For "the conscience of Russia," internal exile to a closed city
Every Tuesday for the past decade, the Soviet Academy of Sciences had dispatched an official car to pick up Physicist Andrei Sakharov and take him to one of the academy's weekly seminars. Last week, as his Volga sedan turned into Leninsky Prospekt toward the imposing 19th century academy building, uniformed militiamen halted the automobile, seized Sakharov and hustled him to the Moscow prosecutor's office. The 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner was under arrest, as the Kremlin at long last moved to silence the Soviet Union's most celebrated dissident.
Deputy Chief Prosecutor Alexander Rekunkov read Sakharov a decree issued by President Leonid Brezhnev; it stripped Sakharov of all the honors he had been awarded as the father of 1 Soviet hydrogen bomb, including three orders of Hero of Socialist Labor, the U.S.S.R.'s highest civilian decoration. A stickler for legality, Sakharov coolly complained that Brezhnev's signature on the document had been typed and not handwritten Sakharov was told that he would be exiled to the city of Gorky (formerly Nizhni Novgorod) for "subversive activities," and then was allowed to phone his wife. Given two hours, Yelena Sakharov packed up a few clothes and her ailing husband's heart medicine. By nightfall, police had whisked the couple aboard a Tu-134 turbojet on a regularly scheduled flight to Gorky, a military and industrial center on the Volga River, 260 miles east of Moscow. The Sakharovs have been sent to an area that is off limits to foreigners, and the Kremlin hopes they have been effectively cut off from the Western world.
Sakharov thus becomes the first well-known human casualty of the cold war that has erupted between Moscow and Washington since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He had dared to speak out openly against his country's coup in Kabul. Always deeply fearful of thermonuclear war, the physicist had called upon the United Nations and the U.S.S.R. to arrange for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. In a statement to foreign journalists, Sakharov said: "The situation is so tragic, dramatic and dangerous that we must all concentrate on how to prevent a chain reaction that could have unpredictable consequences for mankind in this nuclear age." After it became evident that the Soviets had no intention of withdrawing their troops, Sakharov urged all nations to boycott the Olympic Games in Moscow.