Sakharov Archive Finds New Home
By Caroline McGregorFriday, November 12, 2004. Page 1.
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BOSTON -- First they piled up at his daughter's house outside Boston. Then they relocated for a decade to a small university in the nearby suburbs. This fall, they landed at Harvard University. They are the 10,000-plus items that make up the Andrei Sakharov Archive, largely his personal papers and materials relating to his life and work as a physicist-turned-human rights activist. Sakharov died in 1989 at the age of 68, leaving a legacy of humanism and an example of civic courage. His widow, Elena Bonner, donated the archive to Harvard to form the basis of the Andrei Sakharov Program on Human Rights. The program will be run through Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, while the materials themselves will be housed in Harvard's Houghton Library alongside other prestigious collections. Bonner, 81, had hoped to build not just a program but an entire research center around the archive. Her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich, who is the director of the program, said Bonner compromised because ultimately it was more important to know the university was committed to giving the archive a permanent home. Its previous home, at a lesser-known university in the area, Brandeis, proved temporary after the major funding ran out. |
Yankelevich emigrated to the United States in 1977 and within two years, "my parents started sending things for safe-keeping," she said. "Anything Sakharov would write was being stolen by the KGB in clandestine searches."
Because of this, Sakharov had to write his memoirs not once, not twice, but three times.
"Once, the manuscript was stolen while he was driving. He was stunned with some agent, and they smashed the window of the car he was in and grabbed the bag from the back seat. Another time, it was taken from a doctor's office. The doctors conspired with the KGB, telling him he couldn't take the bag in with him to the observation room."
A third manuscript was sent piece by piece to the United States. Sakharov's autobiography "Vospominaniye" or "Memoirs" was published in New York in 1990.
Papers were smuggled out, Yankelevich said, "but it was never easy. It was mostly foreigners who agreed. There was real risk involved."
The KGB acknowledged having taken the first two, Yankelevich said. After the fall of the Soviet Union, her mother was given a typewritten book of Sakharov's memoirs compiled from the early versions -- one of the eight copies typed up for members of the Politburo to read.
The title they put on it is additional proof that their apartment was bugged, Yankelevich said. "'Listy Vospominanii' (or 'Pages of Memories') was one of the titles he was considering but he decided it was rather tacky. It shows you the kind of taste they have."
That book is now part of the archive alongside 200 documents from the KGB archives and the presidential archives in Moscow, as well as prosecutors' files and Politburo records. A compendium of these will be published this spring as "Andrei Sakharov in the KGB Files" by the Yale University Press.
The archive consists of several collections, measured in linear feet. The Andrei Sakharov Collection consists of 81 linear feet of the scientist's personal papers.
The Elena Bonner Collection, meanwhile, measures only 9 feet since much of her life is largely inseparable from his.
Another collection contains materials pertaining to the work of Western human rights organizations on behalf of Sakharov during his exile to Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, in the 1980s and to the individual human rights cases of dissidents and political prisoners in the Soviet Union.
Despite brief hospitalization for heart trouble, Bonner is described by colleagues as a powerhouse and fierce defender of Sakharov's legacy. She holds the copyright on the use of his name and archived material, which she wields vigorously.
From her Davis Center desk on a recent afternoon, Yankelevich relayed to a film crew calling from Moscow her mother's unforgiving critique of their proposal for a television documentary on Sakharov: "It is superficial, inaccurate and banal."
Bonner, who splits her time between Moscow and Boston, is likewise very frank in her assessment of the state of Russia.
"To put it simply, Russia is under the control of the KGB, an organization that has taken the lives of many millions of people," Bonner said at a Harvard seminar on Nov. 1 marking the launch of the Sakharov Program on Human Rights.
Marshall Goldman, the deputy director of the Davis Center, said Russia was an important focus for the Sakharov Program, but not the only one.
"Human rights are all the more important today given what's happening in Russia. A few years ago this would have seemed superfluous but not now," he said.
"But we don't want to hold ourselves out as the know-it-alls. We want to prod Russia but prod ourselves too."