My Country Wrld V2067

by Andrej D. Sacharov and Andrei D. Sakharov

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394720679
• ISBN13: 9780394720678
• Release Date: October 1975
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Length: 109 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The voice of truth and conscience

Andrei Sakharov was one of the greatest fighters for human rights of the 20th century. He gained the 1975 Nobel Prize and in 1979 was exiled to Gorky. In this book Sakharov outlines his vision of the USSR and the world at the time. In this moving and forthright book Sakharov outlined the problems of the Soviet Union of the time including poverty, poor living standards, alcoholism, and economic stagnation. He criticized the priviliges of the Nomenklatura, or Communist Party elite. He attacked the discrimination and repression of minorities such as the Jews, Ukrainians,Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and Meshki Turks. In 1944 the Crimean Tatars became victims of a criminal forced resettlement during which half of the children and old people died of hunger and cold. They were denied the right to resettle in their native Crimea until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the independence of Ukraine. Their fate was shared by the Volga Germans, the Meshki Turks and others. He outlines the hypocrisy and blindness of leftwing intellectuals of his time, and during the Stalin years before. During the 1920s a Western writer declared that the "rumors" of famine in the USSR were exaggerated "Nowhere have I eaten so well as in the USSR" he said at the very time that NKVD "anti-profiteer" detachments were machine gunning starving children who were trying to cross the border. Sakharov attacks the hypocrisy of the leftist intellgensia who showed a moral blindness in condoning human rights abuses and crimes in Communist states. Their moral perfidy is echoed today in their support of terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, their vicious prejudice against Israel, and their support for both Arab/Islamic dictatorships like Iran, Syria, Libya and Sudan as well as revolutionary/Communist regimes like Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and Zimbabwe. In this book he condemmned leftists who were so vocal about the excesses of Pinochet's Chile but were silent about the mass executions in Cambodia and Vietnam by the Communists. Sakharov attacked Soviet support for totalitarian regimes like Gaddafi's Libya and Idi Amin's Uganda, as well as Soviet support for the genocide of the Ibos in Nigeria and the Kurds of Iraq. Sakahrov saw the greatest threat to the world coming from the totalitarian challenge. This is as true today as it was then. His call for Western unity and strength in the face of totalitarian evil is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s.