Word: sakharovs
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...Soviets have traditionally found it difficult to talk realistically about the faults and failings of their society. In the past two 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...
Essential Freedom. Does this prove the superiority of capitalism over socialism? "Of course not," declared Sakharov. The problem, as he sees it, is that the Soviet system is still laboring under autocratic practices 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...
Intellectual Sensation. Brezhnev's angry accusations have inspired thoughtful replies from a number of prominent Soviet citizens. One of the most compelling responses was circulating last week among intellectuals in Moscow. Some thought that it came from Academician Andrei Sakharov, the gifted physicist whose 10,000-word essay outlining a scenario of economic convergence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union created a sensation among intellectuals 18 months ago. Others believed that it was written by someone who knows and shares the physicist's view, though not necessarily by Sakharov himself. Sakharov was removed from work requiring security...
Kapitsa's approval of the Sakharov thesis was a trifle ambiguous, and with good reason: convergence is regarded by Soviet ideologues as a major heresy. In essence, the theory is a variation on a Marxist theme-namely, that economic developments govern political and social evolution. But it challenges the conviction of Soviet orthodoxy that Communism alone is the road to human development. After publication of his essay in the West, Sakharov was dismissed as chief consultant to the state committee for nuclear energy, and hardly a month goes by without a denunciation of convergence appearing in the Soviet press...