A Russian Physicist's Passionate Plea for Cooperation

THE Soviet Union knows very well how to deal with dissidence from its disaffected artists and writers. Their criticism is dismissed as the predictable plaints of those whom Lenin scornfully characterized as the khliupiki or "intellectual wet rags." The dissidents themselves are sent to asylums or to jail. It is a far different matter, however, when the dissenter is an honored, brilliant and necessary figure in the Soviet Establishment.

Such a man is Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, partner in a major scientific discovery at the age of 29, a full member of the prestigious Academy of Sciences at 32 and now, at 47, a leading Soviet research physicist. Last week, after circulating underground for some time in Russia, an extraordinary manuscript by Sakharov was published in the U.S. by the New York Times. In it, the physicist boldly denounces major aspects of Soviet policy and practice, goes so far as to urge an East-West "convergence" to provide a safe and single world leadership. It is, as Library of Congress Kremlinologist Leon Herman said, "a thunderbolt"--not only for what it says but because of its origin in the very bosom of the Soviet elite.

Sakharov's 10,000-word essay, entitled "Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom," begins with two principles that the author considers axiomatic: that ."the division of mankind threatens it with destruction," and that "intellectual freedom is essential to human society." He then catalogues the clear and present dangers to physical survival: thermonuclear war, hunger, police dictatorship and atmospheric pollution. The threats to intellectual survival, he says, are the propaganda of mass culture, spreading bureaucracy and, again, dictatorship. The world's only hope in overcoming these menaces, he says, lies in a rapprochement between socialist and capitalist systems. To suggest how this might be accomplished, he analyzes the growing similarities between the world's two superpowers and lays out a four-stage timetable that would lead toward total U.S.-Soviet cooperation,

"Every rational creature, finding itself on the brink of disaster, first tries to get away from the brink, and only then does it think about the satisfaction of other needs," writes Sakharov. Beyond the brink, of course, is nuclear war, and Sakharov speaks so authoritatively on the destructive power of nuclear weaponry, on its low-cost production and "the practical impossibility of preventing a massive rocket attack" that U.S. analysts are certain that he has engaged in military research. Present foreign policy in both Washington and the Kremlin, he says, is aimed "at maximum improvement of one's position everywhere possible and, simultaneously, a method of causing maximum unpleasantness to opposing forces without consideration of common welfare and common interests." In recent years, says Sakharov, such policies have engendered two wars: Viet Nam and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Sakharov's analysis of the threats of hunger and pollution displays both a scientist's rigor and "a humanist's compassion. "What is involved is a prognosticated deterioration of the average food balance in which localized food crises merge into a sea of hunger, intolerable suffering and desperation, the grief and fury of millions of people." He proposes a massive infusion into the have-not world of already available technological aid, financed by "a 15-. year tax equal to 20% of national incomes" of the developed nations, including the U.S. and Russia. One advantage of such a scheme: it "would automatically lead to a significant reduction in expenditures for weapons."

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In attacking the danger of police dictatorships, Sakharov unhesitatingly uses Stalin as his prime example. Compared with Nazism, "Stalinism exhibited a much more subtle kind of hypocrisy and demagogy," he says. "This served as a convenient screen for deceiving the working class, for weakening the vigilance of the intellectuals and other rivals in the struggle for power with the treacherous and sudden use of the machinery of torture, execution and informants, intimidating and making fools of millions of people, the majority of whom were neither cowards nor fools." During Stalin's reign, he charges, "at least 10 million to 15 million people perished in the torture chambers of the N.K.V.D. [Stalin's secret police] "--an estimate that approaches the most extreme totals ever guessed in the West.

Sakharov claims that Stalin's prison camps were actually "the prototypes of the fascist death camps," cites the dictator as Hitler's "colleague in crime" for their nonaggression pact in 1939. On almost every level, he says, the characteristics of Stalin's reign were imprisonment and slavery. "From 1936 to 1939 alone, more than 1.2 million party members, half the total membership, were arrested." The "serflike enslavement of the peasantry" has resulted in "a profound and hard-to-correct destruction of the economy and way of life in the countryside, which, by the law of interconnected vessels, damaged industry as well." "I have never seen anything like his analysis of Stalinism in any official or unofficial Soviet document," says Abe Brumberg, editor of Problems of Communism. "He deals with sacred cows in a way no one has dealt with them there."

Moreover, Sakharov makes plain that "neo-Stalinism" is a prominent influence in Russia today, despite Moscow's de-Stalinization measures. In fact, he singles out a direct superior--Sergei Trapeznikov, director of the science department of the Communist Party's Central Committee--as one of its "most influential representatives." "The leadership of our country should understand," he cautions, "that as long as such a man (if I correctly understand the nature of his views) exercises influence, it is impossible to hope for a strengthening of the party's position among scientific and artistic intellectuals."

In an eloquent defense of the necessity for intellectual freedom, the physicist is again contemptuous of Soviet leadership. The value of free speech, he says, was "clear to the philosophers of ancient Greece, and hardly anyone nowadays would have any doubts on that score. But after 50 years of complete domination over the minds of an entire nation, our leaders seem to fear even allusions to such a discussion. The crippling censorship of Soviet artistic and political literature has again been intensified. Dozens of brilliant writings cannot see the light of day."

Like nearly all Soviet intellectuals, Sakharov bitterly attacks the trial of Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, which he says "has been condemned by the progressive public in the Soviet Union and abroad and has compromised the Communist system. These two writers languish in a camp with a strict regime and are being subjected (especially Daniel) to harsh humiliations and ordeals."

Sakharov's prime example of progress in the socialist system, embarrassingly enough for the Kremlin, is Czechoslovakia. The universal human need for intellectual freedom, he says, "has been understood in particular by the Czechoslovaks, and there can be no doubt that we should support their bold initiative, which is so valuable for the future of socialism and all mankind.

That support should be political and in the early stages include increased economic aid."

He also finds that not all is hopelessly bleak in Russia. "We have demonstrated the vitality of the socialist course, which has done a great deal for the people materially, culturally and socially and, like no other system, has glorified the moral significance of labor." At the same time, "the continuing economic progress being achieved under capitalism should be a fact of great theoretical significance for any nondogmatic Marxist. It is precisely this fact that lies at the basis of peaceful coexistence, and it suggests, in principle, that if capitalism ever runs into an economic blind alley, it will not necessarily have to leap into a desperate military adventure. Both capitalism and socialism are capable of long-term development, borrowing positive elements from each other and actually coming closer to each other in a number of essential respects."

He then proceeds to show that social structures in the two countries are al ready quite similar. Both have large managerial groups, and both still allow glaring inequalities--the "half-truths and hypocritical evasion" of Soviet propaganda notwithstanding. In Russia, he says, "there is still great inequality in wealth between the city and the countryside, especially in rural areas that lack a transport outlet to the private market or do not produce the goods in demand in private trade. There are great differences between cities with some of the new, privileged industries and those with older, antiquated industries. As a result, 40% of the Soviet population are in difficult economic circumstances."

He discards the official Soviet explanation for inequality among American Negroes, ascribing it to the "racism and egotism of white workers," not the treatment of capitalist overlords. "It seems to me that we in the socialist camp should be interested in letting the ruling group in the U.S. settle the Negro problem without aggravating the situation in the country."

The most sweeping changes still needed for U.S.-Soviet cooperation, says Sakharov, involve "further advances in our economic reform and a greater role for economic and market factors." In the U.S., it would mean "substantial changes in the structure of ownership, with a greater role played by government and cooperative ownership." Sakharov compares the two economies at present to a pair of skiers, one wearing a striped jacket who "broke the snow," the other dressed in a red jacket who "did not have to." Thus acknowledging Communism's debt to capitalism, Sakharov concludes: "The capitalist world could not help giving birth to the socialist, but now the socialist world should not seek to destroy by force the ground from which it grew."

In his four-stage plan for collaboration, Sakharov blocks out progress against the world's challenges. Rather astoundingly he suggests that "the growing ideological struggle in the socialist countries" will result in a multiparty system in Russia before 1980. Though not personally in favor of such a system, he sees it as "an inevitable consequence of the course of events when a ruling Communist Party refuses for one reason or another to rule by the scientific democratic method required by history." Stage 2, ending five years later, would find rapprochement nearly complete and lead to the third, a concentrated 18-year drive to "solve the problem of saving the poorer half of the world." The fourth stage, ending in the year 2000, would climax in nothing less than a world government whose stability would rest on the Russo-American convergence.

There is obviously wishful thinking in this and some of Sakharov's other ideas that is bound to strike Western pragmatists as Utopian and naive. But, as Brumberg points out, "if he were not imbued with idealism, he would not have written the essay at all." And in his eagerness to draw difficult conclusions, his willingness to lay bare the most sensitive nerves of the Soviet monolith, the breadth of vision and passion in his essay, Sakharov has produced a memorable document. It would be an extraordinary work coming from any quarter of the world. Flashing out as it does from the usually opaque and icy surface of the very top of Soviet society, it is all the more remarkable. In his epilogue, Sakharov indicates that he is not alone in his hopes, that like-minded Russian friends and colleagues contributed to shaping his epistle from Moscow.

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