The moral complexity of Sakharov

Andrei Sarkharov was an unusually multifaceted public figure. To put him in an American context, imagine some impossible hybrid of Richard Feynman and Jesse Jackson. He made seminal contributions to the inflation hypothesis in cosmology associated with Alan Guth; he fathered the Soviet H-bomb; and in the early '60s, he was so highly regarded by the Soviet leadership that his disagreement with the science policy of Khrushchev played a part in Brezhnev's engineering of Khrushchev's overthrow.

Most famously, he was the leader of the Soviet dissident movement, insofar as it had a leader, in the 1970s and '80s. For his work on human rights and nuclear disarmament, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

Because Sakharov was roughly on the West's side in the struggle against "the Evil Empire," it is tempting to put Sakharov in soft focus, casting him as a kind of saint battling the minions of the KGB. This is to underestimate the continuing unclubbability of his moral stances. When, in 1978, a bomb exploded in a Moscow subway station, killing seven, Sakharov stood up for the rights of the supposed terrorists, calling into question the investigation of the crime, and he opposed their death sentences, as he opposed all death sentences. His position on the recent detention of more than 1,300 Middle Eastern men in the United States would certainly have been as unpopular with Americans as his 1978 stand proved to be with the Russians.

Given the protean nature of Sakharov's life, his ideal biographer should be correspondingly capacious. Richard Lourie seems to have all the qualifications needed for writing the first biography of Sakharov in English. Lourie knew the great man, for one thing. He translated his memoirs into English. Moreover, Lourie, as a journalist, has written several books about everyday aspects of Soviet life. Lourie lived and breathed the claustrophobic atmosphere of Brezhnev's leaden-age Russia, in which the great utopian experiment spiraled toward its corrupt and drunken end.

Unfortunately, Lourie's portrait of Sakharov does not measure up in several important areas. He gives astonishingly little attention to Sakharov's scientific genius, barely summarizing a few papers, and never places Sakharov in the context of 20th-century physics, where he holds an honorable place.

His account of Soviet defense thinking in the period in which Sakharov was most influential, the 1950s and early '60s, is makeshift, with several astonishing lacunas; most notably, he doesn't mention the American overflights of Soviet air space ordered by Eisenhower, surely a salient factor in the projects Sakharov was working on.

Although Eisenhower stopped the overflights after the U-2 incident, they played a major role in strengthening the Soviet conviction that American long-range planning involved a potential first strike. To understand the politics of Sakharov's opposition to further nuclear testing in 1961, which was overridden by Khrushchev, this context needs to be fleshed out in much more detail.

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