Sakharov Speaks by Andrei D. Sakharov

by Andrei D. Sakharov

This book brings together Sakharov’s major statements & interviews from 1968 to 1974. He discusses political persecution,corruption, emigration, and nuclear testing.

Genres: History

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Dimitrievich Sakharov helped to develop the first Soviet hydrogen bomb and as an outspoken advocate of human rights and nuclear disarmament won the Nobel Prize of 1975 for peace; people banished him to Gorky (now Nizhniy Novgorod) from 1980 to 1986.

Russian activist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_...

Reviews

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andrei Sakharov was one of the greatest fighters for human rights of the 20th century.
From the position of one of the Soviet Union's most eminent scientist, Sakharov in the 1960s turned to fighting for human rights and basic freedoms in the Soviet Union, for which he was persecuted and exiled.
This book contains various writings, documents, manifestos, writings and interviews by Sakharov and his colleagues, which give an insight into both Sakharov's philosophy of peace and human rights as well as the conditions of repression and terror in the Soviet Union at the time.
Sakharov writes of his vision for progress, peace and intellectual freedom in the world.
Despite advocating gradual and peaceful change he was accused by Soviet authorities of conspiring with 'the enemies' of the regime and exiled in 1979 to Gorky, after protesting the brutal Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Sakharov opposed the totalitarian power of Soviet tyrany and in fact all tyrannical and anti-democratic forms of government.
Sakharov's second wife was a human rights activist by the name of Yelena Bonner, who was Jewish.
Because of this the Soviet propagandists claimed Sakharov was really a Jew named Sugarman.
An clear example of Soviet style anti-Semitism.
He called for detente between East and West, but based on greater respect for human rights, and an end to repression by the Soviet Union of it's own peoples and of other nations.
He warned against detente based on condoning or turning a blind eye to communist repression. The policy that would be later be carried out by US President Jimmy Carter who showed no sympathy for victims of repression in Soviet or revolutionary states, and who sold out human rights and freedoms many times over, as a result of his pro-Communist symptathies.
Sakharov struggled for an end to the persecution of dissidents in the Sopviet Unions, and particularly the cruel practise of imprisoning dissidents in mental institutions.
He called for the right of emigration from the Soviet Union, and foght for the rights of minority nations in the Soviet Union such as the Jews, Ukrainians, Volga Germans, Kalmyks, Circasians, Karachai, Balkars Crimean Tatars, Meshki, and Greeks, all of whom had been presecuted and subjected to genocide by the Communist rulers of the Soviet Union.
In a January 1974 memorandum, together with four other human rights activists, Sakaharov called for an end to the Soviet regimes threats to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, after he published the Gulag Archipelago.
Sakharov and his colleagues pointed out that Solzhenitsyn should not be persecutedf and terrorised for speaking the truth.
"After all it cannot be denied that there actually were mass arrests, tortures, executions, forced labor, inhuman conditions, and the deliberate anihilation of millions of people in camps. There was the dispossesion of kulaks, the persecution and anihilation of hundreds of thousands of believers, forcible ressetlement of peoples, anti-worker and anti-peasant laws, and the persecution of those who had returned from prisoner of war camps. And there were other crimes whose harshness, perfidy and cynicism were astounding".
Those who served as part of the Soviet apparatus and who benfitted from the Soviet Empire of Evil, and who now hgold positions of power in such countries as Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela and South Africa, should be reviled for the hypocrites and scoundrels that they are.
Sakharov's appraisals of the wars in the Middle East, in his interview with a Lebanese correspondent in October 1973 are also available in this book.
As Sakharov points out:
"...for Israel in this war, just as in the wars of 1949, 1956 and 1967, what is at stake is the very existance of the state, the right to life. I believe that for the Arabs this war is basically a result of the play of internal and external political forces, of considerations of prestige, of national prejudices. I believe that this difference exists and must be taken into account when appraisng these events".
He also refused to attack Israel stating that"
"The country, which is the realization of the Jewish people's right to a state, is today fighting for it's existance surrounded by enemies who exceed it in population and material resouces many times over. This hostility was stirred up to a considerable by the imprudent policies of other states. All mankind has on it's conscience the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide during the Second World War. We cannot permit a repetition of that tragedy today."
Will the world take heed of these words?

[Roberta Wall · Rating 3 out of 5]

He was a bit idealistic although understandably

[Hassan Chakroun · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't comprehend someone being so vocal about human rights, and at the same time defend the existence of the apartheid state of israel. It simply renders all what he fought for as hypocrisy

[Harcoline · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s an important novel about the dangers of communist, national socialism and autocratic regimes that gave me the chills because we might enter a new unfree world in the near future.