Years In Exile

By Andrei Sakharov

As the 1960s drew on, Andrei Sakharov inched toward a break with the regime he had served so ably as the master builder of its thermonuclear-weapons program. His convictions and the growing repression in the U.S.S.R. during the Brezhnev years moved him to identify ever more closely with dissent in his own country and abroad. In 1966 he took part in his first human rights demonstration, a one-minute silent protest in Pushkin Square. In 1967 he wrote a letter to Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev defending imprisoned dissidents. That prompted an angry reaction from Efim Slavsky, head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which supervised the Soviet nuclear program. "Sakharov is a good scientist," said Slavsky. "But as a politician he's muddleheaded, and we'll be taking measures." Those included a pay cut of nearly 50% and a demotion at the Installation, the secret "atomic city" east of Moscow, where he was then working on the peaceful uses of nuclear explosions. But in the following year, 1968, Sakharov definitively broke with the Soviet system, and far harsher measures were soon to come.

By the beginning of 1968, I felt a growing compulsion to speak out on the fundamental issues of our age. I was influenced by my life experience and a feeling of personal responsibility, reinforced by the part I'd played in the development of the hydrogen bomb, the special knowledge I'd gained about thermonuclear warfare, my bitter struggle to ban nuclear testing and my familiarity with the Soviet system. I hoped that such notions as an open society, convergence of the capitalist and communist systems, and world government might ease the tragic crisis of our age. In 1968 I took my decisive step by publishing Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.

My work on Reflections happened to coincide with the Prague Spring. What so many of us in the socialist countries had been dreaming of finally seemed to be coming to pass in Czechoslovakia: democracy, including freedom of expression and abolition of censorship; reform of the economic and social systems; curbs on the security forces; and full disclosure of the crimes of the Stalin era (the "Gottwald era" in Czechoslovakia). Even from afar, we were caught up in all the hopes of the catchwords "Prague Spring" and "socialism with a human face."

Events in the Soviet Union echoed those in Prague but on a much reduced scale. In the campaign for the dissidents Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov and Vera Lashkova (who were tried in January 1968), more than 1,000 signatures -- an extraordinary number under Soviet conditions -- were collected, mainly from the intelligentsia. A few years earlier, no one would have dreamed of publicly defending such "hostile elements." That and other efforts were a sort of Prague Spring in miniature. They frightened the KGB into taking tough countermeasures: firing, blacklisting, public reprimand, expulsion from the party. After 1968, when everyone understood the consequences, people refused to lend their names to such initiatives.

To my shame, I must admit that the campaign simply passed me by, just as had the 1964 banishment of poet Joseph Brodsky from Leningrad and the 1965 arrests of the dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.

Around the end of January 1968, a friend suggested that I write an article on the role of the intelligentsia in today's world. The idea appealed to me, and soon I was writing at the Installation from 7 p.m. to midnight. My wife Klava was ambivalent: she knew full well the potential consequences for us and our three children, but she allowed me complete freedom of action. By this time her health was beginning to deteriorate.

My essay laid a theoretical foundation for virtually the entire range of my future public activities. I wanted to alert readers to the grave perils threatening the human race -- thermonuclear extinction, ecological catastrophe, famine, an uncontrolled population explosion, alienation and dogmatic distortion of our conception of reality.

I argued for convergence, for a rapprochement of the socialist and capitalist systems that could eliminate or substantially reduce these dangers. Economic, social and ideological convergence should bring about a scientifically governed, democratic, pluralistic society free of intolerance and dogmatism, a humanitarian society that would care for the earth and its future and would embody the positive features of both systems.

I wrote about thermonuclear missiles -- their enormous destructive power, their relatively low cost, the difficulty of defending against them. I wrote about the crimes of Stalinism and the need to expose them fully and the vital importance of freedom of opinion and democracy. I stressed the value of progress but warned that it must be scientifically managed and not left to chance. I outlined a program for mankind's future; my vision was somewhat Utopian, but I remain convinced that the exercise was worthwhile.

Later on, life -- and Lusia ((Elena Bonner, his second wife)) -- would teach me to pay more attention to individual victims of injustice, and a further step followed: recognition that human rights and an open society are fundamental to international confidence, security and progress.

I prefaced Reflections with an epigraph taken from Goethe's Faust:

Of freedom and of life he only is deserving

Who every day must conquer them anew.

The heroic romanticism of these lines echoes my own sense of life as both wonderful and tragic. Another aspect of the truth that complements Goethe's metaphor is contained in these lines by the postwar poet Alexander Mezhirov,

I lie in a trench under fire.

A man enters his home, from the cold.

Mezhirov understands that heroic exploits are not ends in themselves but are worthwhile only insofar as they enable other people to lead normal, peaceful lives. Not everyone need spend time in the trenches. The meaning of life is life itself: the daily routine that demands its own unobtrusive heroism. Goethe's lines are often read as an imperative call to revolutionary struggle, but there is nothing peremptory or fanatical in them once they are stripped of their poetic imagery. Reflections rejected all extremes, the intransigence of revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. It called for compromise and for progress moderated by enlightened conservatism and caution. Marx notwithstanding, evolution is a better "locomotive of history" than revolution: the "battle" I had in mind was nonviolent.

"For God's Sake, Don't Do That"

I flew to Moscow on April 1, bringing a typed copy of the essay. Historian Roy Medvedev came to see me that evening, and I exchanged it for the final chapters of his book on Stalin. Medvedev showed my essay to friends (which I had given him permission to do), and he passed on their comments. After making a few changes, I gave the manuscript back to Medvedev. He was going to produce a dozen or more carbon copies. Some, he warned me, might end up abroad. I replied that I had taken that into account. (We were communicating in writing to foil eavesdroppers.)

On May 18, I paid a call on Yuli Khariton, scientific director of the Installation. I mentioned that I was writing an essay on war and peace, ecology and freedom of expression. Khariton asked what I intended to do with it. "I'll give it to samizdat," I answered, referring to the underground network that had sprung up for circulating dissident writing. "For God's sake, don't do that," he said. "It's too late to stop it now," I confessed.

Early in June I traveled with Khariton to the Installation in his personal railroad car. After supper Khariton said, "((KGB chief Yuri)) Andropov called me in. His agents have been finding copies of your essay all over the place -- it's circulating illegally, and it will cause a lot of harm if it gets abroad. Andropov asked me to talk to you. You ought to withdraw it from circulation."

"Why don't you take a look at it?" I suggested. Khariton retired to his compartment to do so.

"Well, what do you think?" I inquired the next day.

"It's awful."

"The style?"

Khariton grimaced. "No, not the style. It's the content that's awful!"

"The contents reflect my beliefs. It's too late to withdraw it."

In mid-June Andrei Amalrik, who wrote Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? and as a result was imprisoned for five years for defaming the Soviet state, gave a copy of Reflections to a Dutch correspondent. On July 10, a few days after returning to the Installation and exactly seven years after my clash with Khrushchev over nuclear testing, I turned on the BBC or VOA and heard my name. The announcer reported that on July 6 the Dutch newspaper Het Parool had published my article.

The die was cast. That evening I had the most profound feeling of satisfaction. The following day I was due to fly to Moscow but stopped at my office at 9 a.m. and told Khariton, "My article's been published abroad."

"I knew it would happen" was all Khariton could say. He looked crushed. Two hours later, I left for the airfield. I was never to set foot in my office again.

A Dangerous Muddle

Toward the end of July, Slavsky summoned me to the ministry. "Party secretaries have been calling from all over the country," he said, "demanding firm measures to put a stop to counterrevolutionary propaganda in my ministry." Of Reflections, he said, "It's a dangerous muddle. You criticize the leaders' privileges -- you've enjoyed the same privileges. Those who bear immense responsibilities, difficult burdens, deserve some advantages. It's for the cause.

"What you wrote about convergence is utopian nonsense. Capitalism can't be made humane. Their social programs and employee stock plans aren't steps toward socialism. And there's no trace of state capitalism in the U.S.S.R. We'll never give up the advantages of our system, and capitalists aren't interested in your convergence either.

"Without a strong hand, we could never have rebuilt our economy after the war or broken the American atomic monopoly -- you yourself helped do that. You have no moral right to judge our generation -- Stalin's generation -- for its mistakes, for its brutality; you're now enjoying the fruits of our labor and our sacrifices.

"Convergence is a dream. We've got to be strong, stronger than the capitalists -- then there'll be peace. If the imperialists use nuclear weapons, we'll retaliate at once with everything we've got and destroy every target necessary to ensure victory."

So our response would be an immediate, all-out nuclear attack on enemy cities and industry as well as on military targets! Most alarming, Slavsky ignored the question of what, other than military force, might prevent war. I pointed out that Reflections warned against exactly the kind of approach he was taking, in which life-and-death decisions are made by people who have usurped power (and privilege) without accepting the checks of free opinion and open debate. I raised the issue of Czechoslovakia: Was there any guarantee against Soviet intervention? Slavsky said that had been ruled out by the Central Committee, provided there was no overt counterrevolutionary violence, as occurred in Hungary.

A couple of weeks after this, Khariton told me that Slavsky opposed my return to the Installation. "You're to remain in Moscow for the time being," he said. This was tantamount to being fired.

On July 22 Reflections was published in the New York Times and later was widely reprinted. The International Publishers Association said that in 1968-69 more than 18 million copies were published around the world, putting me in third place after Mao Zedong and Lenin and ahead of Georges Simenon and Agatha Christie.

Reflections was well received by liberal intellectuals abroad. A kindred voice had reached them from behind the Iron Curtain -- and from a member of a profession that in America was dominated by "hawks." On the other hand, my criticism of Soviet society appealed to conservatives, and everyone seemed pleased by my comments on the environment, my humanitarian concerns and my scenarios for the future.

The essay was widely read in the U.S.S.R. as well -- samizdat was flourishing -- but many people were punished for circulating Reflections. A driver from Dushanbe who had mailed my essay to a friend was sentenced to three years in a labor camp for defaming the Soviet system.

On Aug. 21 newspapers reported that Warsaw Pact troops had entered Czechoslovakia and were "fulfilling their international duty." The invasion had begun. The hopes inspired by the Prague Spring collapsed. And "real socialism" displayed its true colors, its stagnation, its inability to tolerate pluralistic or democratic tendencies, not just in the Soviet Union but even in neighboring countries. The abolition of censorship and free elections were regarded as too risky and contagious.

The international repercussions of the invasion were enormous. For millions of former supporters, it destroyed their faith in the Soviet system and its potential for reform.

On Aug. 25, to protest the invasion, seven activists sat for a minute near the spot in Red Square where prisoners had been executed in prerevolutionary Russia. Then KGB agents began beating them. All were arrested (they were quickly sent to labor camps, into exile or, in one case, to a prison psychiatric hospital). Minutes later, cars carrying Alexander Dubcek and other Czechoslovak leaders who had been brought to Moscow by force shot out of the Kremlin's Spassky Gate and raced across Red Square.

Acts of "Hooliganism"

Sakharov's wife Klava died in 1969 of stomach cancer. After a while he found himself working closely with Elena Bonner ("Lusia"), a vigorous human rights activist of Jewish and Armenian origin. "Since August 1971," he writes, "Lusia and I have followed a common path." In January 1972 they were married, and attending the ceremony were half a dozen KGB men in identical black suits. "I'd guess that they were demonstrating their disapproval," notes Sakharov. Soon the authorities were stepping up the pressure on him and Bonner to cease speaking out.

After the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, I joined a silent protest in front of the Lebanese embassy in Moscow. Lusia was ill, but her son Alexei, her daughter Tanya and Tanya's husband Efrem Yankelevich were with me. We were all carted to a drunk tank by the KGB. A month later, Tanya was expelled from Moscow University. Lusia's children had now become hostages to my public activity. Their access to education and jobs would be restricted or blocked. Threats of arrest, imprisonment, physical violence and even murder became a genuine menace. Eventually, the children were forced to emigrate.

On Oct. 26, 1973, the trial of Cronid Lubarsky, an astrophysicist charged with distributing the Chronicle of Human Events, the underground publication, began in Noginsk, a town near Moscow. A dozen of us tried to enter the courtroom but were shoved back outside by a wedge of KGB agents. Arms were twisted; some people were trampled. Lusia marched up to the senior KGB officer and slapped his face.

Two weeks later, Lusia was summoned before the Moscow party committee. Could she explain her acts of "hooliganism" in Noginsk? Such behavior, she was told, raised doubts about her continued membership in the party. The threat of expulsion was meant to intimidate her. Instead, Lusia placed her party card on the table, along with a statement she had prepared asking to be removed from the ranks of the party. It was an enormously effective stroke.

"Why are you so hostile to the Soviet system?" a committee member asked. "It's given you everything."

"No one gave me anything. I fought in the war, nearly lost my sight; I worked night and day." Lusia had broken with the party for good.

Not long afterward, her son Alexei was rejected by Moscow University. He was an excellent student, winning a prize in the math Olympics and graduating first in his class. But during his junior year at a new school he refused to attend the standard "Lenin class" that led to automatic Komsomol ((Communist Party youth organization)) membership. I urged him not to jeopardize his future for a minor formality. Alexei answered, "Andrei Dmitrievich, you allow yourself to be honest. Why do you advise me to behave differently?"

We later learned that one Moscow University examiner had received a direct order to flunk him: "He won't be accepted anyway, and you'd just be fired." Alexei's story is not unusual. Anti-Semitic discrimination in university admissions is part of a deliberate policy of squeezing Jews out of the country's intellectual establishment. The Central Committee is said to have asked Mstislav Keldysh, then president of the Academy of Sciences, when its Jewish membership would fall to zero. It would take about 20 years to solve the "problem," he replied. I must note that Keldysh did not reduce the number of Jews in the institutes he directed and was not anti-Semitic.

Notoriety at Home and a Nobel in Oslo

On Aug. 15, 1973, Mikhail Malyarov, the Soviet Deputy Procurator-General, telephoned and asked me to come see him. At his office on Pushkin Street, Malyarov said that meeting with the foreign press, as I had been doing in behalf of dissidents, could be regarded as a violation of my obligation not to disclose state secrets. To make it clear that I was determined to go on speaking out, I decided to hold a major press conference.

Some 30 Western correspondents crowded into our apartment on Aug. 21. I said I supported detente, since it reduced the risk of war, but added that caution, unity and firmness of purpose were necessary on the part of the West as it embarked on a new and more complex relationship with the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union, I said, is a country "behind a mask," a closed, totalitarian society capable of dangerously unpredictable actions. Detente would promote international security only if the West avoided letting the U.S.S.R. achieve military superiority and at the same time tried to promote a more open Soviet society. I reminded my listeners that the ingrained conservatism and inertia of the Soviet system militated against any rapid change. A few hours after the conference, Western radio stations and newspapers began carrying reports.

On Aug. 28, newspapers carried a letter signed by 40 academicians denouncing me for actions that "discredit the good name of Soviet science." It marked the beginning of a press campaign against me that included the obligatory letters from scientific research institutes, writers' and artists' unions, individual scientists, authors, physicians, war veterans, steelworkers, miners and milkmaids.

The writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was also included in many of these attacks. The vital truths expressed in his extraordinary literary works and keen polemics had made him the object of virulent party and KGB hatred for several years; now there were claims that I alone, or the two of us, were engaged in a slanderous assault on Soviet society and its guarantees of work, free medical care and an unrivaled educational system. The main charge was that we were enemies of detente, working against peace.

This grave accusation had an insidious plausibility to believers in Soviet foreign policy's pacific aims, the selflessness of our aid to national liberation movements and the treachery of the imperialists who surrounded us with military installations. If we stand for peace, then the more missiles, nuclear warheads and nerve gas we stockpile, the safer everyone will be. Our Western opponents employ exactly the same line of argument.

In response to the press campaign against me, Valentin Turchin of the Institute of Applied Mathematics issued an open letter in my support. His defense was made at a heavy cost: he was denounced at a staff meeting, demoted and finally fired. Turchin later supported himself by tutoring private students until his immigration to the U.S. in 1977.

On Sept. 16 the physicist Yuri Orlov wrote an open letter to Brezhnev suggesting economic and political reforms and offering a spirited defense of me; like Turchin, he soon found himself out of a job. In 1976 he helped organize the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, part of an organization set up by Soviet dissidents to monitor human rights violations, but two years later he was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp and five of internal exile for anti-Soviet activities. He suffered extremely harsh treatment. At the end of Orlov's trial, a scuffle broke out when his friends were barred from entering the courtroom to hear the verdict. I hit one KGB agent; Lusia, receiving a sharp blow to the neck from another, smacked him back, but as she was being shoved into a police car, she accidentally punched the local police chief. She said later, "I was right to hit the KGB agent and don't regret it, but I struck the police chief by mistake, and I'd like to apologize to him."

On Sept. 5, Solzhenitsyn dispatched his article "Peace and Violence" for publication abroad, warning the West about the nature and extent of state violence in the U.S.S.R. Just before its publication, he added the proposal that I be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "indefatigable, devoted (and personally dangerous) opposition to systematic state violence."

On Oct. 9, 1975, Lusia and I -- she in Italy after a hard-fought battle to permit her to leave the country to treat her glaucoma; I in Moscow -- heard the news that I had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The official reaction in the U.S.S.R. was one of intense irritation tinged with nervousness. I was denied permission to go to Norway for the Nobel award ceremonies on the grounds that I was "an individual possessing knowledge of state secrets." Lusia accepted the award for me in Oslo in December.

Shanghaied and Banished

Sakharov was able to continue his cat-and-mouse game with the authorities through the 1970s at least partly because of his world stature as a human rights activist and because his arrest would have strained Soviet-U.S. relations. But with the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, those relations deteriorated catastrophically, and the state soon moved against Sakharov.

As 1980 began, Afghanistan cast a long shadow. Increased latitude was granted to the KGB because of the war and possibly in anticipation of the forthcoming Olympics, as evidenced in a series of arrests.

On Jan. 17, Charles Bierbauer, an ABC television correspondent, and his crew arrived for an interview. Afterward I accompanied them to their car. I was surprised by the number of KGB agents in the area and by something peculiar in the air -- a mixture of hostility and gloating.

I said, "Well, here they are."

"Yes, here we are!" a KGB agent echoed derisively. I suppose they'd already learned of the decision to exile me. But the Americans were allowed to drive off.

Our phone rang at 1 a.m. on Jan. 22. A friend, very excited, said he had heard that a decision had been made to deprive me of my awards and exile me from Moscow. I remarked, "A month ago, I wouldn't have taken it seriously, but now, with Afghanistan, anything's possible."

Jan. 22 was a Tuesday, the day the theoretical-physics seminar met at FIAN ((the physics institute where Sakharov still worked)). I followed my customary routine, ordering a car from the academy's motor pool and leaving home at 1:30. At the Krasnokholmsky Bridge, a traffic-patrol car forced us to stop. From the front seat I saw two men get in the rear, flashing red IDs marked MVD ((for Interior Ministry)). They were actually KGB.

They ordered the driver to follow the patrol car to the Procurator's Office on Pushkin Street. KGB agents escorted me to the fourth floor, where "chats" about my activities had taken place in 1973 and 1977. I asked Alexander Rekunkov, the deputy procurator-general, "Why didn't you send a summons instead of shanghaiing me?"

Rekunkov replied, "I gave orders to have you brought here due to the extraordinary circumstances and the great urgency involved. I have been instructed to read you a decree passed by the Presidium:

"In view of A.D. Sakharov's systematic actions, which discredit him as a recipient of State awards, and in response to many suggestions made by the Soviet public, the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet has decided to deprive Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov of the title Hero of Socialist Labor and all his State awards."

Rekunkov continued, "It has been decided to banish A.D. Sakharov from Moscow to a place that will put an end to his contacts with foreigners." The official looked up and added, "The place that has been selected is Gorky, which is off limits to foreigners. Please sign here to acknowledge that you have been informed of the decree's contents."

He handed me a typewritten sheet of paper. I saw the typed -- not signed -- name of Leonid Brezhnev. The decree was undated and made no mention of banishment.

As I studied the paper, Rekunkov said, "The regulations require that persons deprived of awards return them." I refused, since the awards had been given in recognition of services rendered.

I asked why the decree was undated and why Brezhnev had not personally signed it. Rekunkov said something about "technicalities." I failed to ask who had made the decision to banish me and on what authority. I considered the entire proceeding completely illegal and thought it pointless to argue fine points of jurisprudence with those who obviously had no respect for the law. By maintaining this attitude all through my first weeks in Gorky, I may have created the inadvertent impression that I accepted their right to proceed in this totally unlawful manner.

"You're to leave for Gorky at once," Rekunkov said. "Your wife may accompany you."

I phoned Lusia. "I'm calling from the Procurator's Office. They picked me up on the street."

"Whaaat?"

"Police stopped our car; KGB agents got in and ordered us to drive here. I've been stripped of my awards, and I'm being banished to Gorky -- it's off limits to foreigners."

"Will you be coming back to the house?"

"No, I'm supposed to leave straight from here, but it's my understanding that you can accompany me." I hung up and mumbled to myself, "So this is it . . ."

Downstairs, I climbed into the backseat of a minibus with curtained windows, flanked by KGB agents. We were preceded by a police car with a flashing light and siren and followed by another car. Lusia arrived at Domodedovo Airport % more than two hours later. She told me that as soon as she hung up after my call, our phone went dead (service wasn't restored until December 1986). Soon afterward, police and KGB cordoned off our building and stopped correspondents and friends from entering.

Five minutes after Lusia arrived, an officer announced that our plane, a Tu- 154, was ready. A dozen KGB agents accompanied us on our special flight. We were too relieved at being reunited to worry about where we were headed -- we didn't care if it was to the ends of the earth. In Gorky we were loaded into another minibus. "Where are we going?" Lusia asked our anonymous escorts.

"Home," answered one, grinning.

Visit from a Gunman

After a long journey, we were deposited at a twelve-story building off what we later learned was Gagarin Avenue and taken to an apartment on the first floor. In a large room a man seated behind a desk said, "I'm Perelygin, deputy procurator for the Gorky district. I've been instructed to inform you of your regimen: you are forbidden to go beyond the city limits of Gorky. You'll be kept under surveillance, and you are forbidden to meet with or contact foreigners or criminal elements. The MVD will let you know when you're required to check in at their headquarters. If you have any questions, call the KGB, either Major Yuri Chuprov or Captain Nikolai Shuvalov." Perelygin left.

Lusia, meanwhile, had been talking with our "landlady" and had taken a look around the apartment, which had four rooms (one reserved for the landlady), plus kitchen and bathroom. The landlady told Lusia she was the widow of a KGB officer. (It took us six months to discover what her real duties were: to make sure that the window in her room was left unbolted to allow KGB agents access to the apartment from the street, bypassing the police manning a watch post.) As I appeared, she retired to her room.

At last Lusia and I were alone together.* She'd had the foresight to pack our transistor radio, and on the evening news my exile was the lead story, along with Afghanistan. For the next two weeks foreign broadcasts featured protests by writers, public personalities and -- of particular weight -- scientists, including the U.S. scientists Sidney Drell and Jeremy Stone. The intervention of U.S. National Academy of Sciences President Philip Handler and other prominent scientists might have forestalled further steps against me. My Soviet colleagues, regrettably, kept silent -- except for public attacks on me.

Lusia, who was still permitted to travel, left Gorky for Moscow on Jan. 27. The next day, at a press conference held in our Chkalov Street apartment, she read a statement I had written describing the circumstances of my exile and my thoughts on current issues. She also visited the Procurator's Office to determine the official grounds for my exile and to resolve the visa problem of her son's fiancee Liza (Alexei had immigrated to the U.S. in May 1978, but Liza had not received permission to join him).

Several Gorky residents visited me while Lusia was absent. Felix Krasavin, an old friend of the Bonner family, paid a call. So did the refusenik physicist Mark Kovner, whom I'd met at a seminar in Moscow. I made new acquaintances, among them Sergei Ponomarev, who had served five years in a labor camp for "anti-Soviet activity."

Each visitor, upon leaving the building, was taken by the police to a nearby site designated "post for the maintenance of public order." They would be held for hours while their papers were checked, and attempts would be made to intimidate them. Many suffered unpleasant repercussions. After a few weeks the authorities allowed only people sent or approved by the KGB to pass through their blockade. A few months later, the flow of visitors stopped altogether.

On Jan. 28 I was ordered to report to MVD headquarters. There, two KGB men introduced themselves as Major Chuprov and Captain Shuvalov. They complained that I had violated the terms of my regimen by phoning Moscow and writing a postscript to a Helsinki Group document.

"They're mistaken," I said.

"Will you put that in writing?"

"Of course." I took a sheet of paper and wrote that I had not called Moscow (my attempts to telephone had all been illegally cut off). I had added my signature to the document about Afghanistan but had not made any changes in it, since I was not a member of the Helsinki Group.

I asked Chuprov to write down several requests and pass them on. I asked that Liza be granted a visa to join Alexei, that young scientists from FIAN be permitted to visit me, that I have access to my regular doctors from the academy clinic, that the telephone be reconnected in the Moscow apartment of Lusia's mother Ruth (essential because of her age, 79, and her health) and that phone service be installed in the Gorky apartment -- members of the academy are entitled to a private telephone.

Chuprov suggested that I order the telephone myself. I said that no one would speak with me at the telephone office since I was officially still a resident of Moscow.

"You can register as a resident of Gorky."

"Under no circumstances will I do that: I was sent here illegally."

That same evening, I answered the doorbell. Two men -- drunk or pretending to be drunk -- entered, declaring that they wanted to "get a look at this Sakharov guy."

"I'm Sakharov."

"Why do you want the Olympics boycotted?"

"Because the U.S.S.R. is conducting military operations in Afghanistan."

Suddenly, one pulled a pistol from his pocket; he began playing with it and waving it around. I asked whether it was a real pistol or just a cigarette lighter. One of them replied, "A cigarette lighter that drills holes in people."

The second man kept assuring me that his friend really was a first-class marksman. Then the man with the gun started to shout, "I'll show you what Afghanistan's really like! I'll turn this apartment into an Afghanistan!"

While this was going on, Lusia's friend Natasha Gesse, who was looking after me while Lusia was gone, caught sight of the pistol and told the landlady, "Pretend you're taking out the garbage and go tell the policeman that drunks are in the apartment and that they've got a pistol."

The landlady was gone a good while, but when she returned, she pretended she'd misunderstood Natasha. She had to be sent a second time. At last, several policemen appeared and led the "drunks" away.

A Theft in Gorky

The KGB never let things settle into a stable pattern; from time to time, they would commit a new outrage.

Whenever I left the building, my KGB tails would shadow me. I came to know many by sight. When I walked in the woods, I more than once flushed an observer hiding behind a tree, who would then dash away. We were prevented from making long-distance calls; whenever we went to a post office to do so, the phones were "out of order" -- KGB shadows had been there ahead of us. Once I managed to make a call by carrying out a trash can, dropping it off and continuing to a post office. From that day on, a policeman accompanied us when we took out the garbage.

The KGB did more than supervise my quarantine. From the first days, we detected signs that strangers were entering our apartment. We would find our tape recorders, radios and typewriter damaged and had to repair them many times. At first, we assumed that some of the policemen were letting the KGB agents into our apartment; then we realized it was the landlady. Whenever I went out, I took irreplaceable notes, documents and books with me.

The KGB never gave up its pursuit of my bag of documents. In March 1981, I visited a dental clinic where I was having some work done. The dental technician insisted that because this was a surgical office, I'd have to leave my bag outside. When I went to reclaim the bag, it was gone. The KGB had struck a powerful blow: I lost notes on scientific matters and current events, personal documents and letters, my diary for the past 14 months and three thick notebooks containing the manuscript of these memoirs.

I began to reconstruct the book from memory. Once or twice a month, Lusia would take what I'd written to Moscow and send it on to Efrem and Tanya in the U.S. How she accomplished this is a story that cannot yet be told. By April 1982, I had finished another rough draft. But on Oct. 11, 1982, the entire manuscript -- 500 typewritten pages Lusia had brought back from Moscow and 900 handwritten pages I had recently completed -- was again stolen, this time by what can only be called gangster methods.

We had driven into town, and Lusia went off on an errand while I waited in the car, the bag on the floor behind the front seat. A man walked over and asked through my half-open window, "Are you headed for Moscow?" I told him no. My memory of what happened next is blank. I recall someone pulling the bag through a window. I tried to get out of the car but couldn't find the door handle, something that usually comes automatically. I finally extricated myself and saw three women standing nearby, one holding what looked like a doctor's kit. "They jumped over the railing," one woman told me. "Did you know they smashed your window?" The left rear window had been smashed, but I hadn't heard a thing. I believe I'd been momentarily stunned by some narcotic. I have no direct evidence, but there was a strange odor, like that of rotting fruit.

"We called the police," one said. "They're coming." One of the women must have been a doctor, the other two were probably nurses assigned to treat me if I suffered any ill effects from the narcotic. They'd lied about calling the police. They didn't want me to go straight to the precinct station; maybe they were afraid I'd pass out along the way. They walked off before I could ask them to serve as witnesses.

Beginning in March 1980, a policeman was stationed in front of our apartment door around the clock. Anyone who came to see me was given a hard time, and those from other cities were usually forced to leave Gorky. Some found themselves in serious trouble: at least three persons who attempted to visit spent several months in psychiatric confinement.

A Visa for Liza

In 1981 the Sakharovs began their first hunger strike while in Gorky (earlier they had conducted others in support of various dissidents). The issue was the KGB's refusal to permit Liza to join her fiance, Elena Bonner's son Alexei, in the U.S. Some Soviet dissidents strongly criticized the strike, fearing Sakharov might die over a relatively "trivial" family issue.

Our two-year campaign had made Liza's case widely known, so we could count on sympathy and support. Most people would understand that a hunger strike was not a bizarre extravagance but our one remaining option.

At first, Lusia and I exchanged written notes about our plans, so that the KGB couldn't eavesdrop on us. Once we had made our decision, there was no reason to conceal it. On the contrary, by declaring our intentions, we gave the KGB an opportunity to let Liza go quietly and save face. So, in October, we sent out appeals for support.

Lusia traveled to Moscow with letters announcing our hunger strike, also notebooks containing the work I had done on these memoirs. I didn't want the KGB to get any of this. A week later, she returned with 100 bottles of Borzhomi mineral water, which helps maintain the body's electrolyte balance while fasting. On Oct. 21 I sent telegrams to Brezhnev and the head of the Academy of Sciences, announcing that our hunger strike would begin on Nov. 22.

Many dissidents held Liza responsible for not preventing the hunger strike. It should have been obvious to them that Liza had no way of influencing our decision. The refusal to let her rejoin Alexei may have been the immediate cause of the strike. But in a broader sense, it was the consequence of all that had happened to us, including exile in Gorky and a continuation of my struggle for human rights and the freedom to choose one's country of residence. There had been virtually no objection when I declared a hunger strike in 1974 on behalf of the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and other ! political prisoners. This time I was honoring a more compelling and personal obligation.

The strike began on Nov. 22. After nearly two weeks, Sakharov and his wife were steadily growing weaker.

Dec. 4 was Tanya and Efrem's anniversary, and we looked forward to clinking glasses with Mark Kovner when he stopped by later in the day: mineral water in our glasses, vodka in his. While we were taking our 1 o'clock walk on the terrace, we caught sight of a man inside our apartment -- a KGB agent whose face was familiar. We hurried in from the terrace and saw that eight people had invaded the living room and entry hall. At least some, if not all, were from the KGB. Most were wearing white coats. Lusia said, "They've come to kill us."

The door chain had been ripped off -- not for the first time -- and the key was lying on a table. One of the intruders announced he was from the Municipal Health Department. "We have to hospitalize you. We've received a great many letters from citizens, from your children."

We realized that resistance was useless and, in any case, we no longer had the strength. The KGB agents went outside. We kissed. Tears came to my eyes. Lusia said bitterly, "And on Tanya's anniversary . . ."

Out on the street, they began pushing us into two separate ambulances. I was taken to Semashko Hospital, the medical center for the Gorky region, while Lusia was taken to Hospital No. 10, a run-down facility on the Oka's left bank. But until I actually saw Lusia again, I was under the illusion we were in the same hospital. I was put in a semiprivate room. My roommate introduced himself as secretary of a district party committee. A third bed and patient had been placed in the entry leading into our room. These men were both genuinely ill.

A few minutes after I got to the room, the attending physician, Dr. Rulev, appeared, and I allowed him to take my pulse and blood pressure. I refused to submit to any other procedures and asked to be reunited with Lusia. Separation was difficult to bear. The KGB was apparently counting on that to break us. They were also hoping that the news that the Sakharovs were in the hospital receiving medical care would pacify our friends around the world.

I spent part of the first night reading Nabokov's Speak, Memory. In the morning I wrote a statement to the doctor in charge declaring that my wife and I had been separated by force, and that I would refuse all medical procedures / until we were reunited, and would not end my hunger strike until I was certain that Liza would be granted permission to emigrate.

The nurses would bring meals for me even though I asked them not to. I would leave the untouched trays in the hall. The other patients were kind enough to eat in the entry, keeping the door to the room closed.

A well-known consultant, Dr. Vagralik, would visit me two or three times a day, accompanied by Rulev and sometimes by a doctor who was introduced as a neurologist but was, I suspect, a psychiatrist. Vagralik warned me that I was not a young man, that I could slip into a terminal state at any moment, and that he had already noticed irreversible changes whose progress would accelerate. The neurologist (or psychiatrist) suggested that I was becoming confused and losing my faculties. As he put it, I already had one foot in the grave, and I ought to let the doctors obey the Hippocratic oath and help me.

To all these statements and to Rulev's attempts to take my blood pressure, I responded with a single, set phrase: "I refuse to be examined until I'm reunited with my wife." On the morning of Dec. 8, Rulev said, "You have only a few hours to think it over. You must end your hunger strike."

A few hours after Rulev's visit, a man entered my room. He was from the KGB. "We've met before," he said. It was in 1980, after Lusia surprised the KGB searching our apartment. "My name is Ryabinin. I'm authorized to inform you that your request can now be reconsidered in a positive light, but you must first end your hunger strike." I said that I took the KGB's promises seriously, but that my wife and I could decide to end the hunger strike only when we were together. He said, "You'll be seeing me again."

That same morning, apparatus for forced feeding was brought into Lusia's room. She warned the doctors that she would resist forced feeding with all her strength, even if she died in the struggle. A few hours after this last attempt to break her will, Lusia was driven to Semashko Hospital. In the chief physician's office, after four days of painful separation, we embraced. We insisted that Ryabinin speak in our presence with Academy President Anatoli Alexandrov, as an earnest of the KGB's promise; only then would we end our hunger strike. After 17 days, the strike was over, and Liza was free to join Alexei in the U.S.

Mentally Unstable?

In April 1983 in Gorky, Lusia had what was apparently her second heart attack. The weeks that followed brought two additional cardiac events. She was offered a bed in the Academy of Sciences hospital, but refused to be admitted without me.

The academy soon dispatched a team of specialists to examine me. The head of the team said hospitalization was advisable in my case, as I had received no treatment for a chronic prostate condition since arriving in Gorky, was plagued by angina and borderline hypertension and apparently had suffered several heart attacks -- microinfarcts in 1970 and 1975 and three attacks in Gorky -- as well as a bout of thrombophlebitis. My condition was not nearly so critical as Lusia's, but there was still ample reason for me to be admitted. But I was only kidding myself that my hospitalization was being given serious consideration.

During the summer of 1983 Yuri Andropov, then the Soviet leader, told a group of visiting American Senators who had asked about my situation that I was mentally unstable. Did these remarks indicate a new KGB strategy for dealing with "the Sakharov problem"? The authorities clearly were reluctant or unable to banish me from the country, and hesitated to imprison either of us. There is evidence that the KGB intended to portray my public activities as a delusion produced by the influence of Lusia, who would be presented as a corrupt, self-serving, loose-living, egotistical, depraved and immoral Jew prostitute, an agent of international Zionism. I would be transformed back into a distinguished Soviet (Russian, of course) scientist who had made invaluable contributions to the Motherland and world science. The KGB was concentrating its energies on her, and she was by now seriously ill.

Lusia was detained at the Gorky airport on May 2, 1984, which ended for 17 months her visits to Moscow, our principal means of contact with the outside world. She was put on trial, convicted in August of "slandering the Soviet system" and sentenced to five years' internal exile, in Gorky.

In April 1985, against Lusia's wishes, I conducted a hunger strike demanding that she be allowed to go abroad to visit her mother, children and grandchildren and to receive medical treatment. I was forcibly confined in Gorky's Semashko Hospital from April 25 and subjected to painful forced feeding until July 11, when I decided to end that hunger strike. But two weeks later, I resumed it, and on July 27 I was taken back to Semashko by force. My normal weight is around 175 lbs., but it dropped to 138 by Aug. 13. That day, they began subcutaneous (into both thighs) and intravenous drips to supplement the forced feedings. Each subcutaneous feeding took several hours, my legs would swell painfully, and I would be unable to walk for a day or two.

"You Can Return to Moscow"

In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. Though he at first defended the treatment of Sakharov, he soon decided that keeping him in exile was incompatible with the image he wished to convey of a Soviet Union committed to glasnost and perestroika.

In February 1986 I wrote a letter to Gorbachev quoting his own words in an interview with the French Communist newspaper L'Humanite: "About political prisoners, we don't have any. Likewise, our citizens are not prosecuted for their beliefs. We don't try people for their opinions." In my letter, I argued that prosecutions under various articles of the criminal code are in fact prosecutions for beliefs, including religious beliefs. I also mentioned persons confined in psychiatric hospitals for political reasons, and others imprisoned on trumped-up criminal charges. I gave brief accounts of 14 I knew personally -- Anatoly Marchenko, the writer, headed the list -- and called for the unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience.

In early October 1986 I was summoned to the regional Procurator's Office to see U.S.S.R. Deputy Procurator General Vladimir Andreyev "in connection with your statement." But Andreyev evaded the real issues. He told me that all the prisoners on my list had been properly sentenced. I told him that I was disappointed in our meeting.

I wrote another letter to the General Secretary and mailed it on Oct. 23. I wrote that I'd been banished illegally, without a court decision. I'd never broken the law or disclosed state secrets. My wife and I were being held in unprecedented isolation. Her sentence and the slanders printed about her in the press were actually attempts to shift responsibility for my actions onto her. I mentioned our health problems, and I felt it necessary to say that I would "make no more public statements, apart from exceptional cases when, in the words of Tolstoy, 'I cannot remain silent.' " I concluded, "I hope that you will find it possible to end my isolation and my wife's exile." Once I'd sent off the letter, I forgot about it for the next seven weeks.

Lusia was twirling the radio dial on Dec. 9. The jamming was intense, but through the crackle we both made out the name Marchenko. For a few moments we thought he had been released. Since Aug. 4 he had been on a hunger strike at Chistopol Prison, demanding better conditions for political prisoners and an end to repression. He hadn't been allowed visitors for 32 months and had spent long periods in punishment cells.

We soon realized that the broadcast was not a report of Marchenko's release. The evening before, he'd asked for a doctor. By the time he was brought to the hospital his condition was hopeless. A cerebral hemorrhage was listed as the immediate cause of death. Marchenko was 48. His death ended an era for the human rights movement, which he had helped to shape.

Dec. 15, 1986, was the 25th anniversary of my father's death. Shortly after 10 p.m. the doorbell rang. A search? Two electricians and a KGB agent entered the apartment. They had orders to install a phone. The KGB man said, "You'll get a call around 10 tomorrow morning."

On Dec. 16 we waited for the call until 3 p.m., when the phone rang and I answered. A woman's voice: "Mikhail Sergeyevich will speak with you."

"I'm listening." I told Lusia, "It's Gorbachev." She opened the door to the hallway, where the usual chatter was going on around the policeman on duty, and shouted, "Quiet! Gorbachev's on the phone." There was an immediate silence.

"Hello, this is Gorbachev speaking."

"Hello, I'm listening."

"I received your letter. We've reviewed it and discussed it. You can return to Moscow. The Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet will be rescinded. A decision has also been made about Elena Bonnaire."

I broke in: "That's my wife!" It was an emotional reaction, not so much to his mispronunciation of her name as to his tone.

Gorbachev continued: "You can return to Moscow together. You have an apartment there. Go back to your patriotic work!"

I said, "Thank you. But I must tell you that a few days ago, my friend Marchenko was killed in prison. He was the first person I mentioned in my letter to you, requesting the release of prisoners of conscience -- people prosecuted for their beliefs."

Gorbachev: "Yes, I received your letter early this year. We've released many, and improved the situation of others. But there are all sorts of people on your list."

I said, "Everyone sentenced under those articles has been sentenced illegally, unjustly. They ought to be freed!"

Gorbachev: "I don't agree with you."

I said, "I implore you to look one more time at the question of releasing people convicted for their beliefs. It's a matter of justice. It's vitally important for our country, for international trust, for peace and for you and the success of your program."

Gorbachev made a noncommittal reply. I said, "Thank you again. Goodbye." (Contrary to the demands of protocol, I brought the conversation to a close, not Gorbachev. I must have felt under stress and perhaps subconsciously feared that I might say too much.) Gorbachev had little choice, so he said, "Goodbye."

On the morning of Dec. 23 we stepped off the train at Moscow's Yaroslavl Station onto a platform teeming with reporters. It took me 40 minutes to make my way through the crowd. Hundreds of flashbulbs blinded me and microphones were continually thrust into my face as I tried to respond to the barrage of questions. The whole scene offered a preview of the hurly-burly life that now awaited us.

Lusia and I were almost buried under the load of the first few months in Moscow. I spent time preparing written responses for almost all major interviews. People passed through the house endlessly. Lusia cooked for a whole crowd. Long after midnight, it was not uncommon to find her, despite her heart attacks and her bypasses, mopping the landing -- our building is self- service -- and me still at work on a statement.

Gorbachev: A Cry for Help

One subject that came up in every interview was my attitude toward Gorbachev and perestroika. In 1985, while still confined in Semashko Hospital, I watched one of Gorbachev's early television appearances, and I told my roommates, "It looks as if our country's lucky. We've got an intelligent leader." My initial, positive reaction has remained basically unchanged. Gorbachev, like Khrushchev, is an extraordinary personality who has managed to break free of the limits customarily respected by the party bureaucracy. What explains the inconsistencies and half measures of the new course? The main stumbling block is the inertia of a gigantic system, the resistance, passive and active, of the innumerable bureaucratic and ideological windbags. Most of them will be out of a job if there is a real perestroika. Gorbachev has spoken of this bureaucratic resistance in some speeches, and it sounds like a cry for help.

But there's more to it than that. The old system, for all its drawbacks, worked. And people had grown used to the old system, which at least guaranteed a certain minimal standard of living. Who knows what the new one will bring? And lastly, Gorbachev and his close associates themselves may still not be completely free of the prejudices and dogmas of the system they wish to reform.

Restructuring the command-type economic system in our country is an extremely complex matter. Without market relations and elements of competition, we are bound to see serious shortages, inflation and other negative phenomena. Our country is already experiencing economic difficulties; everywhere, food and other necessities are in short supply. Another thing troubles me greatly: the zigzags on the road to democracy. Gorbachev is trying to gain control of the political situation and strengthen his personal power by compromising with the forces opposed to perestroika instead of relying on democratic reforms. That's extremely dangerous. Only a nationwide swell of initiative can give substance to democracy, and our "chiefs" have shown they're not ready for this.

The gradual replacement of key personnel, the country's objective need for perestroika, and the fact that "the new always beats the old" (to quote Stalin's famous phrase) should all work in Gorbachev's favor. He has four levers he can use to move the country forward: glasnost (this is proceeding under its own steam); the new personnel policies; the new international policies aimed at slowing the arms race; and democratization.

My positive attitude toward perestroika is not accepted by everyone: it especially upsets some dissidents in the U.S.S.R. and some emigres in the West. One Russian-language newspaper in New York City printed an article with the headline THE PARDONED SLAVE HELPS HIS MASTER, or something of the sort.

On Feb. 5, 1987, a delegation organized by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations came to see me. I stressed the West's vital interest in having the U.S.S.R. become an open, democratic society. Henry Kissinger posed a blunt question: "Is there a danger that the U.S.S.R. will first effect a democratic transformation, accelerating its scientific and technological progress and improving its economy, and then revert to expansionist policies and pose an even greater threat to peace?"

I replied that what people should fear is not the development of an open, stable society with a powerful peacetime economy in the U.S.S.R. but a disruption of the world's equilibrium and the single-minded military buildup of an internally closed and externally expansionist society. I believe the West should actively support the process of perestroika, cooperating with the U.S.S.R. on disarmament and on economic, scientific and cultural issues. But this support should be given with eyes wide open, not unconditionally. Opponents of perestroika should understand that a retreat from reform would mean immediate termination of Western assistance.

In a futurological article I wrote in 1974, "The World After 50 Years," I concluded, "I hope that mankind will be able to put an end to the dangers threatening us and to continue its progress while preserving everything that makes us human." I would like to conclude this book too with those words. Today, as I approach the eighth decade of my life, my personal aspirations and my entire existence center on my beloved wife, my children and grandchildren, and all those who are dear to me.

This volume of memoirs is dedicated to my beloved Lusia. What matters most is that she and I are together.

On the night of Dec. 14, 1989, Andrei Sakharov returned to his Moscow apartment from a heated meeting of radical parliamentarians where he had called for the formation of an alternative party to oppose the Communists, lay down for a nap and never awoke. He was 68 when a heart attack felled him. He had been a free man for less than three years.

FOOTNOTE: *Alone Together is the title of Elena Bonner's 1986 account of her life in exile with Sakharov.