Martyrs

November 7, 1995

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by one of his own countrymen adds another martyr to the roster of those who died for the cause of peace.

In Canterbury Cathedral is the Chapel of the Martyrs near the black slab which marks the spot where Thomas Becket was murdered. When I visited Canterbury some years ago, honored names and their stories and mementos included Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold, Martin Luther King, [and] others were memorialized in the Chapel of the Martyrs. One day, I believe, the name and fame of Yitzhak Rabin will be another honored name and memory in The Chapel of the Martyrs.

I have been reading LENIN’S TOMB, THE LAST DAYS OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE, by David Remnick – a gripping account of the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. I hope that some day Andrei Sakharov will be recognized world-wide as a martyr for freedom, even though his death was not the result of an assassin’s bullet, but rather a man worn out in a struggle for human rights in a land where it was dangerous, fatal in millions of instances, not to kowtow to the Communist Party in its many-faceted corruptions and repressions.

Sakharov, once honored as a Hero of the Soviet Union because of his scientific genius in developing the H-bomb for his country, was later exiled to Novgorod (Gorky) because he not only renounced the use of atomic and nuclear weapons, but also took fearless and unpopular stands insisting – demanding – more freedom for the Russian peoples.

Even Gorbachev could not abide him, because Sakharov insisted that the Communist Party should no longer have the constitutional guarantee to be the only political party in the U.S.S.R. Without Sakharov, there could not have been a Yeltsin.

The years of exile had ruined his health; his constant advocacy of freedom had made Sakharov the object of persecution, derision, and scorn by ruling Communist Party.

In 1989, with reform movements gathering strength, sixty-eight-year-old Sakharov’s health was precarious. He had trouble walking up stairs; he had constant demands on his time because fear was lessening that being known to associate with this courageous man, who was the key figure in the Human Rights movement, was dangerous.

On December 14, 1989, his wife, Yelena Bonner found him dead when she went to wake him. A supporter, Korotich said later, “I’m only glad that before he died, Sakharov dealt the system a mortal blow. If God sent Jesus to pay for sins of humankind, then a Marxist God somewhere sent Andrei Sakharov to pay for the sins of our system.”

In HENRY VIII, Act IV, Scene 2, Griffith says to Katharine on Wolsey’s death,

“men’s evil manners live in brass;
their virtues
We write in water.”

Shakespeare was not always precisely correct, as Gorbachev found out to his dismay. At first, Gorbachev tried to squelch the country-wide shock and grief by stating there could be no national day of mourning for Sakharov, citing some Communist Party claptrap, “we have a procedure it seems for this: a General Secretary gets three days of mourning, a Politburo member one, and none for an academician.” But the people’s grief for Sakharov’s death, and their overwhelming feeling of obligation for the Human Rights Movement he sparked, could not be denied. Gorbachev had to yield and allow a public funeral.

The day of the funeral was bitterly cold, “so cold it hurt to breathe”, wrote David Remnick, who then noted, “the march went on for hours. No fewer than fifty thousand people had packed into a vast parking lot. And there was something more striking about the crowd than than its mere size. It was the first time that I got any sense that there could be a unified democratic movement in the Soviet Union. Until now, the miners, the Baltic independence groups, the Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia had all seemed spread out, loosely knit at best. But I now saw Baltic flags, a Russian tricolor, banners supporting the independence movement in the Ukraine, miners from Vorkuta, students. There were placards with a huge ‘6’ crossed out – meaning that Article 6 of the Constitution which guaranteed the Party’s ‘leading role’ in society should be eliminated.”

Dmitri Likhachev (Remnick, p. 288) spoke, “We are gathered here to honor the memory of a very great man, a citizen not only of our country, but of the whole world... a man of the future. This is why many did not understand him in this century. He was a prophet in the ancient sense of the word. That is, he was a man who summoned his contemporaries to moral renewal for the sake of the future. And like every prophet, he was not understood.”

There were other elements in Sakharov’s character which were intriguing (at least to me). In his Nobel Prize in 1975 (his acceptance of the Nobel Prize was labeled as ‘international treason’) - “Other civilizations, perhaps more successful ones, may exist an infinite number of times on the preceding and following pages of the Book of the Universe. Yet we should not minimize our sacred endeavors in the world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of unconsciousness into material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we dimly perceive.” (p.165)

Could there be a more fitting epitaph for Andrei Sakharov than those words he wrote himself?