RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/10/john-fetterman-sluggish-schizophrenic/

Readers of a certain age or a certain educational predisposition will undoubtedly recall the name Andrei Sakharov—for good reason. Sakharov was a hero, a dissident, and a brilliant man who paid an enormous price for his convictions. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The European Parliament honored him for his bravery and sacrifice by naming its coveted human rights award after him. He was, in short, an extremely impressive person.

Before he became a brilliant human rights and peace activist, Sakharov was a brilliant physicist, one of the most brilliant of the twentieth century. He was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, at the tender age of 32. For his work on developing the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb, Sakharov was named a “Hero of Socialist Labor” three times—in 1953, 1956, and 1962. He was a member of the Soviet Atomic Energy Commission and is credited as being a key contributor to the advancement of the Soviet thermonuclear weapons program.

Near the end of the 1960s, however, Sakharov’s concern about the (literal) fallout from nuclear testing morphed into concern about nuclear weapons in general and then into peace activism and advocacy for civil liberties. His manifesto, “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1968, was published by the New York Times, and turned Sakharov into an international icon, a respected and admired dissident.

Just over a decade later, Sakharov openly criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, prompting the Brezhnev regime to take drastic action against him. In the conventional telling of the story the dissident and his wife (fellow physicist and activist Yelena Bonner) were arrested and exiled to the closed city of Gorky. In truth, what happened to Sakharov was much more nefarious. He wasn’t just exiled or “banished.” And he was never officially “arrested.” Rather, he was removed from the proximity to power for what the Brezhnev regime called “his own good.” On December 9, 1983, The New York Times explained precisely what that meant:

A prominent Soviet official implied at a news conference today that Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist and human rights campaigner, was mentally disturbed. The official, Vitaly P. Ruben, who is chairman of one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal Parliament, called Dr. Sakharov “a talented but sick man” and said an article the physicist published in the West earlier this year had invited an American nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.