The Climax of a Lonely Struggle

The news from Norway that the Nobel Peace Prize had been given to a Russian for the first time in the 74-year history of the award was broadcast to the Soviet Union last week by U.S. and West European short-wave radio. For Winner Andrei Sakharov, 54, the prize climaxed a long and often lonely struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union. Dressed in a baggy gray suit and ill-fitting shirt, he talked with newsmen in his gloomy two-room apartment near the Kremlin. "I hope this will help political prisoners," he said. The phone rang constantly with calls from friends and well-wishers in Russia and abroad. His wife, Pediatrician Yelena Bonner, telephoned congratulations from Italy, where she is recovering from an operation for glaucoma. Connected by phone with Norwegian radio, he broadcast a message, in broken German, saying he was extremely pleased and proud. He added that he hoped to come to Oslo to receive the medal and the $140,000 prize money at the ceremony to be held Dec. 10, the 79th anniversary of the death of Swedish Munitions Merchant Alfred Nobel.

Nobel had provided for the establishment of the Peace Prize in his will. Evidently, he was deeply troubled by the destruction caused by his invention of dynamite and smokeless gunpowder. Of all the 72 recipients of the prize since 1901, probably none comes closer than Sakharov to the spirit of Nobel's bequest. The father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Sakharov went on to become an indefatigable fighter for thermonuclear disarmament and democracy in the U.S.S.R. The citation by the Nobel committee in Oslo called him "a firm believer in the brotherhood of man, in genuine coexistence, as the only way to save mankind ... As a nuclear physicist," the citation continued, "he has, with his special insight and responsibility, been able to speak out against the dangers inherent in the armaments race between states." The five-member Nobel committee, appointed by the Norwegian Parliament, reportedly rejected 50 other candidates under consideration, including Finnish President Urho Kekkonen, for whom Soviet officials have been campaigning.

Blasted Nobel. It seems improbable that the Kremlin will let Sakharov travel to Oslo. Writers Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were not able to go to Stockholm in 1958 and 1970 to receive their Nobel Prizes for Literature. The peace award to Sakharov was even more objectionable to the Soviet leaders. Sakharov is still the U.S.S.R.'s most famous scientist and a Stalin prizewinner who was decorated three times with the nation's highest civilian award as a Hero of Socialist Labor. Nevertheless, his eloquent critique of Soviet oppression has cut even deeper than the condemnations of Solzhenitsyn. Twenty-four hours after the announcement of the award in Oslo, the Soviet news agency Tass blasted the Nobel committee for "political speculation" with peace prizes and branded Sakharov an "anti-patriot" who "has taken a stand against his own country ... and joined with the most reactionary, imperialist circles which are actively opposing the policy of peaceful coexistence."

Sakharov has been maligned and threatened by Kremlin bosses ever since he provoked the anger of then Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. At that time, Khrushchev planned to violate the East-West moratorium on nuclear testing with a 100-megaton explosion of a hydrogen bomb. Fearing the consequences of massive radioactive fallout, Sakharov objected in a memo to Khrushchev, who was shocked by his insubordination. In 1964 Sakharov further enraged the party chief by successfully rallying scientific colleagues in opposition to a Khrushchev candidate for election to the Academy of Science.

Sakharov's metamorphosis from a prosperous and privileged member of the Soviet scientific establishment into Russia's leading dissident began when he realized he had not the slightest control over the testing, let alone the use, of the terrible weapon he had developed. "After that, I felt myself another man. It was a basic break." The break was sharpened in 1968, when Sakharov published in the West an eloquent appeal for nuclear-arms reduction called "Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom." In that essay he predicted a convergence between the Communist and capitalist systems in the distant future. Since then he has concentrated his attention on pleading for Soviet political prisoners and victims of psychiatric abuse in police lunatic asylums.

He contributes most of his present monthly honorarium of $400 as a member of the Academy of Sciences to families of jailed dissidents and to a special fund he has set up for the children of political prisoners. His tiny apartment is a haven and refuge for dissidents seeking advice, help and moral support. Guests sleep in the kitchen, bathroom and corridor.

Dark Reality. In his political views, Sakharov is closer to Western social democrats than he is to Solzhenitsyn, whom he has criticized for favoring a regime for Russia that harks back to czarist authoritarianism. In a new book to be published in the U.S. next month, My Country and the World (TIME, Aug. 4), Sakharov deplores Kremlin repression of national minorities and its support of dictatorships in such countries as Libya and Uganda. He also returns to the subject that most haunts him.

"The unchecked growth of thermonuclear arsenals and the buildup toward confrontation threaten mankind with the death of civilization and physical annihilation," he warns. Sakharov accuses the Soviet Union of rigidly resisting verification of compliance with nuclear-arms limitations and calls for on-site inspection, the abandonment of offensive nuclear missiles and a ban on deployment and further sophistication of U.S. and Soviet strategic antimissile systems. "Thermonuclear warfare has already become a dark reality of modern times," he argues, "like Auschwitz, the Gulag and famine. Perhaps I feel this more acutely than many people ... but I believe that no one can shed his share of responsibility for something upon which the existence of mankind depends." If Sakharov cannot deliver the Peace Prize address in Oslo, these words might still serve as a fitting memorial to the hopes of Alfred Nobel.

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