Andrei Sakharov, a life of fighting “the inertia of fear”

The driver engages the car on the bridge. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (1921-1989), seated next to him, does not have time to notice that the surrounding streets are empty, a strange detail for an early afternoon in the heart of Moscow. Already, a vehicle passes them, lines up in front of theirs. A policeman comes out, asks them for their papers. When two agents get in the back, tell them to follow the police car to the floor, the physicist understands: the KGB has just trapped him.

The deputy prosecutor who receives him informs the most eminent member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, where, on January 22, 1980, like every Tuesday, he was preparing to participate in a seminar, that the Supreme Soviet withdrew all his distinctions, and especially that which made him, as he writes in his Memoirs (Threshold, 1990), a “untouchable” : the title of Hero of Soviet Labor, received three times.

Nothing now prevents him from suffering the fate of all these dissidents whom he has defended for years with a tenacity that has made him the emblem of their fight and earned him, in 1975, the Nobel Peace Prize. He was sent into exile, with his second wife, Elena Bonner (1923-2011), to Gorki (the former and current Nizhny Novgorod), a city closed to foreigners, where for six years the couple lived under the watchful eye – and the mercy – from the minions of the regime.

At the height of Soviet glory

August 1953. A cloud “dark blue, evil” rises above the steppes of Kazakhstan. Sakharov, who recounts the scene in his Memoirscan’t resist: he takes off his goggles, observes the fungus forming, “unbelievably large”. For the first time, the Soviet Union has just exploded a thermonuclear bomb, a weapon thousands of times more powerful than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, this success, which allows the communist regime to equal the United States, is largely due to the young physicist, whom the world ends up considering as the “father of the H-bomb”, a formula which it disputes, reminding that it is a collective work. But his peers consider his role decisive. He was elected three months later to the Academy of Sciences. He is 32 years old.

The trajectory that leads Andrei Sakharov from Kazakhstan to Gorky, from the heights of Soviet glory to relegation, embodies at the supreme level the slow decomposition of “real socialism”. Who had more reason than him to turn a blind eye to totalitarian oppression? He benefited from all the advantages granted to his elites by the system, of which he embodied the supposed success. He could, like so many others, spend the rest of his life playing the game and profiting from it.

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