It's a little hard to believe that this is the first comprehensive biography in English of Andrei Sakharov, the famous Russian physicist and even more famous political dissident, renowned as the "father" of Russia's hydrogen bomb and then mercilessly persecuted when his conscience turned him into a mordant critic of the Soviet system.

Sakharov has been dead for 13 years. World events have moved swiftly and in totally unexpected directions since his death; his very name may now seem like a distant echo from a nearly forgotten era. But his story is worth preserving, if not for total political relevance to the world of 2002, then simply as a document of personal integrity, suffering, and courage.

The tale is here told by a writer with vast experience in Russian political and literary affairs. Richard Lourie translated Sakharov's memoirs and has written much on Russian history and politics. He slyly gives himself a cameo appearance late in this book without mentioning his own name, referring to himself simply as Sakharov's "American translator." Many quotes from the scientist's memoirs are woven into the narrative, identified only by quotation marks.

In general, Lourie has done his job thoroughly and well. Sakharov's complex character is plumbed in depth, and there are short but penetrating character sketches of others, friends and foes alike, who crossed his career path. His personal life, insofar as it impacted on his scientific and political lives, is given due attention. Lourie's writing sometimes gets clotted and grammatically awkward, but he can also on occasion come up with a deft and illuminating phrase.

From childhood, Lourie tells us, Andrei Sakharov was a loner, an awkward child given to deep and lasting passions for things that interested him but never at ease in everyday social intercourse (in all his life Sakharov never mastered dancing or swimming, and his relations with his own children were a shambles).

His youthful fascination with physics, pursued with single-minded zeal, led him to the top of the Soviet scientific community. It was, however, his very success in masterminding the production of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb (tested in 1953) that awakened his social conscience. He began calculating the potential human casualty figures for actual use of the weapon he had created -- and what he found appalled him. He began writing and speaking about this, and his fall from official grace was swift. A pivotal event in turning him against the whole Soviet system was the 1966 show trial of the writers Sinyavky and Daniel.

Perhaps the single most harrowing chapter in this book is Lourie's account of Sakharov's enforced seven-year exile in Gorky, where he was shadowed, harassed and mercilessly bullied by the KGB, though he was theoretically a free man. No telephone, for example, was ever installed in his apartment there until the very end of his seven years' residence in the city.

Utterly disillusioned with Soviet socialism yet appalled by many aspects of Western capitalism, Sakharov preached a doctrine of "convergence," in which the two systems inevitably moved closer to each other until a middle way that might incorporate the good features of each and allow people to live decent lives would arise.

Lourie sees Sakharov as a man who started out as apolitical, obsessed solely with physics. When the political world beyond his laboratory intruded on his work it forced him to confront political injustice, and in his obsessive, single-minded way, he took up that cause even though it converted him from honored and privileged hero of the Soviet State into its enemy. He died a hero to the capitalist West but a hotly controversial problem for the masters of post-Soviet Russia.

The Soviet Russia of Stalin and Khrushchev is a fading memory these days. But the memory of a stubborn truth-teller like Andrei Sakharov should not be allowed to fade. This excellent book should help to keep it alive.

   --- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)


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