PILGRIM OF CONSCIENCE

By U.S. standards, the seventh-floor Moscow apartment would be considered painfully modest. A narrow entrance corridor leads to a tiny bathroom, a toilet, a minuscule kitchen; two other small, book-cluttered rooms serve variously as bedrooms, living space and study areas. Yet if there is an epicenter to the Soviet Union's fragmented human rights movement, it is this dingy apartment. For it is the home of Physicist Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov, 55, guiding spirit of the harassed, hunted dissidents of the U.S.S.R.

There Sakharov welcomes Western journalists to issue yet another appeal to world opinion for Soviet political prisoners. There he counsels and often gives needed sanctuary to other colleagues in dissent. Tall, stoop-shouldered, quick to smile, his gray hair a fringe around his bald crown, Sakharov looks, in these conversations, more like a genial professor holding forth at a home seminar than a man in the process of defying the world's most powerful Communist state. Indeed, the odds of winning his challenge seem so impossible that he sometimes calls himself, with self-deprecating humor, Andrei Blazhenny--a Russian word that connotes both sainthood and madness.

The son of a Moscow physics teacher and textbook author, Sakharov recalls his early family life as "cultured and close." From childhood, he says, "I lived in an atmosphere of decency, mutual help and tact, a liking for work and respect for the mastery of one's chosen profession." Young Andrei lost no time in mastering his: by 1942, having graduated with honors in physics from Moscow State University, he went to work in the war industry. After World War II, he studied with the theoretical physicist (and later Nobel laureate) Igor. Tamm. Soon he was at work on the Kremlin's No. 1 priority project: development of the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb. "When I began working on this terrible weapon, I felt subjectively that I was working for peace, that my work would help foster a balance of power," Sakharov recalled years later. "It was a natural point of view shared by many of us, especially since we actually had no choice in the matter."

Sakharov's top-secret assignment also included research on industrial uses for thermonuclear energy with Mentor Tamm. There was little life but science--and the mandatory state "supervision" that went with it. For all of the 18 years (1950-68) that he held his top-level security clearance, Sakharov was never without the shadow of a bodyguard, even when he slept or went swimming. There were, however, compensations. He won the Stalin Prize and was thrice awarded the country's highest civilian medal, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. He was the youngest member ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was given a suburban dacha, a sizable Moscow apartment and the princely salary (by Soviet standards) of $26,500 a year.

But in the late 1950s, Sakharov began taking his first tentative steps on his pilgrimage of conscience. Disturbed by the dangers of nuclear fallout contamination, he protested a series of 1958 Soviet tests. Then, in 1961, Sakharov personally pleaded with Soviet Party Boss Nikita Khrushchev to reverse the decision to break a worldwide moratorium on atmospheric testing. Khrushchev, who in his memoirs would call Sakharov "a crystal of morality," was unmoved by the appeal. When another effort in 1962 failed to halt a test blast, Sakharov pressed a nuclear weapons official to consider a limited ban (on air, sea and space testing) that would avoid contamination. How much Sakharov's initiative helped is not known, but that formula became the basis of the Partial Test Ban Treaty signed in Moscow in 1963.

Sakharov identified himself as a loyal socialist when he wrote his keystone 1968 essay, Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, in which he argued that only a convergence of the capitalist West and the socialist East could avoid the destruction of mankind. The book won him celebrity abroad, but at home --where it circulated in samizdat, the underground press--his security clearance was abruptly withdrawn.

His involvement with dissidents steadily accelerated: he signed petitions for the release of arrested intellectuals, stood vigil at political trials. In 1970, with Physicist Valentin Turchin and Historian Roy Medvedev, he issued another manifesto, this one harshly critical of internal Soviet policies. By then a widower (his first wife died in 1969), he met dark-eyed Yelena Bonner while standing vigil at a trial in late

1970. Half Armenian, half Jewish, Yelena Bonner was a political firebrand. Her father George had been taken away and shot during the Stalinist purge of the '30s, her mother Ruth sentenced to a harrowing eleven years in the bleak concentration camp of Karaganda, in the barren steppes of Kazakhstan, where she had to dig out her own underground shelter. Since their marriage in

1971, Yelena has been Andrei Sakharov's constant partner in protest. It was she, while outside the Soviet Union for an eye operation, who accepted Sakharov's Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, after the Kremlin denied the new laureate an exit visa to make the journey.

Sadly, though he has grown close to Yelena's children, Sakharov's own three children have virtually disowned him. The physicist has responded only with generosity. He has given them his prestigious Moscow apartment and his dacha. Sakharov is casually oblivious to other material possessions as well. These days most of his $440 monthly stipend from the Academy of Sciences --the one source of income that endures--goes to the families of imprisoned dissidents. He regrets that in 1968 he gave away his accumulated $153,000 savings to cancer research and the Red Cross, believing it could be better used now to help persecuted critics of the regime.

But he has given those critics a much greater gift already. "Sakharov has saved the democratic movement in the Soviet Union," says Vadim Belotserkovsky, a dissident Soviet journalist who came to the West in 1973. "The whole movement might have died if it had been led only by people who lacked international prestige." That Andrei Sakharov still has--now more than ever. It is one weapon that he is not afraid to use.

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