As the 1960s drew on, Andrei Sakharov inched toward a break with the regime he had served so ably as the master builder of its thermonuclear-weapons program. His convictions and the growing repression in the U.S.S.R. during the Brezhnev years moved him to identify ever more closely with dissent in his own country and abroad. In 1966 he took part in his first human rights demonstration, a one-minute silent protest in Pushkin Square. In 1967 he wrote a letter to Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev defending imprisoned dissidents. That prompted an angry reaction from Efim Slavsky, head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which supervised the Soviet nuclear program. "Sakharov is a good scientist," said Slavsky. "But as a politician he's muddleheaded, and we'll be taking measures." Those included a pay cut of nearly 50% and a demotion at the Installation, the secret "atomic city" east of Moscow, where he was then working on the peaceful uses of nuclear explosions. But in the following year, 1968, Sakharov definitively broke with the Soviet system, and far harsher measures were soon to come.
By the beginning of 1968, I felt a growing compulsion to speak out on the fundamental issues of our age. I was influenced by my life experience and a feeling of personal responsibility, reinforced by the part I'd played in the development of the hydrogen bomb, the special knowledge I'd gained about thermonuclear warfare, my bitter struggle to ban nuclear testing and my familiarity with the Soviet system. I hoped that such notions as an open society, convergence of the capitalist and communist systems, and world government might ease the tragic crisis of our age. In 1968 I took my decisive step by publishing Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.
My work on Reflections happened to coincide with the Prague Spring. What so many of us in the socialist countries had been dreaming of finally seemed to be coming to pass in Czechoslovakia: democracy, including freedom of expression and abolition of censorship; reform of the economic and social systems; curbs on the security forces; and full disclosure of the crimes of the Stalin era (the "Gottwald era" in Czechoslovakia). Even from afar, we were caught up in all the hopes of the catchwords "Prague Spring" and "socialism with a human face."
Events in the Soviet Union echoed those in Prague but on a much reduced scale. In the campaign for the dissidents Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov and Vera Lashkova (who were tried in January 1968), more than 1,000 signatures -- an extraordinary number under Soviet conditions -- were collected, mainly from the intelligentsia. A few years earlier, no one would have dreamed of publicly defending such "hostile elements." That and other efforts were a sort of Prague Spring in miniature. They frightened the KGB into taking tough countermeasures: firing, blacklisting, public reprimand, expulsion from the party. After 1968, when everyone understood the consequences, people refused to lend their names to such initiatives.
To my shame, I must admit that the campaign simply passed me by, just as had the 1964 banishment of poet Joseph Brodsky from Leningrad and the 1965 arrests of the dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.