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

2. Expanding Horizons

18 Meeting the Demands of Reason oppression, or experienced any psychological or spiritual crisis in his youth that was severe enough to turn him against his own government, or even to create in his own mind the impression that there was something fundamentally wrong with it. Not even the physical destruction of several members of his family seemed to generate an antipathy for the Soviet regime. Because its members were so close to one another emotionally as well as physically, Sakharov’s family could envelop the young boy and protect him from much of what was happening around him. And when Sakharov’s family, depleted by arrests and imprisonment, could no longer do this, Sakharov’s interest in science sufficed to perform the same function. In the final analysis, Sakharov never focused the vague disquiet he felt on anything beyond his own personal milieu. While he retained from his early years an intellectual self-sufficiency that would enable him first to question, then to criticize, and finally to reject the moral and political bases of the Soviet Union, many experiences and observations would have to accumulate before Sakharov was ready to do this. In the meantime, his principal objective, as a student at MGU, was to pursue a career as a scientist, much the way his father had done. By the summer of 1941 this required only that he complete his last year of university education. 2 Expanding Horizons The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, complicated Sakharov’s life in ways he could not have previously imagined. Neither he nor anyone else in his course of study in mathematics and physics at MGU was conscripted because the Soviet government, despite the gravity of the situation, recognized how helpful to the war effort such persons would be once they graduated and could work for the government in their chosen profession. Sakharov chose not to volunteer for military service, believing that his chronic heart condition—from which he would suffer for the rest of his life—would disqualify him. As it was, he failed the physical examination all male students at MGU had to take for possible entry into the Air Force Academy. Sakharov also rationalized his failure to volunteer by convincing himself that the grief his parents would experience if he were killed in combat would be too painful for them to endure.1 In his memoirs Sakharov implicitly acknowledges how self-serving his reasoning was when he asks rhetorically whether there was anyone of his age and gender in the Soviet Union in 1941 who could not truthfully have made the same claim. But he never explicitly apologized for his failure to serve and in his memoirs largely confines himself to 1. Sakharov, Memoirs, 41–42. Expanding Horizons 19 describing how he felt when the issue arose; in his words, he had “no desire to rush [his] fate, and preferred to let events take their course.”2 Still, now that his country was under attack, Sakharov wanted to be socially useful, to contribute in some fashion to the war effort. Accordingly, he volunteered to repair radio equipment for the Red Army in a workshop in Moscow run by a professor he knew from MGU. When he realized that he lacked the necessary training for the task, he switched to another workshop, also directed by an MGU professor, where he devised a magnetic probe for detecting shrapnel in wounded horses. He also helped to extinguish incendiary bombs that were still burning after German air raids over the Soviet capital.3 Despite his aversion to military service, Sakharov believed the war was just. Stalin’s Terror, as already mentioned, had not made a great impression on him, and the various actions Stalin took in foreign policy that were arguably immoral or in some way harmful to the national interest Sakharov barely mentions or ignores entirely in his memoirs. Of the secret protocol attached to the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, which enabled Germany to attack Poland without the fear of Soviet intervention, Sakharov convincingly pleads ignorance. And about events he was surely aware of in the twenty-two months between the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi invasion—the partition of Poland, the war in Finland, and the absorption of the Baltic States and Bessarabia into the Soviet Union—Sakharov claims persuasively that they did not seem to him indicative of a larger systemic inadequacy or failure: “At the time very...