Don’t Cheer Too Loud at Sakharov’s Return : Gorbachev’s Opening Will Mean More if He Reforms Courts and the Criminal Code

The West is right to applaud Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s decision to allow dissident scientist Andrei D. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, to return to Moscow from internal exile. But we should not cheer too lustily yet, for several reasons.

First, we should never forget how and why Sakharov was arrested. He was picked up by the KGB as he drove to work in Moscow in January, 1980. He was arrested without warrant and exiled without trial. He was punished because he continually used his prestigious position of academician to criticize Kremlin positions on a wide range of issues from nuclear testing to the invasion of Afghanistan to relations with the West to the abuse of human rights within the Soviet Union. Sakharov’s six-year exile in Gorky was a flagrant violation of due process. As Bonner has described in her book “Alone Together,” the conditions of exile were so harsh as to amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Sakharov’s return to Moscow does not necessarily mean that such practices have been banished forever.

Second, the conditions under which Sakharov and Bonner are returning to Moscow are far from clear at this point.

Finally, although Sakharov has been freed from his Gorky quarantine, what will Gorbachev do for the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of other Soviet citizens who have been imprisoned under the highly political articles of the Soviet criminal code like anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda? Although less well known, many of these citizens are no less brave and worthy than Sakharov for honestly expressing their hopes for more open, democratic ways in Soviet politics.

At this stage an outside observer has every right to suspect that Gorbachev took his decision on Sakharov as part of a policy of disposing of high-profile human-rights cases. The foreign pressures on Gorbachev are well known. Many foreign scientists have boycotted the Soviet Union as a result of the Sakharov affair, and have declined to participate in cooperative ventures. Sakharov was No. 1 on the list of dissidents whose freedom the United States sought in negotiating a successful conclusion to my own arrest this last summer in Moscow.

The return of Sakharov will also alleviate the opprobrium that the Soviet Union is currently suffering as a result of the totally unexplained death in prison of another valiant Soviet political critic, Anatoly Marchenko. And, finally, the Sakharov decision should alleviate embarrassment from Moscow if the Kremlin goes ahead next year with a human-rights conference there, and should make it easier to revive scientific cooperation with the West.

Less well known, however, is that Sakharov has also been an important issue within the Soviet intellectual community. I remember well one conversation that I had with a Moscow scientist who said: “Until Gorbachev deals fairly and decently with Sakharov, none of us will really believe that Gorbachev is an honest reformer. The touchstone of his credibility will be to free Sakharov and to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan.”

It is in this light that the Sakharov decision should be seen. Gorbachev shows every sign of realizing what a serious and perilous situation the Soviet Union is in today: Soviet goods do not compete in the world’s high-tech markets, corruption and personal opportunism have penetrated deep into the Soviet political system, and Soviet public health is in a desperate situation, with a declining life expectancy, a rise in female alcoholism and soaring births of defective children.

Gorbachev has evidently come to the conclusion that to rescue the nation from long-term, if not permanent, technological inferiority he must rally the best and the brightest to his side. He is trying to do this by projecting the image of an enlightened leader. Besides allowing Sakharov to return home, he is easing literary restraints, reducing censorship, promising to publish forbidden works like Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” and signaling to Russian intellectuals who have fled abroad that they will be welcomed home. How successful this policy will be remains to be seen. The arrival of dissident poetess Irina Ratushinskaya in London suggests that all is not well yet. Ratushinskaya traveled to London on a three-month medical visa but announced that she would not return to the Soviet Union until it is seriously reformed.

What the West should look for now is whether there is any deeper inclination on Gorbachev’s part to seek a more just society and to reform the inequities of the Soviet judicial system and criminal code.

In recent weeks there have been some intriguing signs in the Soviet press. Legal experts, for example, have hinted at the need to return to something like a jury system and to allow a defendant a lawyer at the start of a criminal investigation, rather than at its conclusion. This is an idea that I would heartily endorse, based on my own personal experience in a KGB interrogation this last September.

These are major changes that will probably take years to bring in. A first, and easier, step would be to rescind the highly political articles Nos. 70 and 190 in the criminal code that make it unlawful to espouse “anti-Soviet” ideas. In Gorbachev’s much-touted era of glasnost, or openness, all critical ideas should be welcomed. In my view it is a contradiction to hold that some critical ideas are too hot to handle and should be branded as “anti-Soviet agitation.” Let Gorbachev now move to repeal these primitive and retrograde articles (which are so reminiscent of our own McCarthy era), and let him spread the benefits of the Sakharov-Bonner decision to other Soviet citizens imprisoned for their critical views.