Andrei Sakharov (1921–89) was one of the truly admirable and consequential figures of the twentieth century. A privileged son of the Soviet regime, Sakharov became its indefatigable opponent. One of the principal contributions of Jay Bergman's lucid and insightful book is to show that the seeds of Sakharov's opposition to the Soviet regime were planted long before his active turn to dissidence in the late 1960s. In developing this point, the book provides political theorists and students of comparative politics with invaluable materials for coming to terms with a “contradiction” at the heart of the Soviet regime.

As an ideological tyranny dedicated to a Promethean vision of science and to rapid, even reckless, economic and technological development, the Soviet Union was dependent on a scientific and managerial elite to which it was obliged to give a certain degree of autonomy. That elite, however, was finally subject to the same lies, humiliations, and compromises that affected every other layer of Soviet society. The demand that Sakharov remain a docile child in areas outside of his technical expertise was something that he as a man of honor and reason could not abide.

An immensely talented physicist, Sakharov was one of the principal architects of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, and thus indirectly contributed to the prestige and global reach of Soviet power. His ethical and intellectual formation, however, owed surprisingly little to Marxist-Leninist ideology. Even as a relatively apolitical scientist in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s who still thought of himself as a loyal son of the Soviet Union, Sakharov implicitly affirmed the “demands of reason,” including the autonomy and ethical responsibilities of science. A series of incidents in the 1950s and early 1960s brought the underlying tension between ethical and scientific integrity and the dogmatism and arbitrariness of the ideological party-state to the forefront, dramatically transforming his life and thought.

Sakharov's contributions to the Soviet nuclear program were amply rewarded and gave him unusual access to the ruling governmental and party elite. But the party leadership crudely rebuffed his concerns about the effects of fallout from nuclear testing on civilian populations—and his strong advocacy of meaningful arms control. Bergman traces how Sakharov's growing sense of “impotence” before the authorities, combined with humiliations from above, deepened his estrangement from the Soviet regime and set him on the path to becoming the “moral anchor of the dissident movement” (p. 157).

By the time Sakharov published his Reflections on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom in samizdat in 1968, he conceived of himself as a “democratic socialist” dedicated to scientific “progress” and to “convergence” between the peoples of the East and West. As Bergman himself concedes, there is much that is problematic about Reflections. It exhibits a naive confidence in the capacity of a technocratic, scientific elite to solve all major global problems and expresses a utopian belief that a world government would be compatible with the liberty and dignity of human beings. But the Reflections were only the beginning of Sakharov's intellectual and political odyssey as a “dissident.” By the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in the fall of 1975, he was a convinced antitotalitarian and a self-defined liberal. His 1975 book My Country and the World criticized Western intellectuals who failed to perceive the real nature of the Soviet Union, a regime that he did not hesitate to call “totalitarian.”

Bergman, who has no illusions whatsoever about the Soviet regime, faults Sakharov for this latter designation. The attribution of a “generic category” like totalitarianism to the Soviet Union ignores the “peculiarities and uniqueness” of Russian and Soviet political culture, raises a problematical comparison with Nazi Germany, and ignores the prospects for change that were present even within regimes of the Soviet type (pp. 263–64). There is no doubt a problem with ahistorical notions of totalitarianism that presume that it has an unchanging “essence.” Still, one must ask if terms like “dictatorship” or “authoritarianism” can begin to convey what Boris Pasternak called “the inhuman reign of the Lie” or the phantasmagoric dimensions of the Soviet experience. Western historians and social scientists need to take the judgments of the dissidents such as Sakharov with the seriousness that they deserve and to be less anxious to move “beyond totalitarianism” as a descriptive or analytic category.

Bergman shows that Sakharov's tireless advocacy for the victims of an arbitrary regime impressively coexisted with an active engagement with scientific and “cosmological” questions—research that Sakharov dedicated himself to with renewed determination during his five years of forced exile in the “closed” city of Gorky from 1980 to 1986. Bergman also traces Sakharov's role as the “conscience” of perestroika after his return to Moscow in 1986, goading Mikhail Gorbachev to push beyond the limits of Leninist orthodoxy while acknowledging the constraints under which the Soviet leader was operating. In the final months of his life, Sakharov became the leader of the democratic opposition in the Congress of People's Deputies and even wrote a constitution for a postcommunist state. But despite his many admirable qualities, he was never really able to speak to Russia as Russia. Universal human rights and “convergence” among nations, peoples, and ideologies remained to the end the guiding stars of Sakharov's political reflection.

Bergman shares not only Sakharov's unequivocal opposition to Soviet tyranny but also his distrust of “Russian national culture, with its paternalism, its implicit equation of democracy with anarchy, and its insufficient reverence for the worth of the individual” (p. 407). This may explain Bergman's summary and one-sided account of the Sakharov-Solzhenitsyn dialogue, an exchange about Russia's future occasioned by the publication in the West in 1974 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Letter to the Soviet Leaders. Far from being dated, that remarkably concrete exchange can give breadth and depth to contemporary debates in political theory regarding human rights and nationalism.

While respecting both of these antitotalitarian titans, Bergman goes too far in contrasting Solzhenitsyn's “ ‘particularist’ vision of Russia's destiny, in which there were Russian ideas to be adopted and Western ideas to be avoided” (p. 216) with Sakharov's affirmation of universal moral and political principles. Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Lecture clearly demonstrates that the Russian writer was committed to balancing universal moral principles with what is choice-worthy in Russia's distinctive history and national culture. In his discussion of the Letter, Bergman falsely attributes “theocratic tendencies” (p. 212) to the Russian Nobel laureate despite his explicit denial in the Letter that he asked for any “special privileges” for Christianity. He speaks of Solzhenitsyn's “categorical opposition to democracy” (p. 214) and simply ignores his advocacy for a “democracy of small spaces”—the principal political theme in his writing during the last 25 years of his life (see, in particular, Solzhenitsyn's 1990 book Rebuilding Russia, as well as his last major interview with Der Spiegel in July 2007).

As a result, Bergman fails to appreciate that the truly momentous debate between Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn is not one between universal reason and Slavophile particularism but, rather, about how to conjugate the relationship between universal moral values and what Solzhenitsyn called “Russian national consciousness.” No less now than in 1975, Russia needs both Sakharov's courageous witness for civil and political liberty and Solzhenitsyn's call for national repentance for the crimes of communism and a rebirth of a humane and self-critical patriotism.