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The international repercussions of the invasion were enormous. For millions of former supporters, it destroyed their faith in the Soviet system and its potential for reform.
On Aug. 25, to protest the invasion, seven activists sat for a minute near the spot in Red Square where prisoners had been executed in prerevolutionary Russia. Then KGB agents began beating them. All were arrested (they were quickly sent to labor camps, into exile or, in one case, to a prison psychiatric hospital). Minutes later, cars carrying Alexander Dubcek and other Czechoslovak leaders who had been brought to Moscow by force shot out of the Kremlin's Spassky Gate and raced across Red Square.
Acts of "Hooliganism"
Sakharov's wife Klava died in 1969 of stomach cancer. After a while he found himself working closely with Elena Bonner ("Lusia"), a vigorous human rights activist of Jewish and Armenian origin. "Since August 1971," he writes, "Lusia and I have followed a common path." In January 1972 they were married, and attending the ceremony were half a dozen KGB men in identical black suits. "I'd guess that they were demonstrating their disapproval," notes Sakharov. Soon the authorities were stepping up the pressure on him and Bonner to cease speaking out.
After the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, I joined a silent protest in front of the Lebanese embassy in Moscow. Lusia was ill, but her son Alexei, her daughter Tanya and Tanya's husband Efrem Yankelevich were with me. We were all carted to a drunk tank by the KGB. A month later, Tanya was expelled from Moscow University. Lusia's children had now become hostages to my public activity. Their access to education and jobs would be restricted or blocked. Threats of arrest, imprisonment, physical violence and even murder became a genuine menace. Eventually, the children were forced to emigrate.
On Oct. 26, 1973, the trial of Cronid Lubarsky, an astrophysicist charged with distributing the Chronicle of Human Events, the underground publication, began in Noginsk, a town near Moscow. A dozen of us tried to enter the courtroom but were shoved back outside by a wedge of KGB agents. Arms were twisted; some people were trampled. Lusia marched up to the senior KGB officer and slapped his face.
Two weeks later, Lusia was summoned before the Moscow party committee. Could she explain her acts of "hooliganism" in Noginsk? Such behavior, she was told, raised doubts about her continued membership in the party. The threat of expulsion was meant to intimidate her. Instead, Lusia placed her party card on the table, along with a statement she had prepared asking to be removed from the ranks of the party. It was an enormously effective stroke.
"Why are you so hostile to the Soviet system?" a committee member asked. "It's given you everything."
"No one gave me anything. I fought in the war, nearly lost my sight; I worked night and day." Lusia had broken with the party for good.