After a brief look at the young Andrei Sakharov, this article examines expressions of an awakening to the human rights question in Sakharov’s own thinking as well as that of the physicist’s foreign colleagues. This article then scrutinizes the circumstances and reflections associated with the boycott by Western scientists of their relations with the Soviet Union in retaliation for the violation of the rights of dissident Soviet scientists, and Sakharov in particular. It concludes by analyzing the latter’s exclusive personal features that may help understand an unprecedented movement of solidarity of world science in defense of one of its most illustrious members.

In a study of Russian literature spanning one century, author Tristan Landry demonstrates, interestingly, that Stalin's great purges of 1936-38 did not come about ex nihilo. Murdering people in the hundreds of thousands was made easier by a Begriffsfeld-a "notional field," as Landry calls it, which had developed in successive layers over decades, and which permitted the lives of individuals to be disposed of for the sake of a common objective. 1 In that context, the value of an individual's life was equated with its degree of social utility. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for one, however, remains convinced of a noteworthy distinction between the old regime in Russia-whose inhabitants were not constrained in their choices-and communist rule in the Charles Rhéaume is a historian with the Department of National Defence in Ottawa. His book on the history of western scientists' reactions to Andrei Sakharov's human rights struggle in the Soviet Union was awarded a prize from the Institute of France in 2005.

No abstract

No abstract