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While Europe's diplomats meet to consecrate détente, dissident Soviet Physicist Andrei Sakharov offers some cogent reservations about the process in a recently completed essay, My Country and the World. Excerpts from it accompany our cover story. They were selected by TIME'S State Department correspondent Strobe Talbott, whose previous credits include translating two volumes of Khrushchev Remembers (Little, Brown & Co.), including his The Last Testament...
Ever since the Kremlin exiled Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the West 17 months ago, Russia's leading resident political dissenter has been Andrei Sakharov. A world-renowned nuclear physicist who was instrumental in the development of the U.S.S.R.'s hydrogen bomb, Sakharov, during the past decade, has emerged as a leader of the human rights movement within the Soviet Union...
Last month Sakharov completed a 20,000-word essay titled My Country and the World, which will be published in the U.S. by Alfred A. Knopf later this year. In his introduction, Sakharov describes this new book as an updating of his widely publicized 1968 manifesto, Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, in which he called for rapprochement between the Communist and capitalist systems. The physicist writes that he decided to undertake the new project largely as a result of a discussion about détente in his Moscow apartment last November with New York's Conservative...
Describing himself as "a confirmed evolutionist and reformist," Sakharov begins his essay with a stinging, detailed indictment of Soviet domestic and foreign policy. He decries average living and working conditions, the "lumpenization" of the Russian proletariat ("Per capita consumption of alcohol is twice what it was in tsarist Russia"). He also chastises the government for its "Russification" of ethnic minorities in the U.S.S.R., its support of dictatorships in Libya and Uganda, and genocide against the Kurds in Iraq. In a highly technical chapter on disarmament, he draws upon his own scientific expertise to discuss the problems posed by "heavy" missiles...
...strikes, and open borders. His sweeping criticism of U.S. policy shows that he does not really know the U.S. very well; he speaks simplistically of the American "working class" and suggests that every critic of Senator Henry Jackson's anti-détente stand is politically motivated. But Sakharov's is nonetheless a compelling voice, more measured than Solzhenitsyn's. Excerpts from the essay, as edited by TIME'S State Department Correspondent Strobe Talbott...