April 7, 2002
By LOREN GRAHAM
The story of science in the Soviet Union is one of baffling
paradoxes that challenge preconceptions and make us
uncomfortable. Contrary to the common Western assumption
that creativity needs freedom, Russian science seemed to do
best when political conditions were worst. Six Nobel Prizes
were awarded to Soviet physicists for work done in the
1930's and 40's, a period of tyranny and terror. For one of
those physicists, Lev Landau, 1937, when Stalin's horrific
purges peaked, was his most productive year in terms of
scientific publications. The next year Landau was arrested
by the secret police but was released with a warning.
Another Nobelist, Pyotr Kapitsa, did his most significant
research shortly after he had been detained on Stalin's
orders. The designer of the Soviet Union's finest
airplanes, Andrei Tupolev, and the rocket scientist who
sent the world's first artificial satellites into space,
Sergei Korolev, both spent time in prison before they did
the work for which they are most remembered.
Seeking heroes and villains whose work and achievements fit
more felicitously into our beliefs, Western observers point
to the pseudogeneticist and charlatan Trofim Lysenko as a
more representative product of Stalinism, and to the great
human rights advocate Andrei D. Sakharov as an exemplary
scientist-rebel against political controls. Lysenko and his
doctrines were indeed fruits of Stalinism, but as Richard
Lourie's new, subtle and revealing biography of Sakharov
demonstrates, the impulses to Sakharov's scientific
creativity and his later rise to political heroism were not
simple. Throwing off Stalinism was extremely difficult for
Sakharov, and like many of his colleagues he did his best
scientific work while still in its thrall.
In 1948, the same year that Lysenko, with Stalin's backing,
squelched all resistance to his teachings, Sakharov was
commanded to work on the hydrogen bomb project, which was
directed by a particularly loathsome man -- personally and
politically -- Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police.
Sakharov threw himself into the effort wholeheartedly. He
was soon sent to the center of Soviet nuclear research, a
secret laboratory named Arzamas 16, where scientists took
over a famous monastery near the town of Sarov. Sakharov
was told by a colleague that political prisoners forced to
build the scientific plant had rebelled two years earlier;
Beria's troops surrounded the mutineers and killed every
one. Sakharov later described in his memoirs how in
1950-53, as he worked on scientific projects, he frequently
saw columns of prisoners marching by under armed guard.
In these years Sakharov was strikingly productive
scientifically, perhaps as a subconscious means of avoiding
facing the political repression around him; certainly a
link between freedom and creativity was completely absent.
He designed the Soviet hydrogen bomb in a way that, Western
historians now agree, was original and independent of the
American one (the Soviet atomic bomb had been built to
specifications supplied through espionage). In addition,
Sakharov and Igor Tamm worked out a brilliant toroidal
approach to controlled thermonuclear reactions that still
dominates the field of fusion research everywhere today.
Although surrounded by tyranny, Sakharov and his associates
gave their outstanding talents to the service of their
country. He even found the environment pleasant in some
ways. On his 29th birthday in 1950, he later observed, ''we
listened to music and had a wonderful conversation about
the meaning of life and the future of mankind.'' This
combination of scientific creativity, political oppression
and utopian dreaming encapsulates the flaws and the virtues
of the Soviet intelligentsia. When Stalin died three years
later, Sakharov in sadness remarked: ''I am under the
influence of a great man's death. I am thinking of his
humanity.''
Yet he broke out of his intellectual prison and his
illusions and became one of the bravest defenders of human
rights of the last century. He ranks with Nelson Mandela as
a person who helped guide his country to democracy,
changing himself in the process. One of the strengths of
Lourie's biography is his description and analysis of how
this transition occurred. Sakharov's first impulse to
liberation was not revulsion against the political system
(''I still believed that the Soviet state represented a
breakthrough into the future'') but his sense of guilt
about the deaths caused by radioactive fallout from the
nuclear tests he directed. When he advised cutting back on
the tests, he encountered the unyielding, repressive Soviet
system that he had seen applied only to others. The more he
attempted to express his opinions, the more he was
threatened. Nikita Khrushchev accused him of ''poking his
nose where it doesn't belong.'' When Yuri Andropov became
head of the K.G.B. he declared Sakharov ''Public Enemy No.
1'' and placed him under constant surveillance. Stripped of
his security clearance and dismissed from weapons research,
Sakharov turned to research in fundamental science.
Lourie describes what then happened not as the emergence of
the inner Sakharov under pressure, but as an interaction
between his truth-seeking and his shifting political
consciousness. For the first time he began to ask questions
about politics the same way he had always asked them about
physical nature: testing hypotheses, looking for reliable
evidence. He quickly found that this approach automatically
made him a dissident, and he came to sympathize with other
dissidents. As a member of the elite, holding all the
highest awards the Soviet state could bestow, he found that
his opinions automatically attracted attention. Einstein
once said the accident of acquiring authority through
science gave him responsibility in the social realm, since
it gave him power to help rectify evils and relieve
suffering. When Sakharov took on this same responsibility,
he did it in a truly inspiring way; he had obviously moved
far from the position of his circle at Arzamas 16, whose
members could have deep conversations about ''the meaning
of life'' but at the same time feel no personal
responsibility for the injustices around them.
In the late 60's Sakharov began a campaign to make his
society more humane. He attended trials of political
prisoners and publicized the plight of persecuted religious
believers and oppressed nationalities. He called on the
government to allow citizens to exercise freedoms
guaranteed by the Soviet Constitution but denied in
practice. He helped organize a Committee on Human Rights.
He protested the Soviet military intervention in
Afghanistan in 1979.
The action on Afghanistan enraged the Soviet leaders;
Sakharov was seized by the secret police and illegally
removed to Gorky, a city closed to foreigners, and told he
could not leave. He remained with his wife, Yelena Bonner,
under forced exile for six years. When he resisted with
hunger strikes he was bound and forcibly fed. He was
constantly reviled in the Soviet press, and many of his
scientific colleagues in the Academy of Sciences, including
some from Arzamas 16 (although happily not quite all)
signed letters condemning him.
After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the first hint that
Sakharov's situation would change came when a work crew
arrived at his apartment and installed a telephone. The
reason became clear the next day when the phone rang and
Sakharov found himself talking to Gorbachev, who invited
him to return to Moscow. Sakharov promptly accepted and,
back in the political fray, soon won a position in
Gorbachev's new national assembly. When the assembly met,
Gorbachev called on Sakharov as the first speaker. It was a
stunning turnaround. Yet his position remained uncertain,
as shown by Gorbachev's rebuke of him for criticizing the
war in Afghanistan. Undeterred, Sakharov went on to become
the leader of the democratic forces in the Soviet Union and
was preparing a draft for a new constitution at the time of
his death in 1989 from a heart attack.
Lourie -- an American novelist, translator and critic of
Russian literature -- gives a fascinating account of
Sakharov; he makes many of his most poignant points through
understatement. While his treatment of Sakharov's work in
science is a bit weak, his analysis of the man's
complicated political journey seems authentic and immensely
revealing. Sakharov emerges not as a saint but as a
powerful and inspiring human being who came to understand
belatedly the society in which he lived. As he approached
that understanding he transformed himself. And the new
understanding brought grave responsibilities and risks,
which Sakharov readily assumed at a time when few others
dared to do so.
Loren Graham's most recent book is ''What Have We Learned
About Science and Technology From the Russian Experience?''
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company