Volume 37, Number 13 · August 16, 1990
The Struggle for Light
By David Remnick
Memoirs
by Andrei Sakharov, translated by Richard Lourie
Knopf, 773 pp., $29.95
Gorki, Moskva, Dalye Vezde (Gorky, Moscow, and Beyond)
by Andrei Sakharov
Izdatelstvo imeni Chekhova, 288 pp., $15.00
Trevoga i Nadezhda (Alarm and Hope)
by Andrei Sakharov
Inter-Verso (Soviet edition), 334 pp., $8.00
On a winter's night in 1986, two electricians and their KGB escort installed a 'special telephone' in the apartment of Andrei Sakharov. For six years Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner had been living in the industrial city of Gorky under government edict, and the sudden appearance of the new mystery phone seemed at first just another Orwellian moment in the day of exiles. Maybe the Soviet press would call for an interview, Sakharov thought. Two magazines had already put in requests. Turning the moral equations in his mind, Sakharov arrived at a finely calibrated stand of principle: he would refuse all interview requests until there was no longer a 'noose around my neck.' The KGB agent merely turned to Sakharov and said, 'You will get a call around ten tomorrow morning.'
Review, 6364 words
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