Science, Politics, and Human Rights
APS Nicholson Medal Talk, 3 May 1996
I would like to talk about some problems of defending human rights and, in particular, the human rights of scientists living in totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union and China today.
The main problem seems to be stability. Opponents of strong human rights pressure on China insist that such pressure can dangerously destabilize the country given its huge, multiethnic and comparatively poor population. "Look at Russia," they sometimes argue. My answer is: "Yes, look at Russia!"
The return to a new type of totalitarian regime that may be less predictable than the previous ones is certainly possible in this country because many people who thought democracy would provide a quick fix for all their problems are now disaffected with it. This is to be expected in any transition from totalitarianism to democracy. Even so, a large scale civil war is unlikely -- Chechnya is a tragic exception -- and the texture of political democracy in everyday Russia hasn't been particularly unstable. The pace of political democratization after Gorbachev and his reforms has been more or less normal. There have been some big bumps, of course, like the 1993 bloody conflict between the President and Parliament, when the Russian communists and fascists -- in a radical attempt to stop reforms -- defended the "White House," and Yeltsin bombed it. However, a feedback system existed in this huge undeveloped democracy, and after the 1993 conflict both sides became much more careful. Basically, the country has been, and remains, calm
. The major sources of instability in Russian democracy today are not fundamentally political, but economic and legal. The situation would have been better had we democratic dissidents prepared economic ideas along with our political ones, but we were rather busy with human and civil rights. When the economic changes from the top came in '92, they came as a kind of revolution -- abrupt and inconsistent, without a prepared basis in law and law enforcement. The scale of crime and corruption in Russia today is the result of the revolutionary economic freedom, not political freedom. No one predicted these crimes or how quickly people could and would exploit the new economic situation. Perhaps they could have done so, perhaps not. China seems to be avoiding this problem: the economic part of the liberation there is already well under way and well under control. Of course, that control is partly possible because of a lack of political freedom. The legal swamp in Russia -- many laws in conflict, many needed laws absent -- does represent a failure of the democrats and intelligentsia. It's hard to imagine how to create a real legal system and body of decent laws overnight, especially in a country with so little experience of them. This would be a problem facing any country shedding its totalitarian past, but certainly more progress should have been made in the last eight years. A serious area of potential instability in the Russian Federation (and in China, too, perhaps) is multiethnicity. With the tragic exception of the war in Chechnya, which was begun by the Russian government itself, not by the people, there are no armed conflicts between minorities and Russians. Why? Precisely because the idea of solving the problem of national minorities in a maximally democratic way -- giving them the full set of cultural, economic and administrative freedoms -- was conceptually prepared by the democratic dissidents, in particular by Sakharov, and has been implemented by President Yeltsin personally (Unfortunately, Yeltsin is also personally responsible for the war in Chechnya, which is a colonial war that is being conducted in a way that is a war crime.)
This conceptual preparation -- democratic dissidents educating the intelligentsia in non-violent opposition to a violent regime -- went on for a quarter of a century. We tried to change the mentality of the intelligentsia and (less effectively) that of ordinary people, as well as new generations of bureaucrats, and in this we succeeded. Today there are several generations of intelligentsia in Russia and even high bureaucrats who have been educated in this approach, as well as most of the latest generation of journalists, who help to shape public opinion. The situation is very different in the former Yugoslavia, the Caucuses, and Central Asia, where anti-violent opposition to the communist regimes either has never existed or has been underdeveloped. As a result, mutual solutions of interethnic conflicts are hard and violent in these areas. This is strong evidence that long-time preparation of public psychology by an anti-violence democratic opposition is a crucial factor in avoiding civil war.
For such preparation to work, this opposition needs very strong support from around the world. The fact that we Russian dissidents had our partial success, and survived to see it, is partly due to the strong and steady support we received in the West -- in my case and Sakharov's, support especially from fellow scientists. It is extremely important to continue defense of scientists like us around the world.
The crucial issue, I think, is: What is really more dangerous for domestic and international peace and security -- a repressive totalitarian regime that may gradually improve itself without pressure, or an unstable democracy? I think choosing the former is wrong for the following reasons. First let me say that a totalitarian regime like China is a special case. You have the usual repressive regime with almost unlimited political power, a state ideology and restrictions on other ideologies, and a degree of xenophobia and conspiratorial secrecy combined with aggressiveness. In addition, however, you also have the dream of being a nuclear superpower. One more superpower is perhaps not a catastrophic problem if it is a strongly democratic one. From the point of view of international peace and security, it is extremely important that China become democratic before it achieves the status of a superpower. From the point of view of peace inside China, a democratic approach to social, national and religious problems can help avoid violent revolutionary explosions. All this means that scientists concerned with democracy and world peace urgently need to keep up the pressure for human rights in China, and help that small number of our extremely brave Chinese colleagues who oppose totalitarianism and push their leaders peacefully in the direction of democratic political reforms.
But what if such pressure helps give birth to an unstable democracy in China? Unfortunately, there seems to be no formula for making a transition from a totalitarian regime to a safe democracy. This is an area that urgently needs study and work. It is true that unstable democracies -- and even stable ones -- have terrorism and thefts of nuclear and other dangerous materials that you don't find in a totalitarian regime. It is obvious that disappearing plutonium and even tragedies like terrorist massacres are far less dangerous than having yet another confrontation with a totalitarian superpower. When faced with a totalitarian superpower, there is almost nothing to do but arm yourself as much as possible while trying to engage in negotiations to scale things down. What about a totalitarian regime improving on its own? The very notion of a totalitarian regime gradually improving itself, without permanent and hard pressure, can be a fantasy. (Recall that the Soviet regime was pressed -- very, very hard.) There is some threshold beyond which a totalitarian regime is too totalitarian to be amenable to improvements. It will suppress them unless pressured, and apparently in the case of China, often suppress them if not pressured hard enough. Granted that human rights in China is our affair, if only because an undemocratic China is a threat to international peace and security. We may still be uneasy about actively supporting Chinese scientific colleagues who are trying to protest against political repression, on the grounds they are only a tiny part of the scientific community there. Some scientists insist that they are a small minority not because the majority is afraid, but simply because it supports government policy. Even If this is true, it still does not mean that the majority is right. Moreover, to judge from my personal experience, determining who is or is not really opposed to their totalitarian government is a rather more complicated phenomenon than it appears.
For scientists in a totalitarian society, the line between the professional and the political collapses because neutrality is not tolerated by the regime. Scientists have only two choices: cooperation (some might say, complicity) with the regime, or resistance to it. Remember, your salary comes from the regime. Your promotions, opportunities for publication, and travel abroad depend on political evaluations. Your outstanding work supports the regime by adding to its international prestige and, in the case of technological and military work, its economic and military power. A line cannot be drawn between the cooperation and non-cooperation of an active, working scientist. It can only be drawn between degrees of cooperation.
How did scientists in the Soviet Union confront this dilemma? How did they respond to colleagues who resisted the regime by struggling for democracy and human rights? During the period that I personally experienced (1956 onwards), their responses were radically diverse. As some of you may know, in April 1956 -- exactly 40 years ago -- immediately after the famous Khrushchev "secret" speech, I declared at an open Party meeting in ITEP that we needed democratization on the basis of socialism. Along with three other speakers, I was immediately expelled from the Party and fired from ITEP, without the right to work in any scientific institute in or near Moscow. The decision was made by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and confirmed by the Politburo, a body high enough to have scared anyone only three years previously, In Stalin's time.
In 1956, encouraged by Khrushchev's anti-Stalin's speech, scientists from the main physics Institutes -- Lebedev, ITEP (Moscow), Budker (Novosibirsk), Ioffe (Leningrad), and IPT (Kharkov) -- sent us, their unemployed colleagues, financial support, though secretly, of course. At that time, some 20-30 leading physics, including Kapitsa, Sakharov, and Alikhanov, were very active in writing collective letters (not for publication, of course) to the leaders protesting attempts to restore or protect Stalinism. The majority of scientists, however, were afraid to participate in such activity.
The behavior of even the majority of that leading minority changed rather quickly after Khrushchev's fall in the 1960s. Like most of the intelligentsia, they became rather depressed or cowed, and most were disinclined to continue their protests. In the mid-60s, only Mikhail Leontovich, Kapitsa and a handful of much less famous scientists risked signing protest letters written by dissidents, who were mostly intellectuals demanding glasnost, among other things. Human rights activists and other dissidents had emerged in the USSR, some opposing the regime on purely moral grounds like Sakharov and others opposing it on political grounds as well (like myself).
Very soon the society as a whole as well as the scientific community became sharply divided into people in open opposition, always some half-hundred still-not-arrested people (among them Andrei Sakharov), and others. (The Jewish refuseniks, many of them scientists, appeared later.) Under totalitarian conditions, there was a big ditch between these two groups, and a striking difference in behavior. That ditch was dug not simply by the repressive conditions, not simply by the powerful Party-KGB propaganda machine of disinformation, but by intellectuals as well. In about 1970, I told a friend who was a famous physicist that I was preparing a letter to the Soviet authorities about the situation in Soviet science. "But," he asked,"Do you want to continue to work as a physicist?" There was nothing wrong with this concern and indirect advice. What amazed me, however, was that after this conversation he always avoided me and at one scientific meeting bypassed me as if I were a pole on a complex plane.
The majority of scientists maintained an ambiguous or hypocritical public silence. Some did criticize the regime, but only in the privacy of the famous Moscow kitchens. Only a small (but significant) minority expressed strong professional and public support of the regime, and lack of support for colleagues opposed to the regime. This lack of support ranged from expressions of dislike to outright condemnation. A tiny minority chose ideological confrontation with the regime, which cost them their scientific careers and in some cases incarceration in prisons, camps, and exile.
In time, this picture changed. Nowadays, truly amazing numbers of Russians, scientists included, present themselves as having been longtime dissidents and democrats (but then, Russia is the land of revisionist history). Still, it is true that from the middle '60s when Brezhnev came to power to Gorbachev's time there were more and more free kitchen discussions, more people listening to foreign radio broadcasts, more samizdat readings, fewer and fewer citations of Lenin and Marx even by Party-member intellectuals, and more and more non-dissident "outsiders" -- including scientists -- secretly helping their oppressed colleagues by giving money and clothes, sending letters to camp, and helping to transmit our human rights information. Let me return now to the matter of our colleagues in China. What should we do apart from active support of persecuted fellow scientists? In answering this question, we need to face the issue of collaborating with the fellow scientists who are officially acceptable to the regime. Their cooperation with the regime is, as I suggested in connection with Russia, a matter of degree, so it is desirable to examine each case, putting our emphasis on science but not closing our eyes to the obvious. Here it may be argued that any and all contacts with our Chinese colleagues are necessary to "keep lines of communication open" In order to have some beneficial effect on the regime. So let me ask: what lines of communication are involved? Certainly not ones of genuine, serious political discourse. Remember that during the 1930s Stalin had several thousand Americans and Germans working in Russia, and it didn't make a bit of difference.
I would also like to suggest that it is one thing to invite Chinese scientists to the West, say, to a conference at one's university, and quite another to go to a conference in China. For we organize independent, scientific conferences. They organize official conferences that are always mixtures of science and state politics. Western scientists who think that scientists should not be involved in politics should bear this in mind: attending a scientific conference in China is participating in a political situation. My view is that attending such conferences is constructive if, when in China, one publicly speaks out in defense of scientific colleagues being punished for their political views. Keeping silent in such circumstances is not only not constructive; It helps the regime by legitimizing the persecution of colleagues. In short, just as scientists in a totalitarian society cannot separate the professional and the political, neither can visiting western colleagues going to China or any other totalitarian state. This is one of the many reasons why totalitarianism is an affront to us as scientists and as human beings. It is one of the reasons why we should, as scientists and human beings, do our best to oppose it.
Yuri F. Orlov
Newman Laboratory, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY