Customer Reviews (1)

Cold War rationalist and great conscience
This is a great read in its search for remedies at the height of the Cold War.Originally circulated as an essay for both free thinkers and aparatchiks in the USSR, Sakharov wanted not just to resolve the conflict between the superpowers, but also address the plight of the Third World.First, he states that the US is ahead technologically, but the USSR is following close behind, like a second skier in the track of the trailblazer.From weapons, he argues, we should move to other realms of competition.Second, he argues for a massive transfer of wealth to the poorer countries.

While this approach can appear quaintly naive, it is wonderfully humanistic and well intentioned, a truly modern voice from a brutal and closed society.But it was also an intellectual manifesto that, with his other political transgressions, essentially got Sakharov ejected from the most prestigious perch in communist society as a traitor.Once revered as the father of the Soviet H-Bomb and a physicist of genius, he became a dissident and was exiled and beaten from 1980-6.All because of what he began - thinking more largely and politically - with this volume and other acts.For that, it is of historical interest.He is up there with Solzhenitsyn, but he is a more rational and less religious character.

This makes for truly fascinating reading, and gets one to think on many levels.Warmly recommmended for both the history buff and the concerned thinker. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of Russian History, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 547 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Providing a comprehensive discussion of the people, politics, economics, religion, culture, and social systems of Russia, this work spans the time from the earliest beginnings of the Russian nation (among the ancient Eastern Slavic tribes) to the end of czarist Russia and on through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. It provides the necessary information for readers to obtain a greater understanding of and appreciation for Russia in all of its many spheres. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The voice of a true 20th century hero.
Andrei Sakharov was one of the greatest fighters for human rightsof the 20th century.
From the position of one of the Soviet Union's most eminent scientist, Sakharov in the 1960s turned to fighting for human rights and basic freedoms in the Soviet Union, for which he was persecuted and exiled.
This book contains various writings, documents, manifestos, writings and interviews by Sakharov and his colleagues, which give an insight into both Sakharov's philosophy of peace and human rights as well as the conditions of repression and terror in the Soviet Union at the time.
Sakharov writes of his vision for progress, peace and intellectual freedom in the world.
Despite advocating gradual and peaceful change he was accused by Soviet authorities of conspiring with 'the enemies' of the regime and exiled in 1979 to Gorky, after protesting the brutal Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Sakharov opposed the totalitarian power of Soviet tyrany and in fact all tyrannical and anti-democratic forms of government.
Sakharov's second wife was a human rights activist by the name of Yelena Bonner, who was Jewish.
Because of this the Soviet propagandists claimed Sakharov was really a Jew named Sugarman.
An clear example of Soviet style anti-Semitism.
He called for detente between East and West, but based on greater respect for human rights, and an end to repression by the Soviet Union of it's own peoples and of other nations.
He warned against detente based on condoning or turning a blind eye to communist repression. The policy that would be later be carried out by US President Jimmy Carter who showed no sympathy for victims of repression in Soviet or revolutionary states, and who sold out human rights and freedoms many times over, as a result of his pro-Communist symptathies.
Sakharov struggled for an end to the persecution of dissidents in the Sopviet Unions, and particularly the cruel practise of imprisoning dissidents in mental institutions.
He called for the right of emigration from the Soviet Union, and foght for the rights ofminority nations in the Soviet Union such as the Jews, Ukrainians, Volga Germans, Kalmyks, Circasians, Karachai, Balkars Crimean Tatars, Meshki, and Greeks, all of whom had been presecuted and subjected to genocide by the Communist rulers of the Soviet Union.
In a January 1974 memorandum, together with four other human rights activists, Sakaharov called for an end to the Soviet regimes threats to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, after he published the Gulag Archipelago.
Sakharov and his colleagues pointed out that Solzhenitsyn should not be persecutedf and terrorised for speaking the truth.
"After all it cannot be denied that there actually were mass arrests, tortures, executions, forced labor, inhuman conditions, and the deliberate anihilation of millions of people in camps. There was the dispossesion of kulaks, the persecution and anihilation of hundreds of thousands of believers, forcible ressetlement of peoples, anti-worker and anti-peasant laws, and the persecution of those who had returned from prisoner of war camps. And there were other crimes whose harshness, perfidy and cynicism were astounding".
Those who served as part of the Soviet apparatus and who benfitted from the Soviet Empire of Evil, and who now hgold positions of power in such countries as Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela and South Africa, should be reviled for the hypocrites and scoundrels that they are.
Sakharov's appraisals of the wars in the Middle East, in his interview with a Lebanese correspondent in October 1973 are also available in this book.
As Sakharov points out:
"...for Israel in this war, just as in the wars of 1949, 1956 and 1967, what is at stake is the very existance of the state, the right to life. I believe that for the Arabs this war is basically a result of the play of internal and external political forces, of considerations of prestige, of national prejudices. I believe that this difference exists and must be taken into account when appraisng these events".
He also refused to attack Israel stating that"
"The country, which is the realization of the Jewish people's right to a state, is today fighting for it's existance surrounded by enemies who exceed it in population and material resouces many times over. This hostility was stirred up to a considerable by the imprudent policies of other states. All mankind has on it's conscience the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide during the Second World War. We cannot permit a repetition of that tragedy today."
Will the world take heed of these words? ... Read more