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81 6 Radioactive Fallout and Other Matters of Conscience By the late 1950s Sakharov was sufficiently appalled by what he had seen of the Soviet ruling elite that on one occasion, in the winter of 1958, he described the top leaders of the Soviet Union, whom he had recently observed in meetings he attended in the Kremlin, as “monsters.”1 In time these same leaders would think similarly of Sakharov. Obviously descriptions such as this reflected Sakharov’s growing disillusionment not only with the personal qualities of the individuals who ruled the Soviet Union but with impersonal and institutional aspects of Soviet society and government as well. But it was by no means inevitable that Sakharov should have become a dissident as a result of it. He could easily have ignored his own observations of these things and instead of opposing the Soviet regime have spent the rest of his life as a pampered scion of the scientific establishment, basking in well-deserved acclaim for his achievements designing thermonuclear weaponry for his country. It would not have been dishonorable for him to do so. As a husband and father, Sakharov had responsibilities he could carry out most effectively by stifling his inclination to think independently, an attribute the Soviet leadership thought he should confine entirely to matters scientific. Sakharov, by all accounts, had great potential as a physicist, which Tamm in particular believed he had a responsibility to fulfill. But Sakharov’s growing willingness to trust his moral intuition and use his training as a scientist in assessing rationally how he might rectify the wrongs he observed had the effect of propelling him in a different direction. He began examining carefully social and political issues that, in the end, would cause him to repudiate the very system on which he depended for his livelihood and professional identity. It is easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to see where Sakharov was headed. The dissidence he first espoused in the late 1960s was consistent with the moral sensitivity he displayed on several occasions earlier in his life. But as he concerned himself with issues that, like concentric circles, drew him farther and farther away from the familiar territory of physics, the transition from scientist to dissident could not have been easy. In the decade before he emerged as a dissident, Sakharov was still developing the critical intelligence needed to make sense of the larger political and social issues to which he was increasingly drawn. That he could not have known where his own insights were leading him makes the journey he began in the late 1950s truly an act of personal and intellectual courage. Before 1956 the disobedience Sakharov occasionally displayed was limited to protecting people he knew personally. After that year, however, he was concerned 1. Adamskii, “Stanovlenie grazhdanina,” 41. 82 Meeting the Demands of Reason increasingly with the fate of individuals unknown to him, people who were victims , in one form or another, of government policies he regarded as unwise, irrational, and morally suspect. At the same time, his protests had limits that he was unable or unwilling to exceed. Although Sakharov was confident enough in the late 1950s and early 1960s to voice objections to government policies related to scientific matters such as genetics and radioactive fallout, when he began expressing himself publicly on political issues in the mid-1960s, he did so mostly through letters of protest whose collective authorship afforded him a measure of protection. It was not until 1968 that he had the self-confidence to express himself individually on matters of broad public significance. Sakharov did not become a Soviet dissident overnight. This role was not the result of any spiritual epiphany or psychological crisis. Rather, it was the product of a slow accretion of intensely personal experiences and observations, which generated larger conclusions about Soviet society that he believed were grounded in both morality and reason. In this process Sakharov combined the moral stringency of the intelligentsia with the careful evaluation of evidence characteristic of the scientist. In retrospect , it is readily apparent in Sakharov’s evolving ethic of social responsibility how very neatly each step in his political and intellectual evolution followed logically one from the other, and how they reflected a transformation in Sakharov’s thinking in which the roles of scientist and intelligent were fused. In becoming a dissident, he harnessed the rational pursuit of truth to an...

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