Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an OGONEK interview by Vanda Beletskaya with Academician Anatoliy Petrovich Aleksandrov, former president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Aleksandrov blames the Chernobyl accident on an ill-considered experiment prepared by Donenergo that violated operating instructions. He also describes earlier nuclear plant defects, Legasov's suicide, and his dealings with Beria and Kapitsa. He argues for continued atomic power engineering and a law on nuclear power.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 ## Document 6 of 16 Gorkiy, and not somewhere a little farther away. If you now start to attract attention to him, it will be not better, but worse. His conditions in Gorkiy are decent, he is working. He assured me that nothing threatened the life and health of Andrey Dmitriyevich. Now there is not what there was before, there are not the conditions, under which we in our day worked, under Beria. 103. Many people probably do not like this, but I believed and believe that the most agonizing thing for a scientist is when he does not have the opportunity to busy himself with his own science. How else am I to explain it to you? Many of us worked, for example, on the atomic problem in a certain isolation, while officially being completely free. Kurchatov, I, and the same Sakharov. Therefore, I did not regard the isolation and obstacles to contact with foreigners as a tragedy. 104. Then I saw to it that they would let the fiancee of the son of Yelena Georgiyevna Bonner go to America and herself to go abroad to undergo treatment. Of course, I did everything for Sakharov, he had, after all, gone on hunger strikes on this account... 105. It is possible to cast stones at both me and Keldysh. However, while presidents of the Academy of Sciences, we did not allow the expulsion of Sakharov from its members. But they put pressure on us, and very much pressure. Everyone understands this. How many times I explained myself in the Central Committee, in the Politburo, in the government... Writers surely expelled Pasternak, they expelled many from the Union of Writers. 106. Of course, it was possible to scandalously submit my resignation on account of Sakharov. At that time they would no longer kill me, there was not what there was under Beria, when they were quite able to do that. Only it would hardly have become better for Sakharov. And, in general, I do not like this ''if'' and ''and.'' I did not submit my resignation then, I stayed. And I even bore my burden of responsibility, when they elected me to a second term. Of the 180 members of the Academy 168 voted by secret ballot ''in favor.'' Just as the first time. And quite frankly I believe that I was not the worst president of the Academy of Sciences. However, it is not for me to judge this. 107. And here is what else I will say about Sakharov. I and Keldysh tried to keep him for science. Differing, very likely, with the majority of admirers of Andrey Dmitriyevich, I believe that what was done by Academician Sakharov for science and his scientific works will remain in our history. All the rest is temporary, transient passions, which with time will pass and then will be forgotten. While of all his democratic activity in defense of rights his protest
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 22 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.