The lives of the saints do not alter the fate of nations—except when they do. In 1953, a young physicist named Andrei Sakharov was working at a secret research site in Kazakhstan. The facility was near a forced-labor camp, one of countless outposts of the Gulag Archipelago. Every morning, Sakharov watched lines of prisoners marching in the dust, guard dogs barking at their heels. Yet when the news arrived, early that March, that Joseph Stalin had died, Sakharov did not connect the fallen generalissimo with the misery near his door. “I am under the influence of a great man’s death,” he wrote to his first wife. “I am thinking of his humanity.”
Five months later, Sakharov donned a pair of protective goggles and watched the detonation of his horrific creation, the…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 28, 2021