Andrei Sakharov
This is based on a 1990 Observer review of Sakharov’s Memoirs (Hutchinson).
I Met Sakharov only once, in June 1989, six months before his death. He came to the Oxford Encaenia to receive an honorary degree. I did not alas sit next to him at the luncheon. I did, however, drive him home in the evening, but by then he had become too tired to manage much English and we did not have an interpreter. I regretted at the time that I did not have more talk with him. Now, having read his Memoirs, I do so a great deal more. Although inelegantly constructed and sometimes written like a catalogue, parts of this massive autobiography give Sakharov a greater vividness for me than either his fame or his presence did fifteen months ago.
The early part of the book, broadly the first eighteen chapters (out of fifty), which takes us through the first four decades of his life in the Russia of Stalin and Khrushchev, is the best. This was all before the death of his first wife and his second marriage to the formidable but adored Elena Bonner, before any significant break between him and the Soviet establishment, and before his world fame as a dissident and protector of dissidents. It is essentially the story of Sakharov’s childhood and education as a core product of the liberal intelligentsia which somehow persisted, sometimes hazardously but also often patriotically and respectfully, in Stalinist Russia, and then of his crucial and undismayed contribution to the making of the Soviet H-bomb.
Sakharov came of a background as intellectually rarefied and well educated as Keynes or a member of the great Cambridge scientific cousinage. There is indeed a remarkable symmetry between the relationship of his intellect to that of his father, a physicist and talented amateur pianist who was the author of a successful scientific text book, and that of Maynard Keynes with his father, John Neville Keynes, who was Registrary of the University of Cambridge and nearly became Professor of Political Economy at Oxford. Sakharov had a less physically urbane early life than did Keynes (Russia in 1941-5 in particular was a rougher place than Edwardian Cambridge) but he was just as immersed in Pushkin and Tolstoy as Keynes came to be in Bloomsbury.
Sakharov then spent twenty years (from 1948-68) making thermonuclear weapons. During this period he had few doubts about the work. At first he might have wished to assist Soviet nuclear superiority. In 1953, when Stalin died, he wrote: ‘I am under the influence of a great man’s death. I am thinking of his humanity.’ Then he developed a more sophisticated theory of nuclear balance. He believed in MAD (mutual assured destruction) and very sensibly became an opponent of anything that made it more difficult to achieve, from anti-ballistic missiles to SDI. But it was on the nuclear test issue that he began his break with the military-industrial complex, which perhaps even more in the Soviet union than in America melded seamlessly into political power.
For some time Sakharov made his protests on a very privileged network. He had been admitted to the Academy of Sciences, membership of which was highly restricted and which conferred specific and desirable benefits, at the exceptionally young age of thirty-three. He was three times decorated as a Hero of the Soviet union , which must surely have been at least the equivalent of an OM, if not of a KG as well. And when he wanted to complain he often did it direct to Beria, Malenkov or Khrushchev, sometimes just by ringing them up.
It is indeed the case that while refuseniks or dissidents had to take terrible risks they were also, if grand enough, able to avail themselves of a surprisingly high proportion of the privileges of a plural society. Thus Sakharov for a long time after his suspension from ‘the installation’ (the equivalent of Harwell or Aldermaston) was able as an academician to summon a car and driver from the official pool. He was also able even when attending trials as a gesture of support for the defendant to flash his Hero of Socialist Labour card (until it was taken away from him in 1980) and get a priority seat on aeroplanes. And even during his occasionally persecuted exile in Gorky from 1980 to 1986 his wife was for the most part allowed to go by train to Moscow and hold press conferences.
One form that the persecution took was the purloining on two occasions of part of the manuscript of his memoirs. He had twice to reconstruct them from memory. That makes it the more remarkable that the first part is the better, for it was presumably that part that was twice stolen. No doubt his memory unassisted by notes was better for his early years. But there is also the indisputable fact that most sections touching the Elena Bonner years are written more defensively, more flatly, more dutifully. In the mid-eighties in particular she was subjected by the Soviet propaganda machine to calumnies in which she was portrayed as a fiendish puppet mistress. I discount that, but it is nevertheless the fact that she was not good for the liveliness of Sakharov’s literary style - her own writing on the Gorky years was, I believe, much better.