Western Scientists’ Reactions to Andrei Sakharov’s Human Rights Struggle in the Soviet Union, 1968–1989

Abstract

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.

Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov and Shcharansky

“…Among a group of others involved at Berkeley were Nobel laureate Owen Chamberlain and Andrew Sessler, the director of the lab. Philip Siegelman, a later recruit to SOS and a political scientist at San Francisco State University, observed that SOS testified to a "typically 'Berkeleyian' sensitivity to matters of social conscience" (Rhéaume 2008). There were personal connections between the founders of SOS and the scientists for whom they campaigned.…”

“…However, the signing of the Helsinki Accords and the heightened awareness of the plight of Soviet scientists made individual US and European scientists more circumspect about their involvement in these exchanges. A group of prominent French scientists had expressed concern about the Soviet press campaign against Sakharov in 1973(Rhéaume 2008. Sakharov was an elected foreign member of the NAS, and Philip Handler, the NAS President, was also obliged to defend him.…”

“…In science as elsewhere, these organizations testified to the broad engagement with human rights rhetoric that scholars like Samuel Moyn and Jan Eckel have identified as characteristic of the 1970s (Moyn 2010;Eckel and Moyn 2015;Eckel 2019). Studies of scientific human rights organizations have demonstrated that their members understood human rights to be closely connected to scientific freedoms (Wolfe 2018;Vezzosi 2018;Rhéaume 2008). But just as Soviet scientific dissidents were constituents in a broader movement dedicated to calling out their government, members of Western networks were also part of a wider international activism, not solely articulated in the language of human rights, on behalf of Soviet dissidents, be they scientists, authors (from Solzenitsyn to Alexander Ginzburg), or others.…”

An Alternative to the Dissident Paradigm and Intersecting Civil Protests in Soviet Armenia: Equal but Different?

“…It was in that decade that Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika began in the territory of the Soviet Union, which ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union (Bergman 1998;Boffa 1996). As Gorbachev, the initiator of perestroika, noted, the main goal of those unprecedented political processes taking place in the USSR was the broad democratization of the entire public life, which should decisively overcome the processes of stagnation and accelerate the social and economic development of society (Bacon 1992;Fireside 1989;Rhéaume 2008;Remington 1989). Moreover, it would be based on the creative potential of the masses, the acceleration of the development of the Soviet economy, the priority of science, the social sphere, and social justice.…”