(7 of 19)
This grave accusation had an insidious plausibility to believers in Soviet foreign policy's pacific aims, the selflessness of our aid to national liberation movements and the treachery of the imperialists who surrounded us with military installations. If we stand for peace, then the more missiles, nuclear warheads and nerve gas we stockpile, the safer everyone will be. Our Western opponents employ exactly the same line of argument.
In response to the press campaign against me, Valentin Turchin of the Institute of Applied Mathematics issued an open letter in my support. His defense was made at a heavy cost: he was denounced at a staff meeting, demoted and finally fired. Turchin later supported himself by tutoring private students until his immigration to the U.S. in 1977.
On Sept. 16 the physicist Yuri Orlov wrote an open letter to Brezhnev suggesting economic and political reforms and offering a spirited defense of me; like Turchin, he soon found himself out of a job. In 1976 he helped organize the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, part of an organization set up by Soviet dissidents to monitor human rights violations, but two years later he was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp and five of internal exile for anti-Soviet activities. He suffered extremely harsh treatment. At the end of Orlov's trial, a scuffle broke out when his friends were barred from entering the courtroom to hear the verdict. I hit one KGB agent; Lusia, receiving a sharp blow to the neck from another, smacked him back, but as she was being shoved into a police car, she accidentally punched the local police chief. She said later, "I was right to hit the KGB agent and don't regret it, but I struck the police chief by mistake, and I'd like to apologize to him."
On Sept. 5, Solzhenitsyn dispatched his article "Peace and Violence" for publication abroad, warning the West about the nature and extent of state violence in the U.S.S.R. Just before its publication, he added the proposal that I be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "indefatigable, devoted (and personally dangerous) opposition to systematic state violence."
On Oct. 9, 1975, Lusia and I -- she in Italy after a hard-fought battle to permit her to leave the country to treat her glaucoma; I in Moscow -- heard the news that I had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The official reaction in the U.S.S.R. was one of intense irritation tinged with nervousness. I was denied permission to go to Norway for the Nobel award ceremonies on the grounds that I was "an individual possessing knowledge of state secrets." Lusia accepted the award for me in Oslo in December.
Shanghaied and Banished
Sakharov was able to continue his cat-and-mouse game with the authorities through the 1970s at least partly because of his world stature as a human rights activist and because his arrest would have strained Soviet-U.S. relations. But with the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, those relations deteriorated catastrophically, and the state soon moved against Sakharov.
As 1980 began, Afghanistan cast a long shadow. Increased latitude was granted to the KGB because of the war and possibly in anticipation of the forthcoming Olympics, as evidenced in a series of arrests.