An Evening Visit to the Sakharovs

If someone had told me last December that I would meet Andrel Sakharov six months later in Moscow, I—a notorious optimist—would have considered that person a fool. But in June, after unsuccessfully trying to call Sakharov shortly after my arrival in Moscow en route to a conference in Novosibirsk, I asked a friend to drive me to 48B Chkalov Street at around 9 p.m. I rang at the shabby door, which was opened by Yelena Bonner, Sakharov’s wife. She is used to late visitors, to unknown people from Russia and abroad who come to this door unannounced. We had not seen each other since 1977, though we often have spoken by phone. “Wait, I know you! Who are you? Frantisek!” Yelena Georgievna embraced me and led me to the sitting room. “Andrei Dmitrievich is sleeping, but I will wake him immediately.” In a few minutes he appeared, wearing old velveteen pants, a white shirt and a red pull-over. He embraced me, kissed me in the Russian fashion. I had tears in my eyes. Six years ago, on the occasion of Sakharov’s 60th birthday, I wrote an article about my contacts with him. We wrote to each other and talked by phone. I presented his speech at the Pugwash conference in Kyoto in 1975 and introduced his paper on nuclear energy in many countries. Still, we had never had a real conversation. The discussion now was wide-ranging, for the Sakharovs’ door is always open. Two women from the London office of Amnesty International arrived, and talk focused on the Soviet amnesty for political prisoners that had just been announced. When the women left, it was nearly midnight. Someone mentioned food, so we moved to the miniature kitchen, where Bonner set the table with crab salad, sausages, cheese, Russian jam and tea. The gathering included Tania Yankelevich, Sakharov’s step-daughter, who has lived in Boston for many years. She and her children had been permitted to visit her parents. Tania, who in hundreds of interviews has accused the Soviet Union of countless crimes, was in the third week of a visit to Moscow! It was as unreal as a dream. I asked Andrei Dmitrievich if the authorities will allow him to travel abroad. “I have hundreds of invitations, but I will not ask for permission myself. I think it should be connected to my full rehabilitation.” “What do you understand as full rehabilitation?” “To have returned to me all my decorations and prizes. And to have declared null and void the decree by which I was sent into exile.” Although Sakharov retains all his decorations “physically” (as he calls it), officially he has been deprived of them. The matter is complicated. No one has reported seeing the decree by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, dated January 8, 1980, stripping him of his decorations and sending him into exile in Gorky. There is some doubt as to whether it even exists, since in the last years of the Brezhnev period orders were often given by phone, with no documentation. The head accountant of the Lebedev Institute of Physics, when told to stop paying Sakharov’s salary, asked for written instructions. The director, not wishing to comply, invoked the Presidium’s decree. The accountant replied that without a written legal document he could not strike Sakharov’s name from the payroll. So in the jungle of Brezhnev’s injustice, the law served some useful purpose: The accountant saved the institute’s “honor,” and Sakharov received his full salary throughout his seven-year exile. Sakharov, of course, is right to insist on his complete rehabilitation, but the problem of canceling a nonexistent decree can be a sticky one for Soviet leaders. Nor is the Sakharov question a pleasant one for the Soviet Academy of Science. On July 3, 1983, four important academy members published a slanderous article about Sakharov in Izvestia. He now expects the four—G.K. Skriabin (the permanent scientific secretary), A.N. Tikhonov, A.A. Dorodnitayn and Nobel laureate A.M. Prokhorov—to distance themselves publicly from the article. After Sakharov’s return from Gorky, Skriabin offered Bonner a job at the presidium of the Soviet academy in the field of international scientific relations. No doubt this would have increased the academy’s prestige immensely—which is precisely why Bonner refused. Gradually I pieced together information about Gorbachev’s famous telephone call to Sakharov last year. Sakharov, his wife and Tania told me the details. The story began at 10 p.m. December 15 in Gorky, when three men arrived to install a telephone— despite Sakharov’s protest that he hadn’t asked for one. As the men were leaving, their boss, obviously a KGB officer, told Sakharov he should not leave the apartment the next day before 10 a.m., when he would receive an important call. At 10 a.m. a woman from the telephone bureau called to tell them their phone number. Finally, at 3 p.m., just as they had decided to go shop for bread, the phone rang. “Academician Sakharov! You will now speak with Mikhail Sergeivich Gorbachev!” Sakharov called his wife, who in her excitement grabbed a pack of cigarettes and started to smoke. (She stopped smoking after her bypass operation but now has resumed the habit.) Gorbachev said they had decided to permit Sakharov to return to Moscow. Bonner’s case, he continued, was also being addressed. Sakharov responded in an offended tone that Yelena Georgievna Bonner was his wife. "Well you have an apartment there, so you will have no problems with it; you can return and start to fulfill your patriotic tasks. I am sending [Soviet academy President Gui] Marchuk who will discuss all the details with you.” Sakharov thanked Gorbachev, telling him his decision would help to rectify an injustice. He reminded Gorbachev that he also requested in a letter a general amnesty for all political prisoners. Gorbachev’s response was noncommittal, prompting Sakharov to press him again to address the issue of political prisoners. Then he once more thanked the Soviet leader for callipg him and for permitting his return to Moscow, said goodbye and hung up. “It was perhaps not quite polite on my side,” Sakharov recalled with his typical apologetic smile. But the call, he added, “happened somewhat inconveniently.” A few days later, Marchuk traveled to Gorky and invited Sakharov to meet him. Of the long discussion that followed, one part is worth mentioning. Marchuk told Sakharov that, despite his high standing among scientists, there is a danger that he may land in a vacuum if he continues his sharp criticisms. Sakharov answered that he has always said what he thinks, and sees no reason in the era of glasnost why he should change his habit. Much has been written of Sakharov’s triumphal return to Moscow. I would add only that when during his first day back he attended a large colloquium in the Lebedev Institute, the crowd greeted his arrival with a sustained burst of applause. The applause was renewed when the speaker began his lecture: “As was demonstrated in 1967 by Sakharov, the baryon asymmetry of the universe....” Janouch, who spent more than a decade in the Soviet Union, headed the department of theoretical nuclear physics at the Institute of Nuclear Research in Prague until he lost that post and was expelled from Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of that country in 1968. He now works at the Research Institute of Physics in Stockholm.

An Evening Visit to the Sakharovs

Become a Member of

Meet the Author

Frantisek Janouch

Published In

October 1987

Related Research Resources

How Do Embryos Know How Fast to Develop

Research Resources

Podcasts

Webinars

Videos

Infographics

eBooks

Become a PCR Pro

Genetic Insights Break Infectious Pathogen Barriers

Navigating Cold Storage Solutions

The Immunology of the Brain

Products

Product News

Sapio Sciences Makes AI-Native Drug Discovery Seamless with NVIDIA BioNeMo

New DeNovix Helium Nano Volume Spectrophotometer

Olink® Reveal: Accessible NGS-based proteomics for every lab

Zymo Research Launches the Quick-16S™ Full-Length Library Prep Kit