A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Many Western observers attending an international peace forum in Moscow three weeks ago were startled when Kremlin Critic Andrei Sakharov showed up for Mikhail Gorbachev's closing address, listened intently and applauded. But few at that conference had a chance to learn the actual views of the physicist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. Sakharov seemed to avoid the press, confining his remarks to closed-door sessions with fellow scientists. Only tantalizing snippets of his opinions leaked out.

A week after the Moscow meeting, TIME's Washington bureau chief, Strobe Talbott, took a call from Sakharov's son-in-law Efrem Yankelevich, now a resident of Newton, Mass. Yankelevich told Talbott that his father-in-law had sent a copy of the private speeches. Sakharov, said Yankelevich, had requested that a way be found to publish their text. Talbott and State Department Correspondent David Aikman, both of whom read Russian, studied the material and recommended that TIME print the dissident's views. This week the magazine takes an exclusive look at those statements, Sakharov's most detailed examination of U.S.-Soviet relations and arms control since he and his wife Elena Bonner returned three months ago from internal exile in Gorky.

TIME has followed the Sakharov saga since 1961, when the man who helped develop the Soviet H-bomb went on record opposing atmospheric testing of a 100-megaton weapon. In February 1977 a cover story focused on his pivotal role in organizing Soviet human-rights campaigners. And last October TIME featured excerpts from Alone Together, the autobiography of Bonner. Says Talbott of Sakharov's views in this week's issue: "His arms-control advice could hardly be more timely. It comes just as the negotiations in Geneva are showing their first serious signs of progress since the debacle at Reykjavik."

Working with Yankelevich, Talbott and Aikman edited the speeches into a single letter from the physicist. Aikman, who was Eastern Europe bureau chief from 1977 to 1978, wrote an introduction to the text, focusing on its views of the arms race and on Gorbachev's push for reforms. "The struggle in the Soviet Union between the momentum for change and the inertia of privilege," says Aikman, "is one of the great political and intellectual dramas of our day."