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For decades while we were silent our thoughts have straggled in all possible and impossible directions, we lost touch with each other, never learned to know each other, ceased to check and correct each other. While the stereotypes of required thought, or rather of dictated opinion, dinned into us daily from the electrified gullets of radio, endlessly reproduced in thousands of newspapers as like as peas, condensed into weekly surveys for political study groups, have made mental cripples of us and left very few minds undamaged.
Powerful and daring minds are now beginning to struggle upright, to fight their way out from under the heap of antiquated rubbish. But even they still bear all the cruel marks of the branding iron, they are still cramped by the stocks into which they were forced when they were half grown. And because of our intellectual disunity, they have no one to measure themselves against.
As for the rest of us, we have so shriveled in the decades of falsehood, thirsted so long in vain for the refreshing drops of truth, that as soon as they fall upon our faces we tremble with joy. We so rejoice in every little word of truth, so utterly suppressed until recent years, that we forgive those who first voice it for us—all their near misses, all their inexactitudes, even a portion of error greater than the portion of truth, simply because "something at least, something at last has been said!"
All this we experienced as we read Academician [Andrei] Sakharov's article* and heard the international reactions to it. Our hearts beat faster as we realized that someone had broken out from the deep, untroubled, cozy drowse in which Soviet scientists pursue their scientific work. It was a liberating joy to realize that Western atomic scientists are not the only ones who feel pangs of conscience—that a conscience is awakening amongst our own scientists too.
But Sakharov's hopes of convergence are not a well-grounded scientific theory but a moral yearning to save man from the ultimate nuclear sin, to avoid nuclear catastrophe. If we are concerned with solving mankind's moral problems, the prospect of convergence is a somewhat dismal one: if two societies, each afflicted with its own vices, gradually draw together and merge into one, "what will they produce? A society doubly immoral through cross-fertilization.
* Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom was published in book form in the West in 1968.