Sakharov: A Biography, by Richard Lourie It takes more than a Bolshevik to erase history. Lenin intended his revolution to be a clean break with the unruly, uncontrollable past, but, in the end, he failed. Remnants of the older—and, for all its faults, more humane—Russia succeeded in enduring through three- quarters of a century of Communist brutality. Andrei Sakharov, the subject of this new biography by Richard Lourie, may have been born in the formative years of the Soviet dystopia, but he is best seen as a child of the earlier, finer civilization that the revolution had been designed to [...]