Posted on May 22, 2011 - by Venik
Andrei Sakharov’s birthday celebrations are also a Soviet history lesson | Jonathan Steele
Celebrations for the late dissident’s 90th birthday serve as a reminder to young Russians of their country’s repressive history
No Russian did more to draw attention to human rights abuses in the era when Leonid Brezhnev led the Soviet Union than the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov. Though he died suddenly in 1989, celebrations are taking place in Moscow this week for his 90th birthday and to remind young Russians of his place in history.
A member of the team which developed Moscow’s hydrogen bomb in the firm belief that world peace depended on the Soviet Union achieving military balance with the United States, he later had second thoughts about the risks of confrontation that both sides were running. He also opposed the idea of anti-ballistic missile defence.
To ensure real peace he came to the view that the two states’ political systems must reach some degree of convergence. For Russia this meant greater democracy and openness as well as a revival of the de-Stalinisation programme that began after the dictator’s death but was stopped a decade later. When his private letters to the authorities had no effect, he chose to speak out.
He suddenly found he had stepped across the line and was in the world of the repressed. A reluctant dissident, he became aware that members of the intelligentsia had suffered imprisonment and internal exile for denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He learnt of other lonely and peaceful protests that led to jail terms. Sakharov’s pre-eminence made it hard for the Kremlin to treat him so harshly just as it made him a magnet for the Soviet Union’s tiny civil rights movement.
Other dissidents asked him to publicise their views and Sakhraov became a key figure behind the “Chronicle of Current Events”, a secretly typed bulletin of every arrest and imprisonment that became known to him. It was smuggled to the west and published. In January 1980, Sakharov spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He was stripped of all his awards and sent into exile to Gorky, a city closed to foreigners where his apartment was under constant police watch. It was only thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev’s arrival at the pinnacle of power in the Kremlin that he was released in December 1986. On return to Moscow he became a much-quoted public figure and was chosen by the Academy of Sciences to have a seat in the Soviet parliament.
This week’s birthday celebrations coincide, more or less, with the publication of an important new book on de-Stalinisation. The Victim’s Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin treats a subject that is rarely touched. No one really ever comes home after prison and Siberian exile. Relationships, friends, children, and society at large have all changed, sometimes to the pain of the returnees.
Stephen Cohen, a distinguished American scholar of Russian politics, got to know many former prisoners as a researcher in Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular the families of one-time Bolsheviks and party loyalists, from Nikolai Bukharin’s widow, Anna Larina, to the Medvedev brothers and Lev Kopelev.
We know a good deal about the Gulag but little about post-Gulag life. Cohen sheds fascinating new light on two former prisoners who, in spite of their suffering, remained committed communists on release, found work in the party’s central committee, and used their high-level access to open Khrushchev’s eyes. They helped to persuade him to order the release of all victims still in exile and to make the “secret speech” in 1956 in which he denounced Stalin’s crimes. Olga Shatunovskaya and Aleksei Snegov became known to admirers and Kremlin detractors alike as “Khrushchev’s zeks” (prisoners).
They were even more influential five years later when Khrushchev raised the spectre of trials of perpetrators and had Stalin’s corpse removed from the mausoleum in Red Square. Shatunovskaya became the lead investigator in the official commission that examined the origins of Stalin’s terror.
Cohen’s book is a reminder that, for all the persecution which Sakharov and scores of other intellectuals suffered under Brezhnev, the system was infinitely less harsh than Stalin’s arbitrary rule where unpredictability was a deliberate tool of state policy. Though commonly described as stagnant, the Brezhnev system was slowly evolving, and Gorbachev’s emergence was not an aberration.
Even in today’s Russia, when anti-Stalinism may seem to be losing out in officialdom, Cohen argues that things are more complex. Prime Minister Putin has taken contradictory stands, endorsing a new school textbook that seems to rationalise Stalin’s terror as a necessary form of social “mobilisation”, but also attending the public commemoration of victims at a notorious site near Moscow where hundreds of Stalin’s victims were killed. For his part President Medvedev has expressed alarm that young Russians did not know about the “dimensions of the terror, the millions of maimed lives” under Stalin.
Russia has no national museum of Stalin’s repression but Moscow has two Gulag museums. One is financed by the city council and organised by Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, the son of an executed former Bolshevik leader. The other is the Sakharov museum. Both help to keep the flame of memory alive.
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