Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov (review)

With this book Jay Bergman, a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, has written the best biography of Andrei Sakharov as a man and prophet of human rights that has appeared so far. (The best book in English on Sakharov as a physicist remains Gennady Gorelik’s The World of Andrei Sakharov, published by Oxford University Press in 2005.)

Drawing on a seemingly limitless array of sources in at least four languages (English, Russian, German, and French), Bergman shows Sakharov’s roots in the Old Russian intelligentsia and praises him for ultimately transcending those roots, with their paternalistic attitude toward human rights, to become a prophet of the inborn rights of all human beings everywhere.

Bergman traces Sakharov’s beginnings as the son of a Moscow physics teacher and his invitation, at the age of 24, to study for a doctorate at FIAN, the Moscow Physics Institute, under the tutelage of the great Russian physicist Igor Tamm. Three years later, Sakharov was assigned to work in the Soviet thermonuclear bomb program in a unit headed by Tamm. For nearly twenty years he worked in the program, first at FIAN and then at the highly secretive nuclear weapons laboratory in Arzamas, not far from Gorky. Although Sakharov’s wife, Klava, and three children were permitted to live at Arzamas with him part of the time, he, like other scientists there, was shielded from most of the realities of Soviet life. He had occasional contact with zeks, inmates of the labor camp nearby, who did menial tasks at the installation, but did not give a great deal of thought to how they had come to be there.

Sakharov’s talents as a physicist were prodigious: the sloika, or “layer cake,” bomb tested in 1953 was regarded as his invention, and the Soviet Union’s radiationimplosion bomb, which became the first hydrogen bomb to be dropped from an aircraft (1955), was the result of work he did with Yakov Zeldovich in 1954. For his enormous contributions to the USSR’s standing as a superpower, Sakharov was three times awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor with accompanying emoluments. Inevitably, these successes led him into the political arena. His efforts to explain to crudely educated members of the top elite the damage that a hydrogen bomb of given megatonnage could do led to his making recommendations about whether and how the weapon should be tested. On this issue, his independence of mind and sense of duty as a scientist collided with the prerogatives of power. Having calculated that each nuclear test conducted in the atmosphere would, over thousands of years, cost at least 10,000 lives worldwide, Sakharov in 1961 urged the Soviet party leader Nikita Khrushchev to prolong the informal moratorium that Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union had observed for nearly three years. At a meeting in the Kremlin, Sakharov advised Khrushchev against a resumption of testing on the grounds that it would jeopardize “test ban negotiations, the cause of disarmament, and world peace” (p. 95). At this, Khrushchev erupted: “Leave politics to us—we’re the specialists. You make your bombs and test them. Sakharov, don’t try to tell us what to do” (p. 96). The following year, when Sakharov was double-crossed in his efforts to forestall the unnecessary duplicate test of a huge new weapon, he reached his own personal Rubicon. He realized, Bergman says, that to be “a humane scientist in the Soviet Union, one had to be a social critic of the Soviet system” (p. 101).

Describing Sakharov’s early steps as a dissident—his successful opposition to the election of a Lysenkoite biologist to the Soviet Academy of Sciences; his attendance at the 1966 demonstration in Pushkin Square in defense of political prisoners incarcerated in violation of rights guaranteed under the Soviet constitution; and his appeal to the new Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, on behalf of four human...