31 July 2018

Fifty Years Later, Andrei Sakharov’s Seminal Essay Is a Powerful Model of Writing for Social Change

By Masha Gessen

The following is adapted from a keynote address delivered on July 22, 2018, at the beginning of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center’s week devoted to “writers and artists as activists.” In cases, the author has revised the Times translation of the Russian original and reinstated original emphasis. We are here to talk about writing for social change. Fifty years ago today, the New York Times devoted three full pages to an essay by the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, who was about to emerge as that country’s leading dissident and one of the world’s most visionary humanitarian thinkers. On Saturday, the Times published an essay about the essay, headlined “The Essay That Helped Bring Down the Soviet Union.” (I think Sakharov might have turned over in his grave at that title, both because he was an almost unimaginably modest man and because he would have found the Cold War framing that birthed the headline objectionable.) In the column about the essay, the Israeli politician and the former dissident Natan Sharansky writes that Sakharov “championed an essential idea at grave risk today: that those of us lucky enough to live in open societies should fight for the freedom of those born into closed ones.” The United States, Sharansky continues, has been retreating from this obligation, and, under Donald Trump, has shirked it altogether. That is indisputably true, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t do the Sakharov essay justice. The essay is a great piece of writing, and a great piece of writing for social change, not only because it is an exercise in thinking in public, on paper, but because it is an invitation to think—and to argue with the author.


Let me quote the end of Sakharov’s essay:

With this article the author addresses the leadership of our country and all its citizens as well as all people of good­will throughout the world. The author is aware of the controversial character of many of his statements. His purpose is open, frank discussion under conditions of publicity.

The essay was called “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom.” It was written by a forty-seven-year-old man who had spent a decade reconsidering his own life’s work, his world view, and his personal responsibility to humanity. Sakharov was a physicist who, starting in 1948, had played a leading role in developing the Soviet nuclear arsenal. “I never doubted that Soviet superweapons were vitally important for our country, and for maintaining an equilibrium of forces around the world,” he wrote in a different essay. But in 1957 he came to feel personally responsible for the contamination caused by nuclear-weapons testing. He began campaigning for a moratorium on testing. The Soviet Union’s most brilliant young nuclear physicist was, in the course of a few years, transformed into one of the world’s best-qualified crusaders against nuclear testing.

Of course, campaigning in the Soviet Union, a country without a public sphere, was tricky business. Sakharov could campaign precisely because he was integrated into some of the most powerful institutions in the country. He spoke out at top-secret, high-level meetings; he addressed the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, directly. All of this was fruitless. (An aside: while I was preparing this talk, I came across Sakharov’s recollection of an exchange with Khrushchev, in which the Soviet head of state took credit for the election of John F. Kennedy; according to Sakharov, Khrushchev lamented, “But what’s the damn use of Kennedy when his hands are tied?”)

The more helpless Sakharov felt, the more he seemed to notice how helpless other intellectuals felt to express their views, or to undertake their research. He started speaking out on behalf of geneticists, whose discipline was banned in the Soviet Union. This, in turn, led him to meet dissident thinkers. By 1968, he realized that he was in the process of reconsidering everything he had ever thought about the way the world worked. He began writing “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom.” He referred to it variously as a book or a brochure—since it was fated to be circulated only in “samizdat,” the underground self-publishing network, it fell outside the standard categories of books and articles—but probably its most important incarnation was in the Times. Following the publication of the essay abroad, Sakharov was stripped of his Soviet titles and honors and demoted far down the academic ladder. Around the same time, he had made the decision to donate all of his savings to the Red Cross and for the construction of a cancer hospital. So now he was also virtually penniless.

Sakharov’s writing process was evolutionary and collaborative. He circulated drafts of his ideas and incorporated feedback. The ideas in this essay were ones he would continue considering for many years to come. When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1975, he wrote a lecture titled “Peace, Progress, and Human Rights,” a much more polished and, in some ways, clearer version of many of the ideas in the earlier piece. (Sakharov was not allowed to travel to Oslo for the ceremony, so the speech was delivered by his wife, Yelena Bonner.) He did not even include the 1968 piece in a collection of his political essays that he put together in the nineteen-eighties; presumably, he believed he had found better iterations of its ideas. But his fifty-year-old essay remains ahistoric document and an achievement. I want to focus on it in no small part precisely because it contains a lot of raw ideas and uncertainty, and these are two elements that are essential to thinking, good for writing, and very important for the potential for social change.

For the Russian version of the essay, Sakharov chose an epigraph from Goethe (the Times omitted it, or perhaps Sakharov added it to a later version):

He only earns his freedom and his life

Who takes them every day by storm

To me, this choice of opening is oddly inspiring, but not because I share the sentiment. In fact, the sentiment is antithetical to the concept of human rights, which holds that people do not have to earn the right to live or the right to be free—these rights are theirs from birth, and no idea of “deservedness” can be applied to them. I don’t think Sakharov believed that people had to earn their lives or their freedom, either. I suspect he chose this epigraph to assert his own right to speak. There is something immodest about sticking one’s neck out and demanding attention to one’s ideas. Sakharov is making the claim that he has the right to speak, the right to think in public, because he is trying to think in the name of freedom. This is a beautiful claim. (It’s also interesting that when Sakharov uses the concept of human rights in this piece, he puts it in quotation marks. Twenty years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was still a novel enough concept for someone living behind the Iron Curtain.)

Sakharov began by expressing deep anxiety about the future of humanity. “This anxiety is nourished, in particular, by a realization that the scientific method of directing policy, the economy, arts, education and military affairs still has not become a reality,” he wrote. By “scientific,” the scientist explained, he meant a method rooted in facts and based in analysis. Today, those of us who are deeply anxious about the future of humanity may not choose to use the word “scientific,” but we are similarly lamenting a lack of regard for facts, the loss of a shared sense of reality, and the absence of transparency in politics.

“The division of humankind threatens it with destruction,” Sakharov wrote. This was the height of the arms race, during the Cold War and the Vietnam War; Sakharov wrote specifically about the threat to humanity posed by the Vietnam War.

In the face of these perils, any action increasing the division of humankind, any preaching of the incompatibility of world ideologies and nations is madness and a crime. Only universal coöperation under conditions of intellectual freedom and the lofty moral ideals of socialism and labor, accompanied by the elimination of dogmatism and pressures of the concealed interests of ruling classes, will preserve civilization.

In a footnote, he reminded the reader that what he said did not mean that there could be compromise, rapprochement, or any kind of peace with racist, fascist, militaristic, Maoist, and other extremist ideologies. The Times incorporated the footnote in the body of the text. I don’t know whether this decision was based on “house style”—most newspapers reject the possibility of a footnote—or on other considerations. But incorporating the note in the text had the effect of flattening Sakharov’s attempt to create an intellectual hierarchy between peace that is desired and peace that is nonetheless morally untenable. Placing these paragraphs on the page one after the other made it, perhaps, easier for readers to hold the two contradictory thoughts at the same time. It also served to encourage passivity: if possibility and impossibility are weighted equally, your inaction is excused. Sakharov’s approach demanded that you do the impossible: create peace where compromise is immoral.

Sakharov went on to enumerate the threats to humanity. First among them was the threat of nuclear war. He acknowledged that nuclear parity between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. serves as a sort of deterrent, though clearly not enough of one to alleviate his anxiety. Fifty years later, we can no longer make the same statement about nuclear parity with respect to, say, the United States and North Korea. Yet our anxiety seems to have dissipated, perhaps simply because we have spent half a century with the knowledge that the world is capable of imminent suicide. Even over the roughly six months when Donald Trump was actively goading Kim Jong Un into nuclear war, we found other controversies to focus on. Sakharov wrote:

Every rational creature, finding itself on the brink of a disaster, first tries to get away from the brink and only then does it think about the satisfaction of its other needs. If humanity is to get away from the brink, it must overcome its divisions.

A vital step would be a review of the traditional method of international affairs, which may be termed “empirical-competitive.” In the simplest definition, this is a method aiming at maximum improvement of one’s position everywhere possible and, simultaneously, a method of causing maximum unpleasantness to opposing forces without consideration of common welfare and common interests.

If politics were a game of two gamblers, then this would be the only possible method.

Indeed, this still seems like the only possible method for most teachers and students of international relations and diplomacy, for political analysts and journalists. When we analyze Trump’s meeting with Putin, we talk about which one of them won. (I am guilty of this kind of commentary as well.) We almost always neglect to note that humanity lost. Moreover, humanity would have lost regardless of which one of them won (though the extent of the loss would have been different). Fifty years ago, Sakharov was arguing that as long as international politics are framed as a zero-sum game, humanity is imperilled. If politics is the process of finding evolving agreement on how people live together, then Sakharov was arguing for a truly political approach to understanding international relations, where success would be measured by whether the planet became a better place for all its inhabitants.

One of the things that made Sakharov a great thinker was his capacity for moral critique, which was all the more extraordinary if you consider how isolated he was, how little access he had to news or scholarship from outside the Soviet Union. Even more remarkable was his capacity for hope and vision. Here is how he was trying to imagine a new global politics: “International affairs must be completely permeated with scientific methodology and a democratic spirit, with a fearless weighing of all facts, views, and theories, with maximum publicity of ultimate and intermediate goals, and with a consistency of principles.”

What might that look like? At the end of the essay, Sakharov took a stab at a forecast. He was beginning to develop his concept of “convergence,” a gradual coming together of the socialist and capitalist systems. (Like most people who grew up in the Soviet Union, Sakharov was more likely to speak about the competition of two different economic systems rather than two competing ideologies or two political systems.) In the best possible scenario, he wrote, “Convergence will reduce differences in social structure, promote intellectual freedom, science, and economic progress, and lead to the creation of a world government and the smoothing of national contradictions.”

In this best possible of all worlds, Sakharov imagined that this coming together would occur between 1980 and 2000. He was well aware that he was calling for a psychological revolution, a moral one. And, though he was writing for citizens of the world, but counting only on being read by the few hundred or few thousand regular consumers of samizdat, he included a radical prescription for the American public. It came in the section on another threat to humanity: world hunger and overpopulation. He wrote:

At this time, the white citizens of the United States are unwilling to accept even minimum sacrifices to eliminate the unequal economic and cultural position of the country’s black citizens, who make up 10 per cent of the population.

It is necessary to change the psychology of the American citizens so that they will voluntarily and generously support their government and worldwide efforts to change the economy, technology and level of living of billions of people. This, of course, would entail a serious decline in the United States rate of economic growth. The Americans should be willing to do this, solely for the sake of lofty and distant goals, for the sake of preserving civilization and humankind on our planet.

Sakharov saw clear parallels between the economic inequalities in the Soviet Union and the United States. In both societies, he estimated, the top five per cent enjoyed extraordinary privilege while a far larger group—his estimates were twenty-five per cent for the U.S. and forty per cent for the U.S.S.R.—lived in poverty. His greater concern, however, was with the inequality between countries. He proposed a twenty-per-cent tax on the gross national product of developed countries for a period of fifteen years. He imagined that this money could be used to help developing countries and have a healing effect on their politics while also “automatically” lowering the amount that developed countries spent on defense.

From behind the Iron Curtain, Sakharov saw the role of American racism in exacerbating the plight of the poor people of the world. Fifty years later, his observation is no less relevant. The U.S. has never been further from achieving a moral consensus that would compel its wealthier citizens, or its white citizens, to contribute in thought, deed, or gold to the welfare of humankind globally.

Sakharov could not have foreseen a new kind of coming together of cultures. Take, for example, Mariia Butina, a Russian woman who was recently arrested on suspicion of acting as a Russian agent. Her links to virulently racist and homophobic political circles in the U.S. have been interpreted as an expression of Russian influence on that politics. Just a few years ago, observers of these politics generally favored the opposite narrative: that American fundamentalists and other extreme social conservatives, having apparently lost their foothold in the U.S., were exporting their politics to Russia and elsewhere. The facts are less neat and more painful: there is a sincere meeting of the minds between American and Russian white supremacists, and this meeting of the minds has fostered an international movement in opposition to everything Sakharov was advocating. This movement—which traffics in white hysteria and fights so-called gender ideology and, of course, the queers—is a rare example of convergence in our world today, and the very opposite of what Sakharov envisioned.

Just as Putin has done in Russia, Trump and the Republican Party have used white demographic panic in the U.S. to shore up their power. That gets me to another threat to humanity that concerned Sakharov in this essay. He addressed the danger of cultural “dumbing down.” (The Times translation did not use this term, but I believe it’s closest to the Russian original.) He wrote:

Nothing threatens individual freedom and the meaning of life like war, poverty, terror. But there are also indirect and only slightly more remote dangers. One of these is the stupefaction of man . . . by mass culture with its intentional or commercially motivated lowering of intellectual level and content, with its stress on entertainment or utilitarianism, and with its carefully protective censorship.

Again, Sakharov was making the point that different threats, typical of different societies, were not equal in scale but posed similar dangers. While a police dictatorship may damage and even destroy people’s ability to think, a consumerist society can lull them into the same state. These words read as prescient in a time when Russia is run by what used to be its secret police, while the U.S. is headed by a reality-TV star. Many of the people who are dismayed by this President fall into the trap of increasingly reductionist rhetoric. Last week, for example, we saw the word “treason” become central to what passes for political conversation. While that turn in the debate reflects genuine concerns about what may prove to be actual crimes, it also represents yet another turn away from complexity.

It is also as far as possible from Sakharov’s vision of a global politics. When Sakharov wrote about totalitarian leaders, he accused them of a “combination of crime, narrow-mindedness and short-sightedness.” Consider the meaning of thinking about these acts and traits in combination: crime, narrow-mindedness, and short-sightedness go together and become one another. Crime is a rejection of laws—the product of the political process. The refusal to think broadly or imagine the future is a rejection of politics itself. Blatant disregard for future generations is an attitudinal trait that unites Trump, Putin, and many of today’s other dictators. Sakharov’s thinking here echoes Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil,” which focussed on the willful rejection of thought and depth.

And yet he saw hope. A section in the essay titled “The Basis for Hope” began with the concept of “moral attractiveness.” Many of the specifics in Sakharov’s plan are no longer relevant: he was trying to deal with overcoming the contradictions between what then seemed like two competing economic and intellectual systems in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But his larger concept seems as essential and as remote as it did fifty years ago: humanity needed to achieve a moral consensus that would enable people to live in peace, with ever less regard for borders. Each nation, and most human beings, would come to see their own investment in the survival of the other.

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