Editing Andrei Sakharov (section)

===Attacked by Soviet establishment from 1972===
<!-- Deleted image removed: [[File:Meiman dissidents.gif|thumb|239x239px|Sakharov with [[Naum Meiman]], [[Sofiya Kallistratova]], [[Petro Grigorenko]], his wife Zinaida Grigorenko, [[Tatyana Velikanova]]'s mother, the priest Father Sergei Zheludkov; in the lower row are Genrikh Altunyan and [[Alexander Podrabinek]]. Photo taken on 16 October 1977.<ref>{{cite book|author=Подрабинек, Александр|script-title=ru:Диссиденты|trans-title=Dissidents|date=2014|publisher=АСТ|location=Moscow|isbn=978-5-17-082401-4|language=ru}}</ref>{{ffdc|1=Meiman dissidents.gif|log=2022 April 15}}]] -->In 1972, Sakharov became the target of sustained pressure from his fellow scientists in the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Soviet press. The writer [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]] came to his defence.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://chronicle6883.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/30-12-materials-about-sakharov/|title=30.12 Materials about Sakharov|work=A Chronicle of Current Events|date=2016-01-16}}</ref>

In 1973 and 1974, the Soviet media campaign continued, targeting both Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn for their pro-Western, anti-socialist positions.

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.":<ref name="people" />

{{blockquote
 |text=...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.<ref name="people" />}}

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 '[[Everything which is not forbidden is allowed|what is not prohibited is allowed]]' should be understood literally", and defied what he saw as unwritten ideological rules imposed by the Communist Party on the society in spite of a democratic [[Soviet Constitution]] (1936):
 
{{blockquote
|text=I am no volunteer priest of the idea, but simply a man with an unusual fate. I am against all kinds of self-immolation (for myself and for others, including the people closest to me).<ref name="people" />}}

In a letter written from exile, he cheered up a fellow physicist and free market advocate with the words: "Fortunately, the future is unpredictable and also – because of [[quantum effects]] – uncertain." For Sakharov, the indeterminacy of the future supported his belief that he could and should take personal responsibility for it.