The Silencing of Sakharov

For "the conscience of Russia," internal exile to a closed city

Every Tuesday for the past decade, the Soviet Academy of Sciences had dispatched an official car to pick up Physicist Andrei Sakharov and take him to one of the academy's weekly seminars. Last week, as his Volga sedan turned into Leninsky Prospekt toward the imposing 19th century academy building, uniformed militiamen halted the automobile, seized Sakharov and hustled him to the Moscow prosecutor's office. The 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner was under arrest, as the Kremlin at long last moved to silence the Soviet Union's most celebrated dissident.

Deputy Chief Prosecutor Alexander Rekunkov read Sakharov a decree issued by President Leonid Brezhnev; it stripped Sakharov of all the honors he had been awarded as the father of 1 Soviet hydrogen bomb, including three orders of Hero of Socialist Labor, the U.S.S.R.'s highest civilian decoration. A stickler for legality, Sakharov coolly complained that Brezhnev's signature on the document had been typed and not handwritten Sakharov was told that he would be exiled to the city of Gorky (formerly Nizhni Novgorod) for "subversive activities," and then was allowed to phone his wife. Given two hours, Yelena Sakharov packed up a few clothes and her ailing husband's heart medicine. By nightfall, police had whisked the couple aboard a Tu-134 turbojet on a regularly scheduled flight to Gorky, a military and industrial center on the Volga River, 260 miles east of Moscow. The Sakharovs have been sent to an area that is off limits to foreigners, and the Kremlin hopes they have been effectively cut off from the Western world.

Sakharov thus becomes the first well-known human casualty of the cold war that has erupted between Moscow and Washington since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He had dared to speak out openly against his country's coup in Kabul. Always deeply fearful of thermonuclear war, the physicist had called upon the United Nations and the U.S.S.R. to arrange for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. In a statement to foreign journalists, Sakharov said: "The situation is so tragic, dramatic and dangerous that we must all concentrate on how to prevent a chain reaction that could have unpredictable consequences for mankind in this nuclear age." After it became evident that the Soviets had no intention of withdrawing their troops, Sakharov urged all nations to boycott the Olympic Games in Moscow.

That was too much for the Kremlin. Sakharov's earlier critiques of Soviet totalitarianism, and his impassioned pleas br political prisoners in the Gulag had long enraged the Soviet leaders. But they had been reluctant to arrest so famous a dissident for fear of jeopardizing the advantages of detente, including trade with the U.S. After the invasion of Afghanistan and Washington's punitive embargoes, the Soviets felt free to put Sakharov away. As one top State Department analyst explained the arrest: "Moscow figured there wasn't much more to lose because there was nothing much more we could do to them." The Soviet action was a direct rebuke to President Carter, who had written Sakharov a letter of personal support in 1977. Above all, it was an unmistakable warning to dissidents, human rights advocates and all libertarians in the Soviet Union that detente had been halted at home, just as it had ended abroad.

In Moscow, the dwindling ranks of dissidents still at large mourned the loss of their leader. Said Literary Scholar Lev Kopelev: "Sakharov incarnates the conscience of Russia." There were demonstrations in several Western capitals, where governments expressed outrage at the treatment of Sakharov--as did a number of Communist leaders. The White House said that the Soviet action was "a blow to the aspiration of all mankind to establish respect for human rights." Italy's President Alessandro Pertini sent a cable of protest to Brezhnev. The West German government demanded that the Sakharovs be allowed to return to Moscow. France's president of the National Assembly, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, cut short his official visit to the Soviet Union and returned to Paris in indignation over the exile. "As a guest of the Soviet authorities I cannot interfere in internal affairs," he said. "But my own moral principles will not allow me to remain silent."

The Soviets did show a certain restraint by merely banishing Sakharov, instead of putting him on trial. Said one State Department official: "Being exiled to Gorky is a little like being sent to Detroit; it ain't great but it ain't so bad." Still, the Soviet press attacks on Sakharov suggested that he might ultimately be charged with high treason. The government newspaper Izvestia, for example, claimed that the physicist had "repeatedly blurted out things that any state protects as an important secret" to U.S. diplomats and correspondents. Some Soviet officials, however, assured Western journalists that Sakharov would not stand trial and might even be able to continue his work as a scientist.

Sakharov's banishment may be the signal for an intensification of a domestic crackdown that has paralleled the hardening of Soviet foreign policy. According to a report by Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, more than 40 Soviet dissidents have been arrested or tried in the past three months. These have included religious leaders, Jewish "refuseniks" and activists for the rights of such national groups as the Ukrainians and the Lithuanians. Two weeks ago, Father Dmitri Dudko, 57, was arrested and imprisoned in Moscow's Lubyanka Prison. As revered a figure among Russian Orthodox Christians as Sakharov is among his secular adherents, Dudko is an eloquent preacher whose sermons circulate widely from hand to hand. One day after Sakharov was flown to Gorky, two contributors to the underground magazine Poiski (Quest) were arrested in Moscow; a third dissident, in the town of Vladimir, was detained for questioning by police.

These new victims of Soviet authoritarianism will miss Sakharov; for more than a decade he has tirelessly called the world's attention to oppression in his country and castigated the Soviet regime for its aggressive policies. Still, Sakharov is not a man to give up easily. Two days after his banishment he phoned several friends in Moscow and issued an appeal to "all people of good will, including sportsmen and sports lovers" to demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and to support human rights everywhere.

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