快猫短视频

Sakharov: A biography by Richard Lourie, Brandeis University Press, 拢21/$30, ISBN 1584652071

PHYSICIST Andrei Sakharov grew from innocence and naivety into dissidence. A helplessly shy, inarticulate student from a sheltered background, he came of age during the terror of Stalin鈥檚 time, thinking only of science. When he was appointed scientific director of the Soviet H-bomb programme in his early thirties, he was patriotic but politically clueless.

There was no sudden transformation from scientist to activist, rather an inexorable realisation that successive Soviet regimes were inflexibly autocratic and unjust. Richard Lourie convincingly depicts the paranoia and political machismo that drove the monstrous H-bomb testing programmes of the 1960s, which first sowed doubt and awoke a wider political awareness in Sakharov鈥檚 mind. He also captures the crass brutality of the Soviet state in the years before Gorbachev and glasnost, from which Sakharov emerged as an overt critic. The physicist鈥檚 simple naivete changed into an indefatigable determination to do the right thing.

Lourie is not quite at ease with science, but this is not a scientific biography. It is a deeply textured evocation of a hard and mostly honourable life. And it鈥檚 a sobering tale for those of us who have never had to think about the prospect of exile or hard labour for voicing an opinion.