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135 10 Reflections on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom Reflections made Sakharov famous. Incredibly, some 18 million copies were sold or distributed globally in the first year of its publication.1 An American edition , with an introduction, notes, and commentary by the American journalist Harrison Salisbury, was published in 1968 and remained in print in the United States for many years.2 From 1968 to 1992, no fewer than sixty-five editions of the essay, in seventeen languages, appeared around the world.3 Andrei Grachev, who in the late 1980s served as one of Gorbachev’s secretaries and advisers, claims in his reminiscences of those years that he never had to ask the KGB for the copies of the essay it kept, closely guarded, in its vaults because he had already received a copy from someone who had purchased it abroad.4 Reflections circulated widely in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.5 As early as the summer of 1968 Czech intellectuals were familiar with it, as were students at Sakharov’s alma mater, Moscow State University, where, after reading the essay, some of them deliberately left their copies on their desks for others to read.6 At the end of August, a copy was discovered in the suitcase of a student arrested after demonstrating in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia . Three months later, the government sent the dissident Soviet general Piotr Grigorenko to a psychiatric hospital after the KGB found a review Grigorenko had written of the essay while searching his apartment for incriminating materials.7 1. Sakharov, Memoirs, 288. 2. Andrei D. Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, ed. with introduction, afterword , and notes by Harrison E. Salisbury (New York, 1968). In the original Russian, the title begins with the phrase “Reflections on.” For that reason, although all references in the notes are to Salisbury’s edition, which omits this phrase, I refer to the essay in the text as Reflections. 3. Bela Koval and Ekaterina Shikhanovich, “‘Razmyshleniia’: Variant i izdanie,” in Razmyshleniia o progresse, mirnom sosushchestvovanii i intellektual'noi svobode, 36. 4. A. S. Grachev, Kremlevskaia khronika (Moscow, 1994), 97. 5. The authorities had better luck apprehending readers who sent the essay to others by regular mail than they did with persons who circulated it in samizdat. Persecution for mailing the essay, involving a student in Dushanbe in Tajikistan, is noted in Khronika tekushchikh sobytii, May 20, 1972, 4, in Sobranie dokumentov samizdata vol. 10b (Munich, 1972), no. AS1130. 6. Walter C. Clemens Jr., “Sakharov: A Man for Our Times,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 27, no. 10 (December 1971): 6; Rubenstein, Soviet Dissidents, 86. 7. V. D. Poremskii, “Diskussia po memorandumu akademika A. D. Sakharova v inostrannom mire,” in Memorandum Akademika A. Sakharova. Tekst, otkliki, diskussiia (Frankfurt, 1970), 84. The KGB did not find the essay itself because Grigorenko had returned it to Sakharov with suggestions for improvement that, according to Grigorenko, the author adopted. Petro G. Grigorenko, Memoirs (New York, 1982), 336–37. 136 Meeting the Demands of Reason Ironically, Sakharov was not entirely satisfied with Reflections when he finished it in April 1968. In his opinion it lacked “literary taste.”8 Nonetheless, he gave a copy to Roi Medvedev, who, with Sakharov’s permission, circulated it in samizdat. By the third week in May, a copy (with the first five pages missing) had reached the KGB, which passed it on to Brezhnev.9 For his part, Sakharov showed the Soviet leader the courtesy—which was consistent with his purpose in writing the piece—of sending him a copy directly.10 According to both Solzhenitsyn and Zhores Medvedev, Sakharov tried to keep Reflections secret, in the sense of limiting its circulation beyond the government to samizdat.11 In Medvedev’s account of how the essay was written, Sakharov had different typists type different parts of it so that none of them would understand the work in its entirety. The reason for their doing so, supposedly, was that any report a typist provided the police would necessarily be fragmentary, leaving the latter ignorant of the larger themes the essay advanced.12 But Sakharov insists in his memoirs that only one typist at Arzamas ever saw the essay, and he acknowledges that no matter how few were the number of persons assisting him, he knew that word of the essay would eventually reach the authorities. Thus it made sense for him to send Brezhnev a copy preemptively. In that...

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