At Last, a Tomorrow Without Battle

By Patricia Blake

In his 68th year, modern Russia's greatest humanist and libertarian died in the way that most befitted his life -- in the midst of combat for his country's freedoms. He had spent the day of Dec. 14 at a tempestuous meeting of the Interregional Group, a coalition of liberal members of the Congress of People's Deputies that he had helped found. Exhorting, cajoling and arguing with his colleagues, he pressed for the establishment of an alternative political party in opposition to the Communists. Witnesses were shocked at how dramatically Sakharov had aged lately, as he made his faltering way to the podium around 6 p.m. Still, there was nothing irresolute about his short impassioned speech. He defended his earlier, controversial call for a nationwide strike to end the Communists' institutionalized monopoly of Soviet political life. "We cannot take responsibility for what the party is doing," he declared. "It's leading the country into a crisis by dragging its feet on perestroika."

Returning to his tiny Moscow flat, he exulted to his wife and friends, "Tomorrow there will be battle!" They were his last words. He then repaired to his private study to rest and prepare for the next day's passage at arms. Two hours later, his wife found him dead of a heart attack. His heart had been weakened by the stress of decades of persecution and by his hunger strikes and their inevitable consequence: forced feedings and deliberately inadequate medical care. "We won't let you die, but we will make you an invalid," a doctor told him.

"Sakharov was an honest man who was killed many times," said Vitali Korotich, editor of the liberal weekly Ogonyok. The saga of the deathblows inflicted upon Sakharov and his subsequent resurrection reads like a gripping secular sequel to the Russian Orthodox Lives of the Saints. Sakharov had certainly not been expected to survive the frightful ordeal that began in the mid-1970s, when he was targeted by the regime of Leonid Brezhnev as the nation's most dangerous dissident. Vilification in the press, together with threats of imprisonment and assassination, was a common occurrence.

In 1980, after Sakharov repeatedly denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he was placed under house arrest. He and his wife Elena Bonner were held in confinement by KGB guards 24 hours a day in a small apartment in Gorky, 261 miles east of Moscow. There both became increasingly incapacitated by heart disease. Word reached Moscow's dissident community that Bonner's lips and fingernails had turned blue and that Sakharov could hardly take a few steps without being winded. When the Soviets denied Bonner permission to go abroad for an open-heart operation, her husband went on a hunger strike. The authorities relented, but the ailing Sakharov remained under house arrest until 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev summoned him back to Moscow. Sakharov's first words as a free man were a demand for the liberation of all remaining Soviet political prisoners.

Sakharov's most lasting contribution to mankind may have been his effort to limit nuclear testing and encourage multilateral disarmament, for which he won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. But he was best known as the indefatigable champion of the dissident, the downtrodden and the persecuted in his country. It was in this role that he incurred the deadly wrath of Brezhnev and the KGB. In the decade before Sakharov's banishment to Gorky, his two-room apartment was a haven for men and women who had fallen afoul of Soviet totalitarianism. Sitting at his enamel-top kitchen table, drinking apple-flavored tea, he dispensed precious counsel and gifts of money to an endless stream of visitors in trouble.

Courage came so naturally to Sakharov that it heartened others. Dressed in a worn suit and bedroom slippers, the tall, perpetually bent-over man with shy eyes displayed a lion's boldness when defying the Kremlin. Mocking his own quixotic ways, he once dubbed himself Andrei the Blessed, an honorific that in Russian connotes a kind of holy innocence. Said computer scientist Valentin Turchin, a fellow dissident who emigrated to the U.S.: "There are two categories of people who have left their imprint on humanity: leaders and saints. Sakharov was in the category of saints." One mournful colleague in Moscow summoned up a more scientific metaphor. "We've lost our moral compass -- the compass that showed us the way during these decisive years of perestroika," said space scientist Roald Sagdeyev. "He taught us to use simple words like conscience and humanity."

Sakharov emerged from the most improbable of backgrounds as a human rights activist and peace advocate. In the 1940s and 1950s, he lived under security wraps as the Soviet Union's top nuclear scientist, cut off from all normal social contacts and followed at all times by a bodyguard. A theoretical physicist ranking with America's J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, he was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After he helped develop the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, he became one of the country's most decorated men. But he remained unknown because his honors were bestowed in secret. In those years, Sakharov believed he had a useful function: "When I began working on this terrible weapon, I felt subjectively that I was working for peace, that my work would help foster a balance of power."

In the late 1950s, Sakharov grew deeply concerned about the dangers of atomic fallout. Several times he attempted to use his prestige to halt Soviet nuclear testing. Recalling Sakharov's personal appeals against the atmospheric explosions, Nikita Khrushchev described the nuclear physicist in his memoirs as a "crystal of morality." When his behind-the-scenes lobbying turned to open criticism of the regime, Sakharov was fired from the nuclear program. "The atomic issue was a natural path into political issues," he explained.

Sakharov participated in a public demonstration for the first time on Dec. 5, 1966, joining a tiny band of dissidents who had assembled in Moscow's Pushkin Square to call for a new and genuine Soviet constitution. His increasingly open defiance of the government caused his three children by his first wife virtually to disown him. Nonetheless, Sakharov gave them his comfortable Moscow apartment and his dacha when he stripped himself of the luxuries he had acquired as a nuclear physicist. He donated his life savings of $153,000, an astronomical sum by Soviet standards, to cancer research and the Red Cross.

Because Sakharov was one of his nation's most distinguished scientists, his devastating critiques of Soviet policies cut deep. In his books, which were published only in the West, he repeatedly pointed to the failure of Soviet society to fulfill the promise of Communist ideology. Sakharov's writings on domestic affairs irked the leadership almost as much as his criticism of Brezhnev's foreign policy, which he characterized as imperialist and expansionist. His mistrust of Kremlin intentions was so strong that he said in 1983 that it might be best for the U.S. to "spend a few billion dollars on MX missiles" in order to bargain more effectively with the Soviets.

Even with glasnost, Sakharov found numerous causes to pursue. Encouraged by bilateral cuts in Soviet and U.S. arsenals, he pressed for conventional-arms reductions and a demilitarized "corridor" in Europe to lessen the possibility of a surprise attack from either side. He was hardly placated when Moscow admitted that the invasion of Afghanistan had been a mistake; he criticized the government for a colonialist attitude toward Armenia and the Baltic states. Though a supporter of Gorbachev's basic reforms, he used the Congress of People's Deputies as a tribune to attack him for accumulating too much personal power. "There are no guarantees that a Stalinist will not succeed Gorbachev," he warned. The release of political prisoners motivated him to call ever more insistently for the liberation of those still in the Gulag. He himself was elected to the new People's Congress, but he continued to battle for the multiparty system he knew was indispensable if true democracy was ever to come to his homeland. Andrei Sakharov did not live to see freedom flower completely, but if that day ever does come, he will deserve much of the credit for planting and nurturing the seed.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Moscow