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Détente and Human Rights 223 this elite possessed was hardly a sufficient basis on which to make policy. Translating abstract recommendations into policies people would accept and uphold required political skills that the governors in Sakharov’s good society, accustomed as they were to deferring to the technocrats and scientists, might not possess. Indeed, it was entirely possible that despite their superior knowledge and rationality, the technocrats and scientists might simply be wrong. But since the governors were conditioned to defer to them and the masses conditioned to defer to the governors, there might be no one in the society able to recognize this. Finally, it must be said that Sakharov’s elitism bore some resemblance to the long-standing paternalism in Russian culture—a paternalism that in many other aspects of his life he emphatically and unequivocally rejected. In both cases, an elite class presumed to know more than the masses, and this disparity in wisdom was reflected in a comparable disparity in influence in Sakharov’s case (where the intellectual elite advised) and in power in the case of Russia (where only rarely had the people and the educated elite been allowed to share in governance). But there was a significant difference between Sakharov’s elitism and the paternalism so prevalent in Russian history and culture: while for Sakharov the masses were adults and thus sufficiently rational to recognize their own shortcomings, for both the tsars and the Soviet leaders they were essentially children and thus not even capable of that. Unlike paternalism, the hierarchies Sakharov preferred were not inherently incompatible with democracy because they were based on knowledge and rationality. Understandably, Sakharov took pleasure in the futurological exercise he was asked by Saturday Review to perform. As one who had believed throughout his life in secular progress, it was only natural that he should relish describing the society to which this progress would lead. Convergence, of course, was Sakharov ’s preferred term for what would exist when no more progress was necessary; it was the closest equivalent in his teleology to the religious concept of the end of history or the kingdom of heaven on earth. For all his pessimism about the prospects for short-term improvements in the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, his faith in convergence was still sufficient for him to write confidently in 1974 about the kind of future society he believed humanity was capable of creating. Although Sakharov, as a scientist, found religion too dogmatic for his tastes, his faith in convergence was always precisely that, an article of faith. 16 Détente and Human Rights However much futurology attracted him, Sakharov devoted most of his attention in the 1970s to issues of immediate concern both to him and to the Soviet Union. The most pressing and prominent of these was détente. Sakharov himself never defined the term, but he used it repeatedly to describe a relationship between 224 Meeting the Demands of Reason states that was less bellicose than that in a cold war but without the shared interests implicit in ententes and alliances. What most clearly distinguished détente from a cold war, as these terms were used in the West in the 1970s, was that, while the former suggested a striving for peace, the latter suggested an ideological struggle using all methods short of nuclear war. One of the problems in discussing détente, as it pertained to the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s, was that the two superpowers defined it differently , had different reasons for adhering to it (or for pretending to adhere to it), and had different expectations of what would result from it. For the United States, as the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations pursued it with varying degrees of enthusiasm, détente was basically a substitute for the Cold War and as such was an end in itself. The principal architect of détente, Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Nixon and Ford, saw it as a necessity or a virtue or both, depending on the circumstances. The opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States when Nixon was elected president in 1968 had become by the early 1970s so intense and widespread that Kissinger believed containment was no longer sustainable politically as the basis for American policy toward the Soviet Union. As a result, a different policy was required, one that took into...

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