Despite their common struggle against the arbitrariness of the Soviet system, Sakharov and fellow Nobel laureate and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood far apart on fundamental questions of Soviet life.
We first met at the apartment of a friend of mine on Aug. 26, 1968. With his lively blue eyes and ruddy beard, his tongue-twistingly fast speech delivered in an unexpected treble and his deliberate, precise gestures, he seemed an animated concentration of purposeful energy.
He voiced his disagreements with me in incisive fashion. Any kind of convergence is out of the question. The West is caught up in materialism and permissiveness. Socialism may turn out to be its final ruin. Our leaders are soulless robots who have latched onto power and the good life and won't let go until forced to do so.
Solzhenitsyn claimed that I had understated Stalin's crimes. According to one estimate, 60 million people had died as a result of terror, famine and associated disease. My figure of 10 million deaths in labor camps was too low. I was also wrong to differentiate Stalin from Lenin: corruption and destruction began the day the Bolsheviks seized power, and have continued ever since. It's a mistake to seek a multiparty system; what we need is a nonparty system.
I felt enormous respect for him, since reinforced by publication of his epic work The Gulag Archipelago. Real life is never simple, however, and our relations are now difficult -- perhaps unavoidably so, since we are not at all alike and differ markedly on questions of principle.
The two continued meeting into the early 1970s, not always amicably. Once, Solzhenitsyn's first wife scolded Sakharov for harping on the issue of Jewish emigration and fretting about the harassment of his wife's children, pointing out that the Russian people faced greater worries. As Sakharov writes, Lusia was "outraged by the lecturing tone" and burst out, "Don't give me that 'Russian people' s---! You make breakfast for your own children, not for the whole Russian people!" Still, the Sakharovs were soon rallying to Solzhenitsyn's defense.
Right after New Year 1974, Solzhenitsyn's 13-year-old stepson visited our apartment, disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a book that had been concealed under his clothing: The Gulag Archipelago. The book was a shattering experience, evoking a somber world of gray camps surrounded by barbed wire, investigators' offices and torture chambers, icy mines in Kolyma and Norilsk.
On Feb. 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was taken from his home and placed under arrest. The next day a group gathered in our apartment and drafted the "Moscow Appeal" demanding Solzhenitsyn's release and an investigation of the crimes described in The Gulag Archipelago. But Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country and flown to West Germany.
Before discussing the issues that divide us, I wish to emphasize my profound respect for him, for his talent as a writer and for his historic achievement in uncovering the state's crimes. I agree with a great deal of what he says. But even where I share Solzhenitsyn's general thesis, I often find troubling the peremptory nature of his judgments, the absence of nuance and his lack of tolerance for the opinions of others. He displays a marked anti-Western and isolationist bias, at times lapsing into an exaggerated Russian nationalism.