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Sakharov participated in a public demonstration for the first time on Dec. 5, 1966, joining a tiny band of dissidents who had assembled in Moscow's Pushkin Square to call for a new and genuine Soviet constitution. His increasingly open defiance of the government caused his three children by his first wife virtually to disown him. Nonetheless, Sakharov gave them his comfortable Moscow apartment and his dacha when he stripped himself of the luxuries he had acquired as a nuclear physicist. He donated his life savings of $153,000, an astronomical sum by Soviet standards, to cancer research and the Red Cross.
Because Sakharov was one of his nation's most distinguished scientists, his devastating critiques of Soviet policies cut deep. In his books, which were published only in the West, he repeatedly pointed to the failure of Soviet society to fulfill the promise of Communist ideology. Sakharov's writings on domestic affairs irked the leadership almost as much as his criticism of Brezhnev's foreign policy, which he characterized as imperialist and expansionist. His mistrust of Kremlin intentions was so strong that he said in 1983 that it might be best for the U.S. to "spend a few billion dollars on MX missiles" in order to bargain more effectively with the Soviets.
Even with glasnost, Sakharov found numerous causes to pursue. Encouraged by bilateral cuts in Soviet and U.S. arsenals, he pressed for conventional-arms reductions and a demilitarized "corridor" in Europe to lessen the possibility of a surprise attack from either side. He was hardly placated when Moscow admitted that the invasion of Afghanistan had been a mistake; he criticized the government for a colonialist attitude toward Armenia and the Baltic states. Though a supporter of Gorbachev's basic reforms, he used the Congress of People's Deputies as a tribune to attack him for accumulating too much personal power. "There are no guarantees that a Stalinist will not succeed Gorbachev," he warned. The release of political prisoners motivated him to call ever more insistently for the liberation of those still in the Gulag. He himself was elected to the new People's Congress, but he continued to battle for the multiparty system he knew was indispensable if true democracy was ever to come to his homeland. Andrei Sakharov did not live to see freedom flower completely, but if that day ever does come, he will deserve much of the credit for planting and nurturing the seed.