Page "Andrei Sakharov" Paragraph 17

Sakharov later described that " it took years " for him " to understand how much substitution, deceit, and lack of correspondence with reality there was " in the Soviet ideals.

" At first I thought, despite everything that I saw with my own eyes, that the Soviet state was a breakthrough into the future, a kind of prototype for all countries ".

Then he came, in his words, to " the theory of symmetry: all governments and regimes to a first approximation are bad, all peoples are oppressed, and all are threatened by common dangers.

" After that he realized that there is not much " symmetry between a cancer cell and a normal one.

Yet our state is similar to a cancer cell — with its messianism and expansionism, its totalitarian suppression of dissent, the authoritarian structure of power, with a total absence of public control in the most important decisions in domestic and foreign policy, a closed society that does not inform its citizens of anything substantial, closed to the outside world, without freedom of travel or the exchange of information.

" Sakharov's ideas on social development led him to put forward the principle of human rights as a new basis of all politics.

In his works he declared that " the principle ' what is not prohibited is allowed ' should be understood literally ", defying the unwritten ideological rules imposed by the Communist ruling elite on the society in spite of the seemingly democratic USSR Constitution.