Historical Figure
Andrei Sakharov
d. 1989
Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist (1921–1989)
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Biography
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet physicist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world.
In Their Own Words (5)
A very large nuclear war would be a calamity of indescribable proportions and absolutely unpredictable consequences, with the uncertainties tending towards the worse...All-out nuclear war would mean the destruction of contemporary civilization, throw man back centuries, cause the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of people, and, with a certain degree of probability, would cause man to be destroyed as a biological species.
The Dangers of Thermonuclear War, 1983 , 1983
Both now and for always, I intend to hold fast to my belief in the hidden strength of the human spirit.
Autobiographical sketch at the official Nobel Prize site , 1975
Freedom to travel, freedom to choose where one wishes to work and live, these are still violated in the case of millions of kolkhoz workers, and in the case of hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tartars, who thirty years ago were cruelly and brutally deported from the Crimea and who to this day have been denied the right to return to the land of their fathers.
1975
But what about the sufferings of the innocent? Worst of all is the hell that exists in the special psychiatric clinics in Dnieperopetrovsk, Sytshevk, Blagoveshensk, Kazan, Chernakovsk, Oriol, Leningrad, Tashkent, … .
1975
Millions of people throughout the world are striving to put an end to poverty. They despise oppression, dogmatism, and demagogy (and their more extreme manifestations — racism, fascism, Stalinism, and Maoism). They believe in progress based on the use, under conditions of social justice and intellectual freedom, of all the positive experience accumulated by mankind.
1968
Timeline
The story of Andrei Sakharov, told in moments.
At 32, he's the principal designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. The first test, RDS-6s, yields 400 kilotons. He is named Hero of Socialist Labor and given a luxury dacha. He is the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Helps design the RDS-37, a 1.6-megaton two-stage thermonuclear device dropped over Semipalatinsk. It's the first true Soviet H-bomb. Something shifts in him. He begins advocating for test ban treaties.
Publishes "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom." The essay, smuggled to the West, calls for nuclear disarmament and an end to Soviet censorship. 18 million copies circulate. He's stripped of his weapons work.
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Soviet government won't let him leave Moscow to accept it. His wife Yelena Bonner reads his lecture in Oslo.
Arrested without trial and exiled to Gorky, a closed city where foreigners can't visit. He goes on hunger strikes. The KGB force-feeds him. He stays six years.
Gorbachev personally telephones to tell him he can return to Moscow. A phone had been installed in his Gorky apartment the day before, specifically for this call.
Dies of a heart attack in his Moscow apartment at 68. Three days earlier, he'd addressed the Congress of People's Deputies, arguing for multiparty democracy. Gorbachev had told him to sit down. He kept talking.
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