This is the first English-language biography of one of the central figures in the great Russian drama of the late 20th century. Andrei Sakharov lived a true Russian epic. He did more of real consequence than most men can dream of. He did what he did so well that the Soviet Union got a hydrogen bomb years sooner than any American expert expected, and then the Soviet Union disappeared altogether, something no expert of any nationality had expected.
Sakharov's instrumental role in the first of those accomplishments is indisputable; his was the most important intellectual contribution that enabled the Soviet Union to detonate a hydrogen bomb in August, 1953, just nine months after the United States did. In gratitude, the Soviet authorities elected Sakharov to full membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences and made him a Hero of Socialist Labor. He was just 32, and at the time almost no one outside the scientific establishment even knew he existed.
Sakharov's role in the collapse of the Soviet Union was less obvious and less specific but still indisputably significant. He had been dead for two years when the USSR disappeared at the end of 1991, but long before that he had become notorious, and amazingly effective, in the role of leader of the dissident opposition. He began that phase of his life dramatically in 1968, by writing and circulating an essay called "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom." When this was published in the West, Sakharov was suddenly famous and in trouble. The trouble came from the Soviet authorities, who banned him from all secret work, ending his career at "the installation," the weapons lab several hundred miles east of Moscow where he had made his biggest scientific contributions.
Sakharov's essay was discursive, naive and utterly explosive. Writing with sympathy for the ideals of communism, he denounced the Soviet regime for its denial of basic freedoms, defended intellectual openness and called for the convergence of capitalism and communism under a new world government by the year 2000. The essay circulated in samizdat - typed manuscript that dissidents copied on their own typewriters with fading carbon paper and passed from hand to hand. Soon copies reached the outside world. The New York Times printed the entire essay in July 1968, about a month before Soviet and other Warsaw Pact tanks squelched the Czech Communist Party's attempted liberalization in Prague.
Richard Lourie provides a fast-paced account of these and subsequent events, which transformed Sakharov into the leading personality in the so-called dissident movement. So-called because it seemed even to the courageous but fatalistic participants of the movement that it was tiny and had no prospect of overturning the Soviet order. "The dissident movement was a moral and not a pragmatic undertaking," as Sakharov put it in his Memoirs.
Despite its small size, that band of dissidents - which was all but snuffed out by 1979, when Sakharov was abruptly arrested and exiled to the closed city of Gorky - ultimately had significance far beyond its numbers. The dissidents regularly chal lenged the lies on which the Soviet regime was constructed. They said, in different ways, that the emperor was actually walking around without any clothes on.
Sakharov, who husbanded his moral resources brilliantly even in exile, became a symbol whom even Mikhail Gorbachev had to acknowledge when he began the process that dismantled the Soviet Union. The most important telephone call made in Russia in the 20th century was placed by Gorbachev to Sakharov in Gorky on December 16, 1986. Gorbachev invited the physicist to return to Moscow and "go back to your patriotic work." It was an astounding concession and a harbinger that Gorbachev was serious about altering the old order.
Lourie tells the Sakharov story, or most of it, but he doesn't explain Sakharov, and he skims over some of the most obvious and compelling questions about him. Two of these are particularly striking: Why was he so willing to build a hydrogen bomb for Joseph Stalin, and why, two decades later, did he decide to take the remarkable step of writing his essay and declaring himself, in effect, an oppositionist? On the first point, Lourie says simply, "he did not have any political doubts or moral qualms about the weapon he was helping to design." This just echoes Sakharov's own memoir: "We [scientists working on the H-Bomb] never questioned the vital importance of our work." Why not?
To answer the second question Lourie gives a brisk, engaging account of the series of events that led Sakharov into active opposition to the regime, but does not explain it or explore what might have been going on inside Sakharov's head. Sakharov himself provided some evidence in his memoirs. In the second half of the 1960s, he wrote, he "inadvertently . . . picked up quite a bit of information" about the potential effects of thermonuclear war, something he had not previously considered in any detail, evidently. "What I learned was more than sufficient," he wrote, "to impress upon me the horror, the real danger, and the utter insanity of thermonuclear warfare, which threatens everyone on earth."
It certainly appears that Sakharov, who began his career as a naive, unthinkingly patriotic theoretician, realized after his great success that he had helped put a truly horrific weapon into the hands of bad men. He began to accept responsibility for what he had done, and that led him to break with the Soviet establishment he had so slavishly served. The story of Sakharov's moral evolution would make a gripping companion-piece to the more superficial narrative of events Lourie gives us, but it isn't here.
Nor does Lourie capture the drama of Sakharov's transformation of himself. Sakharov's memoirs, which Lourie translated into elegant English a dozen years ago, offer a more compelling account of his personal odyssey. In this biography, Sakharov's 1968 essay just happens - it falls from the corner of the sky that Sakharov's mind inhabited. This is one of several key moments at which this book lets its subject down. Another is its failure to come to grips with the influence of Elena Bonner, Sakharov's spirited partner from 1971 onward. Sakharov had already cast his lot with the dissidents when they met, but Bonner became an important prod and influence on him, and surely changed the way he thought and behaved. Lourie alludes to her influence but never really explores it.
The Washington Post
