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15 Debating Solzhenitsyn Sakharov’s revelation in early September of the Princeton invitation caused his relations with Solzhenitsyn to worsen. The two men met for the last time on December 1, 1973. At the meeting, Solzhenitsyn argued strenuously against Sakharov’s leaving the country. When Sakharov assured Solzhenitsyn he had no intention of defecting in the unlikely event he received a visa, Solzhenitsyn, who knew that both Chalidze and Zhores Medvedev had been stripped of their Soviet citizenship while abroad after receiving official permission to leave, told Sakharov that the same fate might befall him as well. To this Sakharov replied unrealistically and with a touch of bravado that if he went abroad and the government refused to let him return, he would camp out at the Soviet border until it relented.1 The whole issue of visas and emigration touched a raw nerve in Solzhenitsyn, who considered leaving the Soviet Union even temporarily a betrayal of one’s country and, in the case of the dissidents, of their cause. Even more harmful to their relationship was that the two men differed in their view of what should replace the Soviet system they both deplored. This, along with their personal differences, would be the catalyst, in the fall and winter of 1973–1974, for a near severance of their personal relations. The more Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn saw each other, the less they liked each other. Inevitably, this colored their appraisal of the political and philosophical issues that divided them. Sakharov disliked especially the Soviet writer’s theatricality , his view of the world as a stage and the history of the Soviet Union as a morality play in which Solzhenitsyn simultaneously performed the roles of actor and onstage commentator. Although Sakharov, in his own words, “bowed deeply” before Solzhenitsyn for telling the sordid truth about the Soviet Union, he quickly realized to his dismay that Solzhenitsyn did not always report the particulars of their conversations accurately. Sakharov also rejected Solzhenitsyn’s claim that he, Sakharov, had become a dissident because he felt guilty about developing thermonuclear weapons and living in conditions while doing so that Solzhenitsyn, who spent years in a Soviet labor camp, persisted in describing as luxurious.2 In addition, Sakharov was angered by Solzhenitsyn’s accusations of naïveté, by which Solzhenitsyn meant that Sakharov failed to apportion his energy and attention sensibly. Among the causes to which he believed Sakharov devoted too much of his time was emigration.3 Most infuriating, however, were Solzhenitsyn’s insinuations, which mirrored those of the Soviet government, 1. Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, 823. 2. Sakharov, Memoirs, 399; Smith, Russians, 595; Solzhenitsyn, Oak and the Calf, 367–68. 3. Solzhenitsyn, Oak and the Calf, 375. 212 Meeting the Demands of Reason that Bonner was a neurotic busybody and that after marrying Sakharov, she made him her puppet.4 Even Solzhenitsyn’s calling Sakharov “a miracle” struck the Soviet physicist as the kind of grandiloquent claim only someone oblivious to the primacy of rational explanations of human behavior would make. In contrast, Sakharov explained his dissidence in his memoirs as simply “the natural consequence of what life has made me.”5 It is significant that The Oak and the Calf, in which Solzhenitsyn expresses his reservations about Sakharov most candidly , is the only book from which Sakharov quotes frequently and extensively in his memoirs. Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms obviously struck a nerve. Conversely, Solzhenitsyn seemed always to hold Sakharov’s service to the Soviet Union, and especially the emoluments he received as a result of it, against him. For that reason he thought Sakharov’s dissidence was always tainted by the events in his life that had preceded it. In light of all this, it was probably beneficial to what remained of their relationship that the two men saw each other only once from the spring of 1973 to February 1974, when Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union.6 The political and philosophical differences between the two men became clearer after Solzhenitsyn, in the fall of 1973, wrote his celebrated Letter to the Soviet Leaders, which is as much a meditation on what it means to be Russian as it is an elucidation of the problems then afflicting the Soviet Union and the Soviet people.7 In the Letter, which he knew Brezhnev and his cronies would ignore, Solzhenitsyn made explicit his long-standing belief that Russia’s destiny and the West’s were profoundly different. He stated that once the...

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