The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space From Stalin to Star Wars

Roald Z. Sagdeev, a top-ranked international scientist, has written a classic memoir that rips the curtain of secrecy off the world of Soviet science. Dr. Sagdeev was the youngest full member of the USSR’s prestigious Academy of Sciences. As director of the Space Research Institute, he led the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz mission, the Venera series to Venus, and the international missions to Halley’s Comet. Boris Yeltsin bestowed on him the Soviet Union’s highest award for achievement. Born in 1932, he had grown up in the elite culture of the technical universities and done pioneering work on the behavior of hot plasma physics in controlled thermonuclear fusion at the beginning of the cold war, a time of fierce competition between east and west in nuclear science. From his vantage point at the pinnacle of Soviet science, he observed first-hand the inner workings of its secretive military-industrial complex. Now, as the first top decision maker to leave the "complex," he is finally free to expose the extraordinary extent to which the scientific community was used to foster the objectives of the Communist party and the military establishment. His account of the corruption and hypocrisy of the Brezhnev era—and its impact on Gorbachev and his failed perestroika—provides an unprecedented portrait of the era. Writing with extraordinary candor, Dr. Sagdeev reveals startling details of the most politically sensitive scientific issues of the Cold War years. He identifies the key players in the Soviet nuclear weapons program (nearly all of whom he worked with) and recounts the internal battles over SDI technology and his own role in killing Russia’s own "Star Wars" program. He explains how Gorbachev was deceived about Soviet technical capabilities by his own people and how the arms talks in Geneva were jeopardized as a consequence. He describes the military-space community’s farcical attempt to cover up Soviet technical inferiority during the joint Apollo-Soyuz flight. And he tells the real reasons why Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky. In a style that Time has described as a "mixture of wit, charm, and trenchant observation," Roald Z. Sagdeev recounts his extraordinary career and his struggle to do honest science. The result is a landmark scientific memoir, full of provocative insights into the making of a world-class scientist in our times.