TV Reviews : The Turnabout of Andrei Sakharov

One of the most remarkable dimensions of the race for the bomb and the Cold War it triggered was the similarly deep moral anguish suffered by the American and Soviet fathers of thermonuclear destruction. The superpower Frankensteins, Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov, realized the horror they had unleashed--and their moral responsibility to oppose its spread. These “heroes” of modern science eventually became enemies of the very states they aided.

Oppenheimer died a broken man, but, in a far more Draconian situation, Sakharov survived to become a living world symbol of human rights and democratic values. Producer Sherry Jones’ stirring 90-minute biography, “In the Shadow of Sakharov” (at 9 tonight on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, in the season premiere of the “Frontline” series), portrays what may be one of the most extraordinary Saul-to-Paul conversions of the 20th Century.

Sakharov did not possess Oppenheimer’s instant sense of the bomb’s inherent immorality; it took several years and, finally, some reckless airborne tests, to convince Sakharov that his work had gotten out of hand. He gradually drifted toward people in whom he recognized conscience--many of whom talk on camera of how a meekly quiet man evolved, by the end of the ‘60s, into the voice of Soviet dissidence.

As “In the Shadow of Sakharov” unfolds, it exposes, as almost never before on television, a Soviet Union ruled by madness and the psychology of fear. The video footage shown here of Sakharov and his dissident wife, Elena Bonner, living in internal exile confirms Orwell’s worst “1984” imaginings.

What Orwell couldn’t have guessed, though, was Sakharov’s release and the single-handed way in which he prodded Mikhail Gorbachev toward democratic reform. Dead just days after finishing his draft of a new constitution, Sakharov, as a parliamentary colleague notes here, was “programmed to devote his entire life, to his last breath, (toward) creating something as powerful as that hydrogen bomb, but just the opposite--not for destruction, but for survival of the world and mankind.”