Galileo's Children: Science, Sakharov, and the Power of the State. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 3, 1990 by Russ Braley

LAST YEAR Andrei Sakharov -this "mildest and most good-natured man'-who had helped develop Soviet thermonuclear weapons, died of a heart attack at home in Moscow. That day he had issued a call at the People's Congress of Mr. Braley was a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News from 1955 to 1975. He is the author of Bad News: The Foreign Policy of the New York Times Deputies "to create a formal opposition to the Soviet Communist Party."

Tens of thousands attended his funeral, where Mikhail Gorbachev consoled his widow and praised the 1975 Nobel Peace laureate. Some of those present had shortened Sakharov's life, exiling him for seven years, goading him into hunger strikes by denying exit visas to his relatives, and then force-feeding him.

Sakharov, like Galileo, was a member of what author George Bailey calls the virtuosi, those so gifted that they are highly rewarded, so long as they conform. Sakharov accepted MarxismLeninism, even Stalinism, as he worked with Igor Tamm using prisoner labor to build thermonuclear weapons to rival U.S. nuclear power.

The Manhattan Project built the first atomic bombs in July 1945. By August 1949 the Soviets had the fission bomb, thanks to two spy networks working separately in the United States. In 1950, Tamm and Sakharov momentarily achieved controlled fission. Only a few months after the U.S. tested an unwieldy fusion device in November 1952, the Soviets tested the Tamm-Sakharov H-bomb, putting them ahead.

As Mr. Bailey recounts it, Sakharov underwent his metamorphosis in stages. He defended the hydrogen bomb as necessary to stabilize the balance of power, although he warned of the effects of the H-bomb test. But in 1958, as the Americans, Soviets, and British approached negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear testing, Sakharov protested a spurt of nuclear tests aimed at establishing a Soviet advantage before talks could pre-empt further development. In 1961, as the Berlin Wall went up, he again protested to Khrushchev the Soviet resumption of testing, which violated a gentlemen's agreement not to test while negotiating.

Sakharov abandoned the establishment in 1968 when Warsaw Pact troops crushed the Prague Spring. He defended dissidents who were sent to the Gulag for protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia, a breach that cost him most of his privileges. In 1970, a year after his first wife's death from cancer, he married Yelena Bonner, whose family included Jews and had recorded generations of persecution under czars and commissars.

During Sakharov's earlier life of privilege, his antipode, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had fought in World War II, nearly died as a zek in the Gulag, miraculously recovered from untreated cancer, survived harsh conditions of exile, and by the mid Seventies had been thrown out of the Soviet Union, eventually to become a near hermit in Vermont while continuing to write prodigiously. Mr. Bailey is exceptionally well positioned to understand the Solzhenitsyn-Sakharov relationship. Sakharov's autobiography and the memoirs of Yelena Bonner are likely to be the cornerstones for understanding Sakharov's life. But Mr. Bailey has been up to his ears in Russians for 45 years, since he interrogated Russian POWs freed from the Germans. They were sent home to death or imprisonment, a traumatic event for him. Fluent in Russian, he helped found Kontinent, the magazine for Eastern-bloc dissidents. He has lived with the nuances of the antagonisms-and mutual respect-between Solzhenitsyn, the fire-breathing antiCommunist for decades, and Sakharov, the late-bloomer who step by step discarded Stalinism, Marxism, Leninism, and finally socialism. In 1968, when Moscow was threatening Czechoslovakia's Communist reformers, Sakharov wrote "Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," a denunciation of Soviet Communist history and an exposition of his convergence theory: because of the common interests between the West and the Soviet Union, their political systems would gradually grow nearer to each other. The New York Times published the essay over three full pages on July 22. A month later Soviet airborne troops and tanks crushed Communist reformers in Czechoslovakia, and Sakharov renounced his own idea of convergence. Solzhenitsyn, of course, had never been disposed to accept convergence in the first place.

Sakharov's essay suggested to Mr. Bailey that its author was the standard-bearer of free thought in the Soviet Union, although the contradictions of "convergence" had leaped out at him. He remarks that the Russians, "for a long time nomadic on soil more fit for grazing than for planting, had a penchant for living by ideas alone that divorced them from reality. . . . As a result, the Russian was much given to social-or, rather, socialist-day dreaming. They had no Renaissance, no Reformation, no Age of Reason."

Yet, for the Russians, with their religious cast of mind, Western capitalism was not a shining goal either. The boisterous frivolity of the American model," Mr. Bailey writes, "was enough to disconcert and disgust the Russians, whose seriousness in most matters has always bordered on manic-depressive."