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20 Finding Hope in Quantum Physics The exhilaration Sakharov felt when Liza finally received an exit visa did not last long. However gratifying it was in personal terms, his success in forcing the Soviet government to capitulate momentarily could not obscure the harsh reality that the dissident movement, by 1981, was in extremis. In the late 1970s the government decided to destroy the dissident movement in its entirety, and sending Sakharov to Gorky was just one of many steps it took to achieve its objective.1 Indeed, in the months that followed Sakharov’s victory in December 1981, the government’s persecution accelerated. By the summer of 1982, Helsinki Groups in Lithuania and Ukraine had been crushed, and in the fall of that year the Moscow Helsinki Group, which had always been preeminent in its relation to the other groups, disbanded.2 In the early 1980s, Sakharov, when he was not preoccupied with Liza, did what little he could to reverse these developments , mostly by protesting the persecution of individual dissidents, many of whom were members of these various groups, even before they or their families asked him to. On behalf of Tatiana Osipova and her husband, Ivan Kovalev, he petitioned Andropov to permit the couple conjugal visits after they were sent, on separate occasions, to the same labor camp for their activities on behalf of the Moscow Group—but his petition was simply ignored.3 Orlov,4 Velikanova,5 Viktor Brailovskii,6 Gleb Iakunin,7 Ivan Kovalev’s father, Sergei,8 the Georgian dissident Merab Kostava,9 the Ukrainian dissident and poet Vasilii Stus,10 and Anatolii Marchenko11 were just a few of the other individuals on whose 1. Richard Sakwa, Gorbachev and His Reforms, 1985–1990 (New York, 1991), 202. 2. “The Political and Social Thinking of Andrei Sakharov,” Samizdat Bulletin, no. 157 (May 1986): 6. 3. Sakharov, Memoirs, 539; A. D. Sakharov, “To Dr. Linus Pauling, Winner of the Lenin Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (May 4, 1981),” Chronicle of Current Events, no. 62 (July 14, 1981): 131. 4. Andrei Sakharov and Naum Meiman, “Open Letter to the Madrid Conference,” Samizdat Bulletin, no. 108 (April 1982). 5. A. Sakharov et al., “Kto osuzhden (August 29, 1980)?” Materialy samizdata, no. 17/81 (May 4, 1981), AS 4076: 1. 6. Andrei Sakharov, “On Behalf of Viktor Brailovsky (December 5, 1980),” Chronicle of Human Rights, no. 40 (October–December 1980): 12–13. 7. Sakharov et al., “Kto osuzhden?” 1. 8. Sakharov, “To Dr. Linus Pauling,” 131. 9. Sakharov, Memoirs, 540. 10. A. Sakharov, “In Defense of the Poet Vasily Stus (October 19, 1980),” Chronicle of Current Events, no. 58 (November 1980): 80–81. 11. Sakharov, Memoirs, 539. Marchenko had been arrested, for the sixth time, in March 1981, partly for writing a letter to Kapitsa on Sakharov’s behalf. When he learned of this, Sakharov felt an obligation to reciprocate, and perhaps for this reason directed his appeal for Marchenko to Kapitsa, who ignored it. The disdain he felt for Kapitsa as a result of this increased after Finding Hope in Quantum Physics 303 behalf Sakharov intervened either publicly or privately, but to no avail, while he himself was in exile. Sakharov mourned the demise of the dissidents very deeply. He, of course, was one of them, and the emotional ties he had developed over the years with the dissidents he defended made the incarceration of each of them a personal tragedy. This in turn darkened Sakharov’s political views, in particular his estimation of the chances of the Soviet system reforming itself. In 1982 he acknowledged that he had “no hope” that the Soviet Union, under current circumstances, could be forced to democratize (the reader will recall that for Sakharov democratization was not democracy but rather a form of glasnost), and in 1983 he and Bonner began to wonder “when, if ever, better times would arrive.”12 Also in 1982, Sakharov began reflecting on some of the choices he had made in earlier phases of his career as a dissident, in particular his decision in 1970 to join the Human Rights Committee. He did not go so far as to conclude that his decision was a mistake. Instead, he tried to redefine its objectives retroactively to place his joining it in a more favorable light. In contrast to what he had believed when he joined the committee, Sakharov now claimed that he had never thought it could actually persuade the government to provide human...

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