Bring Down the Soviet Union

Fifty years back this Sunday, this paper gave three broadsheet pages to an article that had been coursing furtively in the Soviet Union for a considerable length of time. The declaration, composed by Andrei Sakharov, championed a fundamental thought at grave hazard today: that those of us sufficiently fortunate to live in open social orders should battle for the flexibility of those naturally introduced to shut ones. This radical contention changed the course of history. 

Sakharov's exposition conveyed a mellow title — "Musings on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom" — however it was dangerous. "Flexibility of thought is the main assurance against a contamination of humanity by mass legends, which, in the hands of misleading deceivers and rabble-rousers, can be changed into bleeding autocracies," he composed. All of a sudden the Soviet Union's most enlivened physicist turned into its most conspicuous dissenter. 

For this work and other "thought wrongdoings," the Soviet specialists stripped Sakharov of his distinctions, detained a large number of his partners and, in the long run, banished him to Gorky. 

In 1968, when this work was distributed, I was a 20-year-old mathematician learning at what might as well be called M.I.T. Despite the fact that we challenged not talk about it, my companions and I carried on with an existence of twofold think: toeing the Communist Party line out in the open, thinking freely in private. Like such huge numbers of others, I read Sakharov's exposition in samizdat — a typewritten duplicate copied covertly, spread casually and read ravenously. 

Its message was agitating and freeing: You can't be a decent researcher or a free individual while carrying on with a twofold life. Knowing reality while teaming up in the administration's untruths just creates awful science and broken spirits. 

Sakharov's exposition, which concurred with the Prague Spring, stimulated majority rule dissenter developments that were simply growing in a post-Stalinist world. The biggest of these was one I would before long join: the purported refusenik development to permit the Soviet Union's for quite some time persecuted Jews the flexibility to emigrate.