Andrei Sakharov: Nauka i svoboda, and: Sakharov: A Biography (review)

Andrei Sakharov—ingenious inventor of weapons of mass destruction and tireless defender of human rights—seems a daunting subject for a biography, and not just because of such apparent contradictions. Exiled to Gor´kii (Nizhnii Novgorod) in the 1980s after protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Sakharov spent much of his time there writing his memoirs—starting over from scratch more than once, because the KGB kept confiscating his manuscripts. According to his English-language translator, Richard Lourie, who actually helped smuggle parts of the work out of the country, the first draft ran to some 900 handwritten pages. What could a biographer add to the life story of someone who had so conscientiously and meticulously recorded it himself?

Lourie's publisher advertises his book as "the first biography of one of the greatest Russians of the Twentieth Century." Few would quibble with the second part of the blurb, but even if we disregard Sakharov's autobiography and the many reminiscences of his family, friends, and colleagues, we must credit Gennadii Gorelik with the first full biography of Sakharov—an impressive piece of scholarship published two years before Lourie's also impressive study. Both, not surprisingly, rely on Sakharov's memoirs as their main source; and, indeed, many of the most telling and amusing anecdotes come directly from there. Both also acknowledge a substantial debt to David Holloway's magisterial Stalin and the Bomb for the basic history of Soviet nuclear physics, the weapons program, and a key insight—that development of nuclear weapons afforded the physicists a certain protection that was fatally lacking for many of their fellow scientists, in the field of genetics, for example.¹

Each author follows a straightforward periodization of Sakharov's life: childhood and education in Moscow (home-schooled until he was 12), with temporary evacuation and military-related research during the war; work in the Soviet nuclear weapons program from 1949 to 1968, when his "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" was published abroad, and his first wife fell fatally ill; civilian scientific work and political activity in the human-rights movement, where he met his second wife, Elena Bonner, 1969-79; exile in Gor´kii, where he conducted a number of hunger strikes, worked on his memoirs, and managed to maintain some of his scientific contacts, 1980-86; and return to Moscow, on Mikhail Gorbachev's initiative, and to the politics of the perestroika period, where barely two years later, in December 1989, a heart attack killed him in his sleep.

Thanks to Elena Bonner's research, both authors are able to report a fair amount about the history of the Sakharov family before "Andrusha" was born.² The Sakharov men had been Orthodox priests in the province of Nizhnii Novgorod for generations, one of them having led the church at Arzamas in the mid-19th century. Andrei's grandfather Ivan broke that tradition by moving to Moscow to study law. He became involved in politics as a founding member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, bought a six-room apartment on Granatnyi pereulok, and edited a collection of essays, including a famous one by Lev Tolstoi calling for the abolition of capital punishment. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Andrei's father Dmitrii, although politically suspect, managed to find employment teaching physics and some financial success as a writer of popular science books. His wife, Katia, was of aristocratic Greek and Tatar background, the daughter of a tsarist general who retired fortuitously in October 1917. The Sakharovs spent the difficult years of civil war at Tuapse on the Black Sea. They returned to their Moscow apartment, now turned into a kommunalka and shared with four other families, where Andrei was born in 1921.

Neither biographer fails to note the curious connections in Andrei's pre history. Lourie points...