The Making of an Activist

By Andrei Sakharov

Preoccupied though he was with the Soviet Union's political upheaval, Andrei Sakharov found time in his last months to polish his autobiography. The following fragments from Sakharov's Memoirs, to be published in 1990 by Alfred A. Knopf, tell of his evolution from an honored physicist into a man reviled, hounded and condemned to exile as the U.S.S.R.'s foremost human rights activist.

On Dec. 3 or 4, 1966, I found an envelope in my mailbox containing two sheets of onionskin paper. The first sheet was an anonymous report on the arrest and confinement in a psychiatric hospital of Viktor Kuznetsov, an artist who had helped draft a model constitution for our country, which the authors hoped would spark discussion about the introduction of democracy.

The second sheet announced a silent demonstration on Dec. 5, Constitution Day. I decided to attend. In Pushkin Square I found a few dozen people standing around the statue. At 6 o'clock, half of those present, myself included, removed our hats and stood in silence. (The other half, I later realized, were KGB.) After a minute or so I walked over to the monument and read the inscription aloud:

I shall be loved,

and the people will long remember

that my lyre was tuned to

goodness

that in this cruel age I celebrated

freedom

and asked for mercy for the fallen.

After that, I left the square with the others.

By the beginning of 1968, I felt a growing compulsion to speak out. 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. My reading and discussions with a fellow scientist had acquainted me with the notions of an open society, convergence and world government. I hoped that these notions 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. The book rejected all extremes, the intransigence shared by 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.

The government's use of psychiatry for political purposes is particularly dangerous because it is a direct assault on the victim's mind. The problem is compounded by the inhuman, illegal conditions of detention in the special psychiatric hospitals, by the conformity and hypocrisy of our closed society and by the absence of an independent press. I am speaking here about any use of psychiatry for political or ideological purposes, not just those cases when mentally healthy patients are forcibly confined in psychiatric hospitals.