at the funeral likened Sakharov to a secular saint, and Lourie compares Sakharov, somewhat extravagantly, to Gandhi, Giordano Bruno and Leonardo da Vinci. More realistically, he invokes the American nuclear scientists Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, with both of whom Sakharov identified himself at one time or another.

Politically, Sakharov was unique, becoming a player in ways that no nuclear scientist elsewhere could hope to emulate, if only because none other faced such a degree of repression and none other experienced a monolithic regime’s collapse. As a result he was an entirely new phenomenon in Russian history: the martyred scientist (as opposed to poet, philosopher or priest) who was forced from contemplation into action by the sheer injustice of the world around him.