Sakharov Returns from Gorky

Andrei Sakharov’s return to Moscow from exile in Gorky (now Nizhnyi Novgorod) on 23 December 1986 was a media sensation. Best known as a Soviet human rights activist, in his professional life Sakharov was a top-notch thermonuclear scientist. In 1948-9, he played a key role in the development of the first Soviet atomic bomb, and was similarly instrumental in the creation of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, first successfully tested in 1955. Two years later, he wrote the first of many letters to Soviet authorities—in this case, defending a doctor convicted of telling anti-Soviet jokes to his patients. He also wrote about the pseudoscience of agronomist Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), touted as a luminary under Stalin, as well as the problems of atmospheric nuclear testing and low-level radiation. In 1959, he was the chief author of the statement “Soviet Scientists against the Nuclear Threat.” At the time, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) appeared to trust the physicist’s opinion, and in 1963, Sakharov was appointed to the team that negotiated an end to above-ground nuclear testing in the USSR and US.

Sakharov’s good fortune in lobbying the Soviet authorities came to an end as the relatively reformist Khruschev era gave way to more conservative rule by Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982). In 1966, Sakharov signed a collective letter to the Twenty-Third Party Congress criticizing the idea of rehabilitating Stalin. After other letters and attempted publications, Sakharov penned “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom,” which expressed his views on nuclear energy and what he called the “convergence” of socialism and capitalism into a single humanitarian system that would prevent nuclear catastrophe. For his signature on the letter to the Twenty-Third Party Congress, Sakharov’s paycheck was cut in half. For “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom,” which came out in samizdat before Sakharov submitted a copy to the Central Committee, and which was then published in Amsterdam, he lost his position at the top nuclear testing laboratory in the Soviet Union. Instead, he was transferred to Moscow and placed in a far less prestigious and lucrative position at the Academy of Sciences.

Sakharov’s fortunes fell even further in 1979—four years after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—when he spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Without trial or conviction, he was exiled to Gorky in January 1980. At the time, Gorky was a closed city where foreigners were forbidden to travel, and Sakharov was similarly forbidden to travel beyond city bounds. He received a comfortable apartment, but not permitted to have a telephone. He was also forbidden from meeting with journalists.

After seven years in exile in Gorky, Sakharov again took up his pen, this time writing letters to Mikahil Gorbachev (1931-2022), first in response to Gorbachev’s interview in the French daily L’Humanité—in which the leader claimed that the USSR had no prisoners of conscience—and later regarding his own exile in Gorky. These missives had a direct effect: late at night on 15 December 1986, an electrician arrived to install a telephone in Sakharov’s apartment. The following day, Gorbachev personally called him to invite him to return to Moscow.

Sakharov arrived at Yaroslav Station in Moscow on the morning of 23 December 1986. Journalists flocked to the physicist and his wife, Yelena Bonner (1923-2011), poised to snap photographs of his return and record his first works back in the capital. Despite having been trashed by the press in earlier years for “anti-Soviet activity,” Sakharov received enormous press attention throughout perestroika, much of it positive, until his untimely death in 1989.