Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...years, a courageous new voice has arisen to question the official pretensions of infallibility. It belongs to Physicist Andrei Sakharov, 48, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, whose own views are believed to mirror those of many Russian intellectuals. In 1968 Sakharov wrote a 10,000-word essay, studied with great interest in the West, that called for a rapprochement of the capitalist and Communist systems and for greater personal freedoms in the Soviet Union...
Last week a new Sakharov essay was circulating in Moscow.* In it, Sakharov warned that unless the Soviet Union changes drastically, it will be unable to solve its grave problems. Citing such signs as a rise in alcoholism and drug addiction as symptoms of Russia's malaise, Sakharov wrote: "At the end of the '50s our country was first in the world to have launched the Sputnik and send a man into space. At the end of the '60s we have lost our leadership, and the Americans have become the first to land on the moon...
...left over from the Stalin era. Freedom of ideas and information, he declared, are essential to the growth and success of a modern economy. He criticized the present regime's handling of intellectual dissenters, who seek to reform the Communist system from within. As Sakharov asked in the essay: "How can one justify the detention in prisons, camps and psychiatric clinics of persons who, although in opposition, act entirely within the framework...
Gagarin, who for a while occupied University Hall and later wholeheartedly participated in the strike, also finds a form of "up" as a result of his experience. In an essay about midway through the book, he pictures a structureless university-a school where all the tradition-honored rigamarole that someone decided was "education" a thousand years ago or so would vanish. This, too, is a kind of "up"-although if we were to really get up there, school itself would become a meaningless item-and Gagarin's explanation of educational ecstasy is as good as any I've seen...
...another statement spelling out his views on school integration. Nixon met with 35 black officials last week, seeking guidance on the shape of a major public pronouncement. In the light of Presidential Aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan's recent call for a period of "benign neglect" on race (see ESSAY), such a statement is needed...