Sakharov Speaks

by Andrei D. Sakharov

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394713028
• ISBN13: 9780394713021
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: Random House Trade
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The voice of a true 20th century hero.

Andrei Sakharov was one of the greatest fighters for human rights of the 20th century. From the position of one of the Soviet Union's most eminent scientist, Sakharov in the 1960s turned to fighting for human rights and basic freedoms in the Soviet Union, for which he was persecuted and exiled. This book contains various writings, documents, manifestos, writings and interviews by Sakharov and his colleagues, which give an insight into both Sakharov's philosophy of peace and human rights as well as the conditions of repression and terror in the Soviet Union at the time. Sakharov writes of his vision for progress, peace and intellectual freedom in the world. Despite advocating gradual and peaceful change he was accused by Soviet authorities of conspiring with 'the enemies' of the regime and exiled in 1979 to Gorky, after protesting the brutal Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Sakharov opposed the totalitarian power of Soviet tyrany and in fact all tyrannical and anti-democratic forms of government. Sakharov's second wife was a human rights activist by the name of Yelena Bonner, who was Jewish. Because of this the Soviet propagandists claimed Sakharov was really a Jew named Sugarman. An clear example of Soviet style anti-Semitism. He called for detente between East and West, but based on greater respect for human rights, and an end to repression by the Soviet Union of it's own peoples and of other nations. He warned against detente based on condoning or turning a blind eye to communist repression. The policy that would be later be carried out by US President Jimmy Carter who showed no sympathy for victims of repression in Soviet or revolutionary states, and who sold out human rights and freedoms many times over, as a result of his pro-Communist symptathies. Sakharov struggled for an end to the persecution of dissidents in the Sopviet Unions, and particularly the cruel practise of imprisoning dissidents in mental institutions. He called for the right of emigration from the Soviet Union, and foght for the rights of minority nations in the Soviet Union such as the Jews, Ukrainians, Volga Germans, Kalmyks, Circasians, Karachai, Balkars Crimean Tatars, Meshki, and Greeks, all of whom had been presecuted and subjected to genocide by the Communist rulers of the Soviet Union. In a January 1974 memorandum, together with four other human rights activists, Sakaharov called for an end to the Soviet regimes threats to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, after he published the Gulag Archipelago. Sakharov and his colleagues pointed out that Solzhenitsyn should not be persecutedf and terrorised for speaking the truth. "After all it cannot be denied that there actually were mass arrests, tortures, executions, forced labor, inhuman conditions, and the deliberate anihilation of millions of people in camps. There was the dispossesion of kulaks, the persecution and anihilation of hundreds of thousands of believers, forcible ressetlement of peoples, anti-worker and anti-peasant law