Photo: RIA Novosti
Once in Gorky, where Sakharov was exiled, Elena Bonner slipped on the street, fell and could not get up. She had a bruised back, damaged coccyx. The KGB men who accompanied her in two cars got out of the cars, gathered around the lying woman, laughed and exchanged mocking remarks. On another occasion they accompanied Sakharov and Bonner to the train. Sick, exhausted, middle-aged people dragged heavy things and often stopped exhausted. When asked to help, the KGB officers mockingly replied that «you can handle it yourself, you are healthy people.» At a railway station in Moscow, the KGB forbade porters to take Bonner's belongings out of the carriage. She recently had open heart surgery.
The fact that the KGB is the organizer of mass repressions, murders, deportations and other major atrocities is well known. But in Boris Altshuler's book about Sakharov, the office also appears as a tireless organizer of petty meanness. Penetrate into the apartment and unplug the refrigerator cord from the socket so that the meat rots in the freezer, intercept telegrams and change the words in them so that the messages get the opposite meaning, steal a bag with manuscripts from Sakharov who came to the clinic, and in his absence steal a disk from the player in order to he couldn't listen to music — even the evil dirty tricks tormenting a person are not capable of such things.
KGBists — Sakharov's word. So he called the countless guards, informers, tramplers, investigators, provocateurs who surrounded him in a dense ring for twenty years in a row,
curled around him, threatened, rude, tortured, did nasty things. KGBists — this is how he called those who filmed on a movie camera how, exhausted by the torture of force-feeding during a hunger strike, he swallowed the last spoon himself so that a film about the happy life of an academician in Gorky would be assembled from these and other shots. And showed it to the West.
This book is about many things, but above all — about the painful and happy life of a man who called white white, black — black and was persecuted for this, but did not give up his own.
There is a lot of talk about who Sakharov was: a genius, a great physicist, a politician, a human rights activist, a great scientist. For me, he is, first of all, a normal person who happened to live life in an abnormal world, where the dead Lenin for some reason was more alive than all the living, and a special secret police monitored the inviolability of madness. Those who did not accept lies were harassed in this world by all means. But he did not give up his human right to see life without glasses with crooked glasses, obligatory for all citizens of the country, and to say what he thinks.
“We won’t let you die… But you will become a helpless invalid.” These are the words of the Soviet chief physician O.A. Obukhov, in whose hospital Sakharov was force-fed during a hunger strike.
Lord, what a variety of idiotic devices and faces we encounter in this book! Sakharov and Bonner went to the forest to pick mushrooms, and the KGB men hid behind the trees under which they grow, Sakharov and Bonner got into the car to talk, and the curtains of the van standing right next to each other suddenly opened and filmed from there, Sakharov and Bonner sat down in the park to talk with friends — and then a guy joined them, inflating a bicycle tire, blowing air past the nipple. How many immoral fools engaged in senseless business! What a stupid parody, what a vile game to ruin the lives of two intelligent, smart and honest people …
After a painful hunger strike, she told him as a consolation that you need to learn to lose. And he replied that he did not want to learn to lose, but would learn to die with dignity.
I never spoke to him and only saw him once in my life, but now, reading this book, I see his face, his shoulders, his stooped back and hear his slow voice when he says this.
Two lonely, hunted, exhausted people in exile, in someone else's apartment, equipped with wiretapping. And not only with wiretapping, but also with a personal jammer so that they could not listen to the radio at home. Every word they heard and recorded. Two sick, fragile people under the supervision of guards, who stood under the door around the clock and, in their absence, climbed into the apartment to rummage through their things.
She picked up boards thrown into the mud on the street, washed them, dried them, planed them on the balcony and made shelves. They planted flowers on the balcony. She baked pies, made jam. This is how they lived. Is this their home? “Where we are, there is home!”
Once — one person saw it and described it, and it is in the book — Sakharov went out onto the balcony to free a wasp entangled in the leaves of a flower.
A tiny episode in the long life of a man who was tortured and exiled for the truth.
He suffered a stroke while being force-fed on a hunger strike.
From everything that happened to them, she survived a heart attack on the go, on her feet, when she arrived in Moscow and dragged her suitcase. She was told: «We will not let you blackmail us with your heart attack.»
Sakharov's wild, desperate, life-and-death struggle, during which he went on hunger strikes — for what? For the most ordinary, human things, the right to which is beyond doubt for any normal person. For Lisa Alekseeva to be released to her husband in America, for Elena Bonner to be released to Italy to treat her eyes and to America — her heart. But they held the young woman hostage for four years and tortured the sick war veteran for a long time, not letting him go to the doctors — perverts, sadists and at the same time «Soviet power».
In the compartment of the Gorky-Moscow train, passengers refused to travel with Elena Bonner because she was a Zionist and anti-Soviet. The whole carriage, inflamed, yelled at her and demanded that she be dropped off. And during the war, she, a nurse on a military hospital train that was approaching the front to take the wounded, traveled with many, bloody, bandaged, and no one refused to go with her, to accept her care and help.
An endless picture of cruelty is given to us by this book, sparing in expressions and restrained in intonations. The KGB investigator Syshchikov, who interrogated Elena Bonner with screams and threats for seven days in a row, and the orderlies in the hospital, who threw Sakharov on the bed and tied his legs and arms for force-feeding, and again the KGB officers, dragging the old woman he wanted out of Sakharov’s car with a whole cauldron give me a lift… Hundreds of pages with descriptions of persecution in front of a deaf, indifferent, sleeping people — only three cases of kindness on the part of people who happened to meet on the way.
Judge of the Kiev Court, an elderly man with medal slats and a prosthesis, who spoke to Elena Bonner like a person.
A woman on a train who came to the official compartment, where Bonner was taken away from the rioters by the conductor. The woman came to hug and kiss her.
And one of the policemen in Gorky, who wrote on the snow of a car parked in the yard: “BIS. Congratulations!”.
BIS means Bonner and Sakharov.
But there were also those who met not by chance — tens and hundreds of people who, like Sakharov, insisted on their right to distinguish truth from lies and talk about it. These are dissidents and friends, among whom was the author of the book, physicist and human rights activist Boris Altshuler. These are those who, despite the prohibitions, went to Sakharov in Gorky, secretly took out his letters and appeals (under the newspaper at the bottom of the bag), handed them over to Western correspondents, and distributed them in samizdat.
What did he say? The most simple, obvious, normal things. About the need to carry out an amnesty for political prisoners. About the need to stop the war on foreign soil. About the need for disarmament and trust, and not an arms race and the incessant fanning of conflicts around the globe. And what did he do? He wrote, spoke, expressed his opinion. This is a human right, and human rights are the basis of civilization, and only those for whom they always be in power can deny it — a sick, selfish interest.
There are episodes in the book that are outwardly insignificant in Sakharov's life filled with great and high-profile events, but they say so much about him. Once, during an unexpected plane landing, he refused a hotel room, which he was offered as an academician, because the young friend and colleague flying with him was not allowed a room, and the academician and three times Hero of Socialist Labor sat overnight on a chair in the waiting room, talking with a friend about physics and life.
You can talk about Sakharov's human rights activist and Sakharov's dissident, but his cry to the KGB, who do not let Dzhemilev's weeping mother into the courtroom, «Let the mother in, because her son is on trial!», is the cry of a normal person, shocked by madness and cruelty those who can hardly be called normal people.
Book Cover
Just like the cry of Elena Bonner in another hall of another court, where Eduard Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshits were sentenced to death, and the decoy KGBists, representing the public, burst into applause. «Fascists! Only fascists applaud a death sentence!” This is a spontaneous reaction and anger of a normal person in a situation of nightmarish, going wild madness.
The book is a montage from various sources — excerpts from the memoirs of Sakharov and Bonner alternate with the memories of many other people.
Sometimes the voice of the author is heard, commenting on events or recalling episodes in which he was a participant. In the montage, declassified transcripts of Politburo meetings appear, at which the “Sakharov problem” was discussed dozens of times. These discussions are as frozen as the brains of Politburo members. From year to year the same formulas are repeated: “anti-Soviet activity”, “provocations”, “writes libel”, “continues to produce slanderous letters”, “takes part in a provocative gathering of anti-social elements”. Measures are being discussed: “to instruct Soviet scientists to denounce Sakharov”, “to publish an article in the newspaper” … They adopt a resolution “On measures to compromise the decision of the Nobel Committee to award the Peace Prize to A.D. Sakharov”. Adults, but at their gatherings in the Kremlin they are engaged in lifeless, meaningless nonsense.