The moral complexity of Sakharov

Sakharov was born into the Moscow intelligentsia, a cultural niche that had formed in opposition to Czarist oppression and retained vestiges of that contrarianism even under the incomparably crueler Stalin. His father, Dmitri, was a physicist who contented himself with writing popular science books. Andrei was nicknamed "the Martian" as a young man for his apparent unworldliness. Like many physicists, he was occupied by matters that were difficult to express in mixed company, such as discovering a mechanism to create the fusion of the nuclei of hydrogen atoms. But somehow Sakharov did get married. His first wife, Klava, is a shadowy figure in Lourie's biography, gradually disappearing in a haze of housewifely chores, childrearing, and bickering with her mother.

Somehow, Sakharov also picked up political convictions. In 1948, with Stalin still in charge and the fearsome Beria acting as the Soviet Himmler, Sakharov turned down an offer to join the Communist Party by explaining that he disapproved of the arrests of innocent people and the excesses of collectivization. His boldness was not punished. This little anecdote demonstrates the quasi-immunity accorded to nuclear-weapons scientists in the Soviet system. Up until 1979, when Sakharov was stripped of his state titles and exiled to Gorky, he was still somewhat protected by the awe and need of the state.

Lourie is most comfortable with the second part of Sakharov's life, starting with his break with his masters in the Kremlin in 1965 over the first big trial of dissidents. The sweeter strain in Sakharov's story is his often tested love for his second wife, Yelena Bonner, a remarkable dissident sprung from the Leningrad intelligentsia (a more cosmopolitan group than Moscow's).

Bonner revitalized Sakharov, taking him, it seems, to every trial of every dissident in the country, expanding his network of contacts with artists and writers, and forming a bond with him that others couldn't penetrate. In the macho culture of the dissidents, their unusually close bond was sometimes misunderstood as Sakharov's uxoriousness.

This part of Sakharov's life enrolls him in the list of 20th-century heroes. Lourie, explaining Sakharov's gradual intellectual maturity as a spokesman for civil society, quotes an elegant phrase of Chekhov's about squeezing the slave out of one's blood drop by drop. Disenchantment is a painful process, especially when you have created the bombs that keep the powers that be in place. Sakharov had the courage to go through it in public.

Sakharov's life is proof of the fact that, among conventional thinkers, idealism and realism are confused. In the midst of the Soviet morass, a physicist calling for a civil society that respected the basic rights of its citizens seemed doomed and marginal, while nothing seemed as concrete as Brezhnev's tanks, missiles, and ubiquitous secret police. Yet by 1986, when Gorbachev called Sakharov in his Gorky apartment and lifted the sentence of exile, the balance of power had shifted decisively, although secretly, to Sakharov's side.

Sakharov, as a scientist, recognized that there is a structural contradiction to being a great totalitarian power. Such a power can persevere only by keeping its own society and the societies around it closed, but the power to achieve that repression can come only from a scientific and technological structure that withers in the absence of the open flow of information. It isn't only a moral victory to squeeze the slave out of one's blood. It is a historical necessity.

• Roger Gathman is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas.

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