ANDREI SAKHAROV
513
silent for some time , and then began to refer to the essay very nega–
tively. Many critics, even sympathetic ones, considered my ideas
naive and impractical. But thirteen years later, it seems to me that
these ideas foreshadowed important new directions in world and
Soviet politics.
After 1970, the defense of human rights and of victims of politi–
cal repression became my first concern. My collaboration with
Valery Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, and later with Igor
Shafarevich and Grigory Podyapolsky, on the Moscow Human
Rights Committee was one expression of that concern. (Podya–
polsky's untimely death in March 1976 was a tragedy .)
After my essay was published abroad in July 1968, I was barred
from secret work and excommunicated from many privileges of the
Soviet establishment. The pressure on me, my family, and friends
increased in 1972 , but as I came to learn more about the spreading
repressions, I felt obliged to speak out in defense of some victim al–
most daily. In recent years I have continued to speak out as well on
peace and disarmament, on freedom of contacts, movement, infor–
mation and opinion, against capital punishment, on protection of
the environment, and on nuclear power plants .
In 1975 I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This was a great
honor for me as well as recognition for the entire human rights
movement in the USSR. In January 1980 I was deprived of all my
official Soviet awards (the order of Lenin, three times Hero of Social–
ist Labor, the Lenin Prize, the State Prize) and banished to Gorky
where I am virtually isolated and watched day and night by a police–
man at my door. The regime's action lacks any legal basis .
It
is one
more example of the intensified political repression gripping our
country in recent years .
Since the summer of 1969 I have been a senior scientist at the
Academy of Sciences' Institute of Physics. My current scientific in–
terests are elementary particles, gravitation, and cosmology.
I am not a professional politician. Perhaps that is why I am
always bothered by questions concerning the usefulness and even–
tual results of my actions. I am inclined to believe that moral criteria
together with uninhibited thought provide the only possible compass
for these complex and contradictory problems. I shall refrain from
specific predictions, but today as always I believe in the power of
reason and the human spirit .
Gorky, March 24, 1981
