ANDREI SAKHAROV
509
I hope that carefully thought out and organized actions in de–
fense of victims of repression will ease their lot and add strength, au–
thority, and energy to the international scientific community.
I have titled this letter "The Responsibility of Scientists."
Tatiana Velikanova, Yury Orlov, Sergei Kovalev, and many others
have decided this question for themselves by taking the path of
active, self-sacrificing struggle for human rights and for an open so–
ciety. Their sacrifices are enormous, but they are not in vain. These
individuals are improving the ethical image of our world.
Many of their colleagues who live in totalitarian countries but
who have not found within themselves the strength for such struggle,
do try to fulfill honestly their professional responsibilities. It is, in
fact, essential to work at one's profession. But has not the time come
for those scientists, who often exhibit their perception and noncon–
formity when with close friends, to demonstrate their sense of re–
sponsibility in some fashion which has more social significance, and
to take a more public stand, at least on issues such as the defense of
their persecuted colleagues and control over the faithful execution of
domestic laws and the performance of international obligations?
Every true scientist should undoubtedly muster sufficient courage
and integrity to resist the temptation and the habit of conformity.
Unfortunately, we are familiar with too many counterexamples in
the Soviet Union, sometimes using the excuse of protecting one's
laboratory or institute (usually just a pretext), sometimes for the
sake of one's career, sometimes for the sake of foreign travel (a major
lure in a closed country such as ours). And was it not shameful for
Yury Orlov's colleagues to expel him secretly from the Armenian
Academy of Sciences while other colleagues in the USSR Academy
of Sciences shut their eyes to the expulsion and also to his physical
condition? (He is close to death.) Many active and passive accom–
plices in such affairs may themselves someday attract the growing
appetite of Moloch. Nothing good can come of this. Better to
avert it.
Western scientists face no threat of prison or labor camp for
public stands; they cannot be bribed by an offer of foreign travel to
forsake such activity. But this in no way diminishes their responsibil–
ity. Some Western intellectuals warn against social involvement as a
form of politics. But I am not speaking about a struggle for power–
it is not politics.
It
is a struggle to preserve peace and those ethical
values which have been developed as our civilization evolved. By
