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##### December 15, 1989 OBITUARY ## Andrei Sakharov, 68, Soviet 'Conscience,' Dies ##### By FRANCIS X. CLINES, Special to The New York Times Andrei D. Sakharov, the indomitable human-rights campaigner who prevailed in official exile to become a relentless prod to the Soviet Union's new congress, died apparently of a heart attack late Thursday after a long and wearying legislative day. He was 68 years old and lived in Moscow. The nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate was respected worldwide as this nation's dissident ''voice of conscience'' through more than a decade of flinty resistance and of protesting the Soviet regime's human-rights abuses of its own people. ''I am very tired,'' Mr. Sakharov said Thursday in the midst of another characteristic personal battle, that time to see the creation of a genuine opposition movement in the Congress of Peoples Deputies. 'A Historical Figure' There, the brilliant scientist who led this nation's anti-war movement had sat in a sixth-row aisle seat, the better to arise in protest of some of the more imperious announcements of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who freed Dr. Sakharov from years of internal exile in the closed city of Gorky in 1987, thus establishing in a single stroke the credibility of the Gorbachev era in the Kremlin. [ A White House spokesman, Roman Popadiuk, read a statement praising Dr. Sakharov: ''Andrei Sakharov is a historical figure who will be long remembered for his human-rights efforts in the Soviet Union. His voice was an important dimension in the contemporary changes under way in Soviet society.'' ] Work on Soviet Hydrogen Bomb ''I am going to live as I lived before and pursue all of my activities,'' Dr. Sakharov said on his release from exile almost three years ago. He did so with a vehemence that reached far beyond the health warnings of his physicians. He immediately demanded further democratization of Soviet society from Mr. Gorbachev, ran for the new congress and began a mixed relationship with the Soviet leader, supporting his overall program of changes while complaining regularly that too much power remained centered in the Kremlin. Dr. Sakharov reached the pinnacle of scientific prestige three decades ago as a leading theoretical physicist and key member of the team that developed the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb. But in 1968, he was removed from secret defense work after circulating an essay titled, ''Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Co-Existence and Intellectual Freedom.'' After years of similar protest over Soviet living conditions and Kremlin political strategies, Dr. Sakharov was exiled to the closed city of Gorky on Jan. 22, 1980. The immediate cause was anger in the Government of the Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, over his continued denunciation of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. 'There Are No Guarantees' That solidified his role as a moral individualist, because from Gorky he managed to issue continuing criticism of the Kremlin. His release by Mr. Gorbachev was a landmark event in the era of gradual democratization still under way and still far from complete, an era for which Dr. Sakharov styled himself part shephard, part hector. ''The slogan, 'Don't hamper Gorbachev's efforts' seems to be very popular with intellectuals and our friends abroad,'' he said in an interview last year. ''But I think it is a dangerous slogan, dangerous for Gorbachev as well,'' he said, warning against the concentration of power the Soviet leader felt he needed to bring about change. ''Today it will be Gorbachev,'' he said. ''Tomorrow, it may be somebody else, and there are no guarantees - we must be frank about this - no guarantees.'' It was just such anxiety about the lack of each day's guarantees in this hard-pressed nation that drove him to his feet in the congress, ignoring the jeers at times from the chamber's majority of Communist Party stalwarts, moving to the rostrum to demand to be heard. There, Mr. Gorbachev felt obliged to yield the microphone. In the last such encounter on Tuesday, Mr. Gorbachev lost patience and cut short Dr. Sakharov. He waved a pile of protest telegrams at the Soviet leader and went back to his seat warning Mr. Gorbachev about the need to end the Communist Party's continuing monopoly on political power. Sought East-West Collaboration Dr. Sakharov argued for decades that the East and West could collaborate on a better system combining economic justice idealized by Socialism with the liberties of real democracy. Once restored to his two-room apartment here on Chkalova with his wife and partner in civil protest, Yelena G. Bonner, Dr. Sakharov immediately turned to the cases of dissidents still in labor camps and psychiatric hospitals. He spent more than 12 hours a day in the current uphill fight to legitimize the principle of formal political opposition in this one-party nation. He also found time to draw up a model Soviet constitution, to call throughout the world to keep in touch with the human-rights cause, to look out into the nation for fresh arrests of civil-rights protesters and keep some of their names before the public. Taking Gorbachev at His Word Mr. Gorbachev, realizing how important Dr. Sakharov was for his own credibility, turned to him often, sometimes finding qualified support that enraged more monolithic-minded Soviet emigres, more often eliciting fresh complaint. ''Dr. Sakharov can still be counted on to quietly terrorize his hosts with his integrity,'' an expert on the Soviet Union concluded when Dr. Sakharov began his new role as an elected official. Upon his release from exile in Gorky on the Volga River, Dr. Sakharov said he would take Mr. Gorbachev at his word. ''He told me to work for the public good - that is the formula he used,'' said Dr. Sakharov, who followed the request to the letter. In that he was often dissatisfied but usually optimistic. ''The times are changing slowly and, in some ways not at all,'' he said two years ago, before Mr. Gorbachev began opening the Communist political system to competitive election and limited democratization. ''But the changes are real.'' ----Reaction From Relatives Word of Dr. Sakharov's death reached the United States on Thursday night when Mrs. Bonner called members of her family in a suburb of Boston from Moscow. Liza Semyonov, Mrs. Bonner's daughter-in-law who lives in Westwood, Mass., said Mrs. Bonner called about 6 P.M. Thursday to notify the family. Ms. Semyonov is married to Alexey Semyonov, Mrs. Bonner's son. ''I don't know what more to say,'' Ms. Semyonov said. ''She didn't give any more details.'' Mrs. Bonner's daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich, lives in nearby Newton. Her husband, Yefrem Yankelevich, said family members planned to fly to Moscow today. Mr. Yankelevich said that Mrs. Bonner said Dr. Sakharov appeared to be fine when he returned home earlier in the everning. ''We believe it was his heart,'' he said. Dr. Sakharov suffered from angina, but during a visit to the United States in December 1988, doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital performed cardiovascular tests and determined that he did not need heart surgery or a pacemaker. Andrei Sakharov, 68, Nuclear Inventor and Mainspring of the Soviet Conscience By RAYMOND H. ANDERSON Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov was one of those rare figures who appear at turning points in history, a man whose courage in fighting for intellectual and political freedom impressed much of the world but put him in long and dangerous conflict with his own country. Dr. Sakharov, a nuclear physicist who was haunted by the weapons he had helped create, left the prestige and orderly life of his top-secret research laboratory for the dangerous spotlight of a struggle against oppression, censorship, and threats to civilization from war and society's destruction of the environment. In an earlier age, he might have been a Socrates or a Roger Bacon, challenging the established order in a search for truth or secrets of the universe. In the Soviet age, he was to be known as a dissident. For years after he turned his back on the Soviet establishment, Dr. Sakharov was criticized, threatened, insulted, ostracized and then, in January 1980, exiled to the remote and closed Volga city of Gorky. Call From Gorbachev Seven years later, when he was ailing in body and seemingly broken in spirit, he received a telephone call from Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader bent on modernizing the Soviet Union. Mr. Gorbachev told the physicist he could return to Moscow and take his place in a changing society. It was an appropriate decision, considering that Dr. Sakharov's program for social, political and economic justice had become a key part of Mr. Gorbachev's campaign of glasnost and perestroika. While he was in nuclear weapons research, Dr. Sakharov was virtually unknown outside the small circles of scientific and political leaders. In 1968, he emerged dramatically in the human rights struggle and became the movement's inspiration and standard-bearer. After his return from the Gorky exile, Dr. Sakharov was widely referred to as the conscience of Soviet society, a man who had held true to his dream and principles when others capitulated. He was allowed for the first time to travel abroad. This year, he even got a seat in the new Congress of People's Deputies, a legislative body for rebuilding the nation. With usual bluntness, he gave his views from the podium and won cheers from young, liberal deputies and jeers from the older conservatives. Patriotic Scientist In earlier years, in his nuclear weapons research, Dr. Sakharov collaborated with Igor Y. Tamm in a priority project after World War II to develop a fission bomb. The weapon was detonated in 1949 to the terror of the West. Dr. Sakharov then went on to play a principal role in the breakthrough to the even more deadly hydrogen weapons. The physicist looked upon his work then as a patriotic endeavor, necessary to help his homeland build a deterrent shield against the growing nuclear arsenal of the United States. In recognition of his achievements, the Soviet Academy of Sciences elected him a full member in 1953, when he was only 32 years old. His status brought esteem, a fabulous income for a Soviet citizen, a car and driver always at call, a large apartment in the city and a luxurious cottage in the countryside. Dr. Sakharov was also honored with many of the high awards that the Soviet state bestows upon its distinguished citizens, including the Stalin Prize, the Order of Lenin and the unusual distinction of being a three-time Hero of Socialist Labor. He gave it all up and for years alienated his own children, Dmitri, Tatyana and Lyubov when he rebelled against both the nuclear peril and the Kremlin's politics. Dr. Sakharov's first known step to dissent began in 1957 over the issue of radioactive hazards posed by nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere. Treated as an Eccentric In later years, he was to denounce social injustice, political arrests, censorship, distortions in the economy, weaknesses in science and education, alcoholism, poor health care and low salaries that kept most people on the edge of poverty. At first, the Kremlin leaders listened to Dr. Sakharov's concerns with attention and a degree of respect. Later, they began to treat him as an eccentric but invaluable scientist whose whims had to be indulged. Even when he infuriated the leaders with stinging public criticism in 1968, they refrained from open reply for four years, hoping to persuade him to return to the nuclear laboratory. Vexed by his sharpening defiance and criticism of Soviet policy, including the December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and worried by his many contacts with Westerners, the Soviet security police seized Dr. Sakharov on a Moscow street on Jan. 22, 1980, stripped him of rights, awards and privileges and flew him to Gorky. That Volga city is a top-secret center of military industry, off limits to foreigners. There, he lived in an isolated apartment, mostly without a telephone and under constant security police surveillance, harassment and threats. He was confined to Gorky for seven years. Support for the scientist in his lonely struggle came mainly from abroad. It took the form of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, high tribute from world leaders, scholars and scientists, and the emergence of a virtual Sakharov cult at Western universities. No Word for Two Years As time passed in his exile, apprehension abroad about Dr. Sakharov began to fade. But it flared again in 1984, when the physicist went on a hunger strike to support his wife's demand that she be allowed to go abroad for heart and eye treatment. Dr. Sakharov disappeared in May that year, and no word was received from or about him for two years. The outside world seemed bewildered about what to do on behalf of Dr. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena G. Bonner. In July 1984, for example, the European Parliament voted to send a delegation to the Soviet Union to try to visit him. But it turned down a proposal that a seat in its hall be left permanently empty in tribute to him. As early as 1958, Dr. Sakharov attracted attention outside the Soviet Union when he and a colleague, Yakov B. Zeldovich, published an article in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda criticizing a plan by Nikita S. Khrushchev, the impulsive party chief, to compel high school graduates to work for a year in factories or elsewhere before being allowed to go on to universities or technical institutes. The two scientists insisted that such an interruption would be particularly harmful to students gifted in the sciences. What such students needed, they insisted, was accelerated study. Many of Dr. Sakharov's proposals for emphasis on the scientific method and new mathematics were adopted by the Soviet educational system, although he got no credit. Shortcut to Forefront In 1963, he was embroiled in a controversy over the harm caused to Soviet science by Lysenkoism, the primitive teaching of Trofim D. Lysenko, the agronomist who maintained that acquired characteristics could be transmitted to the next generation. This doctrine was, in the party's view, a shortcut that could take the Soviet Union and its peoples into the world's forefront, producing a new Soviet man and wondrous farm crops and animals. Dr. Sakharov supported classical geneticists, irritating Mr. Khrushchev but helping to break the hold of Lysenkoism on Soviet biological science. Perhaps the turning point for Dr. Sakharov came in 1966, when he and other intellectuals began to worry about a move to revive Stalin as an authority figure. Their apprehension was aroused by the trial and imprisonment of two writers, Andrei D. Sinyavsky and Yuli M. Daniel, on charges of slandering the Soviet Union through publication abroad of satirical and critical manuscripts under pseudonyms. In October 1964, Mr. Khrushchev was deposed, and his successors, Leonid I. Brezhnev, Aleksei N. Kosygin and Nikolai V. Podgorny, were edging toward rehabilitation of Stalin. Heeded the Warning Dr. Sakharov and 24 other prominent figures, including Maya Plisetskaya, the ballerina, and Konstantin Paustovsky, the writer, sent a letter to Mr. Brezhnev, the party leader, warning that ''the people would never understand or accept'' restoration of Stalin to a place of honor. The party heeded the warning, deciding on a more gradual approach to ease the stigma and shame evoked by Stalin's name. In 1968, a wave of dissident protests, repression and trials caused severe tension in the Soviet Union. A bitter conflict with China was taking on menacing form. Czechoslovakia was stirring against remnants of Stalinism and was moving fast along the road of liberalism toward ''Socialism with a human face.'' In 1968, the Soviet nuclear-weapons program lost Dr. Sakharov. The high point of his fight against repression came in the summer, when tensions were high in Moscow as the Soviet army and its allies prepared to invade Czechoslovakia. Look at the Perils In a 10,000-word typewritten essay circulating clandestinely hand to hand in the intellectual community, ''Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,'' Dr. Sakharov took a long-range look at the perils confronting the world - ''war, hunger, environmental pollution, stultifying mass culture and demagogic myths.'' The only hope for the future of civilization, Dr. Sakharov wrote, was cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States and an ultimate convergence of their opposing systems. ''Profound thoughts arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas,'' he wrote. ''The philosophers of ancient Greece understood this, and it is unlikely that anyone would challenge this today. But, after 50 years of full control over the minds of the entire country, our leadership seems to be afraid of even a hint at such debate.'' The essay called for a thorough investigation into the damaging effects of Stalin's decades of dictatorial rule and demanded that ''neo-Stalinists'' be ousted from positions of influence. 'The Only Guarantee' ''Intellectual freedom is the only guarantee of a scientific-democratic approach to politics, economic development and culture,'' he declared. These were daring words in a Communist society under the tight control of the party and the security police. A Moscow dissident relayed one of a handful of copies of the essay to a foreign correspondent, and The New York Times published an article about it on July 11, 1968, and printed the full translated text 11 days later, after arrangements had been made to get the manuscript to New York. The essay was broadcast back to the Soviet Union repeatedly by the Voice of America and other Western shortwave stations. The impact was profound and long-lasting. Around the world, people expressed amazement that such honest expressions of conscience could come from a person born and reared in the totalitarian Soviet system. Soviet officials attempted to get Dr. Sakharov to sign an article already prepared for Izvestia, saying the essay in by The New York Times was a fraud. He refused. Dr. Sakharov was stripped of his top-secret security clearance. When he left the party headquarters and drove back to his laboratory, the guards refused to open the gate for him. Dr. Sakharov was transferred to the Lebedev Physics Institute but remained a member of the Academy of Sciences. He was penalized by a salary cut, but he still received five times the salary of an ordinary worker. He was allowed to keep his academy-assigned apartment and country cottage, and he was eligible until his exile to Gorky to summon a car and driver from the Academy of Sciences' motor pool -sometimes, he once said, to drive him to dissident gatherings. Liberal Intellectuals Andrei D. Sakharov was born on May 21, 1921, into a Moscow family of cultured and liberal intellectuals. This, he said, was a determining factor in shaping his world outlook. His father, Dmitri, was a physics professor and author of a number of well-known texts. His grandfather, repelled by a wave of hangings in the 1905 revolution, attracted attention throughout Russia by a campaign to eliminate the death penalty. ''From childhood, I lived in an atmosphere of decency, mutual help and tact, a liking for work and respect for the mastery of one's profession,'' Dr. Sakharov wrote. He studied physics at Moscow University, where he was quickly recognized as a brilliant student. He had just completed his third year when, on June 22, 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. In a rare exemption during wartime, he was allowed to stay in the university to complete his studies in 1942. For the remainder of the war, Dr. Sakharov worked as an engineer in a military plant and he won recognition for improvements in quality control. Peaceful Use of Atom In 1945, the war over, he began graduate studies, and in 1948 received a candidate's degree, roughly equivalent to a Western doctorate. He then vanished for a decade, going off to the top-secret nuclear-weapons project in remote Turkmenistan. While there, he also worked on peaceful uses of nuclear energy. As a scientist, Dr. Sakharov was not required to join the Communist Party. The nuclear project was under the control of Lavrentii P. Beria, head of the security police until 1953, when he was arrested and executed. Prisoners did most of the atomic project labor. ''Every day I saw the huge material, intellectual and nervous resources of thousands of people being poured into the creation of a means of total destruction, something capable of annihilating all human civilization,'' Dr. Sakharov wrote in the introduction to ''Sakharov Speaks,'' published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf in 1974. ''I noticed that the control levers were in the hands of people who, though talented in their own way, were cynical.'' 'Impotence and Fright' He made a vain effort in the late 1950's to persuade Mr. Khrushchev to cancel a series of atmospheric tests and tried later to stop what he termed ''the senseless detonation of an enormous hydrogen bomb,'' whose fallout, he warned, would be certain to cause a ''colossal'' number of radiation victims. The bomb was detonated anyway. ''The feeling of impotence and fright that seized me on that day has remained in my memory ever since,'' he wrote. In 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a treaty banning nuclear explosions in space, the atmosphere and under water. Dr. Sakharov's forebodings about mankind were eased by that treaty. And he was gratified that he had played a key role in persuading Moscow to accept the curbs. In March 1970, the nuclear physicist, by now a world-noted dissident, was joined by Valentin Turchin, a mathematican who later emigrated to the United States, and Roy Medvedev, a Marxist historian and unrelenting critic of Stalinism, in addressing a troubled letter to the Kremlin leadership, analyzing failures throughout the Soviet system, including ''economic breakdown and stagnation.'' The critique was devastating. The three pointed to crippling policy errors and red tape in the economy, technological backwardness, defects in planning and accounting, widespread alcoholism, censorship, imprisonment of writers, plundering of forests, ruin of farmland and pollution of water resources. Easing of Secrecy ''The cause of all this trouble,'' the letter said, was not the Soviet Communist system as such, but rather ''cruel distortions in the system caused by the antidemocratic traditions and norms of public life'' that appeared during Stalin's dictatorship and persisted after his death. They proposed an urgent program of democratization, a gradual easing of obsessive secrecy, amnesty for political prisoners, elimination of nationality designations in passports, reforms in industry, education and the press, and gradual introduction at all levels of multiple candidates for party and government posts. The proposals, which focused on the worst sore points of Soviet society, met only cold silence from Soviet officialdom. Persisting in the struggle and turning more and more to foreign public opinion for support, Dr. Sakharov and two others, Andrei Tverdokhlebov and Valery Chalidze, who later went to the United States, announced on Nov. 4, 1970, the formation of a Committee for Human Rights, seeking to implement in the Soviet Union the terms of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After the death of his first wife, Klavdiya, in the late 1960's, Dr. Sakharov married Yelena G. Bonner in 1971. She was a physician whom he met at a dissident rally. He left his large Academy of Sciences apartment and moved into her modest two-room quarters, which they shared with her mother. Nobel Prize Over the years, Miss Bonner gave him support in his lonely battle, and she was to become the focus of wrath and charges that she had incited Dr. Sakharov to commit dissident deeds. In 1975, at a time when he was under growing threats and pressure, the Norwegian Parliament's Nobel Committee said Dr. Sakharov ''has fought not only against the abuse of power and violations of human dignity in all its forms, but has with equal vigor fought for the ideal of a state founded on the principle of justice for all.'' Stung by the Nobel Committee's gesture, Moscow branded Dr. Sakharov ''a judas'' and ''laboratory rat of the West.'' He was denied a visa to go to Norway for the award. His wife, in Italy for eye care, went to Oslo and read his speech, in which he again stressed the urgency of intellectual freedom. In January 1977, a day after the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter, Dr. Sakharov sent him a letter citing human-rights violations and oppression in the Soviet Union. He received a reply through the American Embassy, but there was no further correspondence between the two as human rights were overshadowed by other issues in Washington. Afghanistan Invasion In the letter, Dr. Sakharov said a bomb blast in a Moscow subway car, which killed several people, was similar in purpose to the Hitler-inspired Reichstag fire in 1933, which enabled the Nazis to consolidate their rule, and the Stalin-instigated murder of Sergei Kirov in Leningrad in 1934, which opened the door to a wave of purge trials. In December 1979, when the Soviet leaders were trying to stifle the dissident movement as the Moscow Olympics approached, they complicated their own uneasy situation by sending troops into Afghanistan. Dr. Sakharov alarmed the Kremlin by denouncing the military intervention and urging the world to retaliate through a boycott of the Olympics. The response was swift. Security officers of the K.G.B. stopped an Academy of Sciences car taking Dr. Sakharov to a seminar, removed him and delivered him to a deputy prosecutor, who informed him that he had been stripped of his state honors and would be sent to Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow. His wife was given two hours to pack and accompany him to the airport. In Gorky, Dr. Sakharov was kept isolated from the world. His mail was intercepted, and most of his visitors were turned away by secret police agents. In 1984, after he went on a hunger strike, all visitors were barred. Dr. Sakharov's attempts to call friends and supporters from public telephones were thwarted by the security police. Yet he managed to transmit a manuscript, which he titled ''A Time of Anxiety,'' to The New York Times. In it he told of a grim life in exile and reiterated his many criticisms of the soviet system. 'What Kind of Country?' Five months after being sent into exile, when he learned that a dissident friend, Viktor Nekipelov, had been sentenced to a labor camp for anti-Soviet activities, Dr. Sakharov asked, in a stinging statement passed to Westerners in Moscow by his wife, ''What kind of country is this, cruel and without a soul, that destroys its best citizens and cynically breaks its own laws and international agreements?'' After Mr. Gorbachev intervened in December 1986 to permit him return to Moscow, Dr. Sakharov became an ally of the Soviet leader, speaking out in support of the program for democratization. But he warned often against letting any Soviet leader acquire too much power.
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