The onslaught of recent Russian history has rather pushed the great physicist, humanitarian and dissident, Andrei Sakharov, into the past. And it is a testimony to the West's lasting incomprehension of Russian culture that, apart from two Russian books (one a comprehensive festschrift) on Sakharov, this is the first English-language biography of the "father of the Russian H-bomb" who matured into "the conscience of the Cold War".
Lourie, an American novelist and translator of Russian writers - indeed of Sakharov's memoirs - has also examined the memorabilia of Elena Bonner, Sakharov's second wife, and what remains of KGB archives, after 584 volumes of operational material on Sakharov and Bonner alone were destroyed in 1989.
Sakharov was born in Moscow in 1921, against a backdrop of Bolshevism, civil war and famine which, between them, killed 15 million people. His father was an author of popular physics books, and Sakharov learnt about relativity and quantum mechanics before he entered Moscow University in 1938.
In 1941, as the Luftwaffe bombed Moscow, Sakharov joined the air defence units, somehow escaping injury. As a student, he was evacuated to Turkmenistan and, after graduating in 1942, to a munitions factory in Ulyanovsk, where he invented an instrument for magnetically analysing the cores of armour-piercing bullets. There, he also met his first wife, Klava, a well-educated "peasant" girl. In 1945, he returned to Moscow to study under Igor Tamm at FIAN (Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences), in the first of many separations from Klava.
By now, Russian science had long been Stalinised. Lysenko's disastrously Lamarkian "agrobiology" was enforced, while relativity was deemed "anti-materialistic". But theoretical physics took priority after Klaus Fuchs whispered atom bomb secrets to Stalin from Los Alamos - information backed up by the atrocities which befell Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 1947, Sakharov published his doctoral paper on the production of mesons in cosmic rays, and in 1948 he was ordered to work on H-bomb research. He soon devised his first bomb design, involving concentric shells of uranium-fission and deuterium-fusion fuels.
In 1949, he was taken to Sarov (which had disappeared from Soviet maps) and into the Zone - a 90-square-mile barbed-wire fortress containing the Arzamas-16 atomic installation. Thousands of "zeks" (political prisoners) starved and slave-laboured alongside scientists and their guards. Kindness and prostitution seemed interchangeable.
In 1949, the USSR finally tested its first fission bomb. The US triggered its first, more powerful, H-bomb test in 1951 and, in 1952, its massive Mike shot. On August 12th, 1953, Sakharov watched the first Soviet H-bomb, which he had helped mastermind, as it was tested on the Kazakh steppes, after a last-minute evacuation of tens of thousands of Kazakhs. The test was a huge success and, at 32, Sakharov won his first Hero of Socialist Labour medal, and fell ill from radiation sickness.
Sakharov (with Yakov Zeldovich) now sired a "third idea", using X-rays from a fission explosion to compress fusion fuel. In 1955, military brass and scientists gawped at the silent, infernal spectacle before the colossal shockwave killed two people and - shattering windows in a 100-mile radius - injured many more.
Sakharov, working with underground geneticists, estimated 10,000 cancer deaths from each megaton of nuclear explosive force. Krushchev personally authorised publication of these figures, to counter American propaganda about a "clean bomb".
Sakharov argued for a unilateral test ban, but was openly humiliated by Krushchev for venturing into politics. In 1962, Krushchev ordered the testing of his 60-megaton bomb - still the biggest ever detonated - to coincide with the 22nd Party Congress, at which he publicly denounced Stalin.
Sakharov initially opposed the test, but then asked for a second, so that further testing could be minimised. Both tests were successful, and Krushchev kissed Sakharov when awarding him his third Hero of Socialist Labour medal. Soon after, Sakharov was devastated to hear of new tests from both the Arzamas-16 and Cheylnabinsk installations. However, after the global horror of the Cuban missile crisis, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed in Moscow in late 1962.
This period marked a turning-point for Sakharov, who now openly declared anti- ballistic missile strategy to be insane. He also began writing appeals against arrests and "psychiatric" hospitalisations of dissidents, culminating in a world politics essay, 'Reflections', a samizdat classic printed in the New York Times in 1968. He recommended convergence between West and East; and an intellectual freedom which he saw as stupefied, in the West by consumerism, in the East by Stalinism and Maoism. He was sacked from Arzamas-16.
Sakharov used all his contacts, including Yuri Andropov (then KGB chief), to help dissidents, but his influence at the top was clearly fading. After Klava died in 1969, he donated all his money to charity and returned to FIAN. He wrote to Brezhnev urging open trials and freedom of information - just as Andropov was installing microphones in his flat.
Sakharov began fraternising with dissidents such as Bonner, whom he married in 1971. Sakharov's three children, particularly his teenage son, resented Bonner, and he left them his country dacha (personally authorised by Stalin) and his apartment, and moved in with Bonner in a writers' colony outside Moscow.
After being arrested at a demonstration - and later blamed for causing the fatal heart attack of a fellow-Academician - Sakharov was publicly denounced by the Academy, followed by members of the union of composers (including Khachaturian and Shostakovich), film-makers, factory workers, war veterans and collective farmers.
Talking to Swedish radio, he described the USSR as a closed, totalitarian society. After being warned by the deputy state prosecutor, he called a press conference. When Eduard Kuznetsov's Prison Diaries (a tiny manuscript written on cigarette papers) passed through the Sakharov apartment, Bonner was interrogated for two weeks.
Both ill, Sakharov and Bonner checked into the Academy hospital, she with a thyroid complaint. The surgeon refused to operate, and Sakharov staged his first hunger strike, protesting Bonner's right to travel. The US Republican senator, James Buckley, visited Sakharov, enraging the KGB. Threats intensified, and friends were arrested or mugged.
In 1974, a retinal necrosis threatened to blind Bonner. She was eventually allowed to travel to Paris - after the KGB had poisoned her baby grandson, and sent her photographs of mutilated eyes. Luckily, the operation was successful. While she was away, Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Soon after (in Lithuania at a dissident's trial), he heard Bonner deliver on radio his still inspirational acceptance speech, which shared the award with 127 named prisoners of conscience.
Andropov now rated Sakharov Public Enemy Number One, but ordered that he should not be injured or killed. However, when Sakharov blamed the authorities for the 1978 Moscow subway bombing, which killed seven people, he was berated by the attorney-general, intimidated at home, and assaulted outside the trial of physicist Yuri Orlov. That year, he began writing his memoirs, though the KGB soon stole the document.
The final straw came in 1980, when Sakharov condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in Die Welt. He was stripped of all honours, and exiled to a bleak high-rise in Gorky, where the city ended in rubbish and woodland. He still received scientific materials, and published three papers on particle physics and cosmology in his first year of exile. He began his memoirs again, and even managed to publish an 'Essay from Exile' in the New York Times.
Although Sakharov carried his manuscripts everywhere, everything - memoirs, diaries, notes on science, current events, even literature - was again snatched, during a dentist's appointment inGorky.
Bonner and Sakharov began a hunger strike together in late 1981. The KGB harassed them, sending them newspaper accounts of the "death agonies" of the Long Kesh hunger strikers. After 12 days, they were manhandled to hospital, where Sakharov had a heart spasm. He was sent home, and had a heart attack.
Again, he began to write, and by April 1982 had 900 pages of memoirs, which Bonner was smuggling out in batches. This time, he was attacked with nerve gas on the street, and the document was taken - but, although tempted by suicide, he started again. Two hundred and fifty pages later, Bonner was arrested in Moscow, strip-searched, and forced to hand over the manuscript.
Soon after, Bonner herself had a heart attack. She was sentenced to internal exile, and Sakharov began another hunger strike. After four days, he was hospitalised and drugged. He was force-fed, through a nose-tube for nine days, then by having food crammed down his neck for a further three days. He caved in and was discharged.
In April 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was briefed on Sakharov, who, five days into a new hunger strike, had been hospitalised again under a news blackout. Even Bonner heard nothing for three months.
When he was discharged, Sakharov wrote to Gorbachev, threatening to go on hunger strike again. Once more, the white coats dragged him to hospital. International protests were being stepped up, and Bonner quietly left for Boston and bypass surgery.
In December, the KGB installed a phone in Sakharov's apartment, and Gorbachev rang in person to tell Sakharov he could return to "patriotic work" at FIAN, as long as he made no public statements. Instead, Sakharov insisted on the release of all political prisoners. Gorbachev hedged and Sakharov hung up.
Eventually, Sakharov agreed to speak out only in "exceptional cases". He and Bonner again captured international media attention, receiving visitors such as Henry Kissinger and Jeane Kirkpatrick. He preached human rights to Margaret Thatcher, and was most amused by Stephen Hawking. Eventually, in 1988, he was allowed to visit the US, where he found Reagan "charming" but unbudgeable on Star Wars. He was even more startled by the intransigence of his one-time opposite number, US H-bomb scientist Edward Teller.
Sakharov constantly pestered Gorbachev for reforms, particularly after March 1989 when, in a quasi-democratic assembly, Sakharov sat on the First Congress of People's Deputies. He challenged Gorbachev's position as both head of the Communist Party and of the state. With Boris Yeltsin and others, he founded the Inter-regional Group of Deputies, and called for the repeal of article six of the constitution, which gave primacy to the Communist Party. Gorbachev called them a bunch of gangsters, and at one point switched off Sakharov's microphone.
Sakharov now flung himself into humanitarian work; attending sessions of the Supreme Soviet; chairing the Academy's Council on Particle Physics and campaigning for many protesting groups and ethnic minorities. He drafted a liberal constitution, and even wrote a second volume of memoirs, Moscow and Beyond.
In late 1989, as communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, the Communist Party majority in Congress howled down any opposition to article six. On December 14th, after rallying the Inter-regional Group for an all-out strike vote, Sakharov went home, ate and took a nap, asking Bonner to wake him at nine. She found him dead on the floor - on the cusp of a new democracy he had helped inspire.
Sakharov's funeral was a mass event, with tens of thousands filing past the open coffin, and a huge rally in Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. Sakharov remains an inspiration for dissidents such as the Chinese astrophysicist, Fang Lizhi. Bonner herself remains outspoken, criticising the Russian electoral system, the monarchic appointment of Putin and the outrageous Chechnyan wars.
Lourie's highly moving account - written novelistically in a sometimes perplexing jumble of gaps and dark KGB anecdotes - is rather a melodrama of a secular saint and his triumph over personal pride and surreal adversity.
But Sakharov merits a more scholarly biography, particularly as Lourie includes no science, other than hesitant mentions of Sakharov's contributions to cosmology (such as baryon asymmetry) and his interesting ideas on quantum gravity (which have since fallen into disfavour).
Sakharov's extraordinary intellect, with its instinctive leaps, came to be suffused with an astonishing clarity and compassion. A witting tool of callous Western diplomacy during the Cold War, his appalling experiences reflect interestingly on the often illusory freedoms - particularly of expression - which we enjoy in Western, let alone Irish, culture.
Mic Moroney is a writer and critic
Sakharov: A Biography. By Richard Lourie. University Press of New England, 465pp. £21 sterling