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EDUCATION
Andrei Sakharov was tutored privately until fifth grade, when he entered the School No. 110. During his years of private schooling, Sakharov has a close friend, Oleg, who aspired to be an historian, and who opened the curtains of the wonderful world of humanities to Sakharov. Sakharov’s love for poetry was inspired by Oleg.
Andrei Sakharov’s physics education started very early, a fact not surprising considering that his father was a physics teacher. At age twelve, he was a frequent visitor to his father’s lab, witnessing experiments that he actually could understand! Before long, Sakharov began to perform experiments at home on his own. Andrei also studied physics and mathematics under his father.
“I grasped ideas quickly, with little need for explanation, and was fascinated by the possibility of being able to reduce the whole gamut of natural phenomena tot eh comparatively simple laws of interactions between atoms, as expressed by mathematical formulas.”
Graduating as one of the only two honor students from his high school, Andrei entered the physics department of Moscow University in 1938.
Though the university had boasted of some distinguished physicists, most of them were forced to resign and were sometimes even imprisoned due to one of a series of slanderous campaigns against scientists. Thus, the educational standard in physics was greatly lowered. Nevertheless, Sakharov ardently pursued his interest in physics. He spent most of his time studying in the library until very late. Reading scientific works so engaged him that he began to skip boring classes, and went to the library instead.
Although outstanding in his scientific and other studies, Sakharov had much trouble with the course Marxism-Leninism.
“It wasn’t an ideological problem: at the time, it never entered my head to question Marxism as the ideology best suited to liberate mankind, and materialism too seemed too a reasonable enough philosophy. What I didn’t like was the attempt to carry over the outmoded concepts of natural philosophy into the twentieth century (the age of exact science) without amendment: for example, Engels with is Lamarckian theory of the role played by labor in turning apes into men (which conflicts with the modern theory of genetics) and the primitive, naïve use of formulas in Das Capital….Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism seemed superficial, written on the level of journalistic polemic.”
In June, 1941, Germany broke the Non-aggression Pact with Soviet Union, and invaded the USSR. It was at the end of Sakharov’s junior year in college. Although many students at Moscow University enlisted as volunteered in the army, Sakharov did not enroll due to a chronic heart condition. Nevertheless, wanting to defend Russia, Sakharov joined the volunteer air defense units at the university, and attempted to Russia’s war effort in whichever way possible.
Amidst the notorious Moscow Panic in October, the government evacuated Moscow University to Ashkhabad. This stay of 6 months presented many “firsts” to Sakharov: It was the first adventure beyond the confines of his home, the first social contact that he had with companions of his own age, and, sadly, the first experience with the hostility of many Russians toward intellectuals and Jews (although he was not a Jew).
After graduation, Sakharov declined an offer to continue studying theoretical physics as a graduate student. Instead, he accepted his assignment to a munitions factory.
“ I felt it would be wrong to continue studying when I could be making a contribution to the war effort.”
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