Sakharov: A Biography by Richard LourieReview by: Robert LegvoldForeign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 2002), p. 213Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20033322 .

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Recent Books

he would exclaim at the point of an intellectual breakthrough, "O Pushkin, you son of a bitch, you!") The evolution from a politically passive scientist to a lonely figure holding sidewalk vigils outside kangaroo courtrooms is almost unfathomable for a non-Russian. Lourie, however, makes it comprehensible, not least by painting with an artist's spare, deft strokes this transcendent figure into the history of his day.

These accounts have missed something. Kenney goes back and uncovers the more complex bubbling of events in the 1970S and 1980s that helped prepare the way for democracy. From Slovenia to western

Ukraine, East Germany to Slovakia-and nowhere more intensely than Poland clusters of young activists took to the streets. They sought not to stir political opposition but to take on causes such as fighting alcoholism, protecting the environment, or defending the rights of conscientious objectors. They unleashed, Kenney argues, a "carnival" of diverse players, causes, and actions squirming out from under the regime's control. This carnival included harlequins such as the Polish "Orange Alternative,"

whose cuts were the most cruel: with painted faces, costumes, and caricatures (what they called "socialist surrealism"), they simply laughed at their political overlords. Precisely how all these ideas flowed into the historical forces producing 1989, however, is less well explained.

Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism. BY MI KHAI L GORBACHEV AND ZDENEK MLYNAR.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 230 pp. $24.95.

Mlynar, a Czech, was a key figure in the 1968 "Prague Spring," dragged by the scruff of the neck before Brezhnev and company after the Soviet tanks rolled.

He had also been Gorbachev's closest friend when both studied law at Moscow

University from 1950 to 1955. In the fall of 1993, about a month after Yeltsin blew up the Russian "White House" in his confrontation with parliament, Mlynar and Gorbachev sat down for the first of a six-month-long series of conversations, in which they ruminated about the subjects in the subtitle of this book. The conver sations were recorded and published in

Russian in 1995; now they are available in English. Of the two participants,

Mlynar's reflections are less guarded and more precise. But Gorbachev adds enough beyond what he has already

written to offer valuable insight into his intellectual evolution, down to and including his conception of socialism now that the version in which he had so long believed has perished.

Sakharov: A Biography. BY RICHARD LOURIE. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2002, 465 pp. $30.00.

Lourie does full justice to a life that could not be more engrossing. The socially introverted son of Moscow in telligentsia, Andrei Sakharov became a star physics pupil, then chief architect of the Soviet Union's first thermonuclear device, and later on a dissident and target of KGB ire-and finally the moral con science of a democratically awakening

Russia. This grand curve unfolds amid the humanizing detail of his boyhood explorations, young marriage, family relations, friendships, and intellectual eccentricities. (Like his hero Pushkin,

FOREIGN AFFAIRS September/October2002 [213]

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