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199 14 Orchestrated Vituperation “Sakharov, that traitor.” This is how Sakharov characterized the slander he heard several Soviet citizens utter in September 1973, not long after the press campaign began, when they spotted him on a beach in Batumi on the shore of the Black Sea. He and Bonner had hoped to find a brief respite there from the incessant attacks.1 Sakharov does not reveal in his memoirs what his reaction was to the charge, but one can be fairly certain he was not pleased by it. Not only was it completely false but it also showed that the government’s rhetorical onslaught was having an effect on a population that habitually ignored or ridiculed government directives prescribing what it should think about a particular issue or individual. From the reaction of the bathers on the beach, it seemed that the press campaign was serving its purpose. But the public vilification Sakharov endured following his interview with Maliarov in August 1973 was no ordinary exercise of the traditional prerogative Soviet leaders adopted to discredit people they considered hostile to the Soviet system. Sakharov’s case was different. Exceeding anything any Soviet citizen had experienced since Stalin’s death, the campaign against him was even more vituperative and shrill and of a longer duration than that directed at Pasternak in 1958 after he won the Nobel Prize for literature but was prevented from going to Sweden to accept it. The campaign was also better coordinated than previous attacks on other dissidents.2 In Soviet history the only analogue to what Sakharov was now enduring were the attacks in the Soviet press on some of Stalin’s victims, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, in which their reputations were blackened and their achievements either ignored or maligned. It is true that Solzhenitsyn was attacked concurrently with Sakharov. But the transgressions for which Solzhenitsyn was excoriated were different from those attributed to Sakharov. Because Sakharov, unlike Solzhenitsyn, had worked for the Soviet government and had been rewarded handsomely for his services, there was a bitterness, born out of a sense of betrayal, in the criticisms the government directed against him. Partly for that reason, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn did not coordinate their responses in defending themselves.3 The press conference Sakharov called on August 21—the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia—triggered the press campaign against him. From the Soviets’ perspective, the very act of calling a press conference was a provocation, a way of showing both the Soviet government and the rest of the world that nothing the Soviet leadership could say about him would 1. Sakharov, Memoirs, 387. 2. Dornan, “Andrei Sakharov,” 403. 3. Solzhenitsyn, Oak and the Calf, 359. 200 Meeting the Demands of Reason frighten him and that he would continue to speak out whenever he had something newsworthy to say. Maliarov’s reason, or excuse, for his warning five days earlier of serious, if unspecified, consequences if Sakharov were to grant any more interviews was that the Soviet physicist might reveal secret information from his days at Arzamas. Holding the press conference was therefore a way of showing Maliarov and everyone else in the Soviet leadership that their concerns were groundless and that the discretion he would exercise was actually proof of his patriotism. Finally, the press conference, which took place in Sakharov’s apartment, rankled the Soviets because it called into question the government’s claim, on which a good deal of its political legitimacy depended, that the Soviet people were children, too immature to answer rationally and in a way that was supportive of the Soviet Union the probing questions of hostile reporters, all of them foreigners. Sakharov began the press conference by reading a prepared statement in which he described his meeting with Maliarov.4 In responding to questions, he reiterated his support for human rights, expressed in general terms his reservations about détente, and declared again that he and the other dissidents were acting on the basis of moral principle rather than out of political expediency. What the dissidents were doing, he said, was “normal human activity,” the kind of thing ordinary people with a minimal degree of decency would do.5 The implication of Sakharov’s comments, which he hoped the reporters would comprehend , was that by trying to silence him, the Soviet leaders were not only morally wrong but were engaged in an enterprise that was irrational, unnatural, and abnormal. At the very least, they, not...

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