Andrey Sakharov

Andrey Sakharov (1921-1989), nuclear physicist and father of the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb, famous Russian human rights advocate from the 1960s to the 1980s, and Nobel laureate.

The son of a high school teacher, Sakharov was born in Moscow. He received his degree in physics from Moscow State University in 1942, finishing his studies in Central Asia, where his department was evacuated during World War II. After working for three years in a weapons plant, Sakharov studied theoretical physics under Igor Tamm at the P. N. Lebedev Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, taking a doctorate in 1947. In 1948 Tamm drew him into the top-secret scientific and engineering team that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had assigned to develop thermonuclear weapons for the Soviet Union. From 1950 to 1968 Sakharov lived in Arzamas-16, a closed city devoted to the program. Sakharov’s brilliant mathematical work on gas dynamics, magnetic confinement of charged particles, and other problems was crucial to the creation of the Soviet hydrogen bomb first tested in August 1953. In recognition of his contribution, he was elected a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences at the age of 32 and given other honors and privileges.

As a young man, Sakharov did not doubt the fundamentals of the Soviet regime or take an interest in politics. In the mid-1950s, however, he began to consider the dangers of nuclear explosions and radiation to human populations and the natural environment. At a Kremlin meeting in 1961 he passed a note to Nikita Khrushchev, the top Soviet leader, criticizing the resumption of nuclear testing recently announced by the government; Khrushchev in turn condemned his boldness. Shortly afterward, Sakharov began to awaken to wider issues. He moved toward more radical positions when the leadership group under Leonid Brezhnev, which overthrew Khrushchev in 1964, took the country in a conservative direction.

In his 1968 essay “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom” Sakharov argued for détente, the relaxation of strained relations between East and West. He also called for a gradual convergence of the socialist and capitalist systems. The essay’s publication in underground samizdat (literature published and circulated secretly in the Soviet Union) and in translation abroad led to the termination of Sakharov’s military-related work and the loss of many luxuries.

Sakharov was one of three cofounders in 1970 of the Committee for Human Rights. From then on, although he continued to do some research on physics and cosmology, he was constantly embroiled in human rights causes. These included campaigns in favor of freedoms of speech, assembly, worship, and emigration—all of which were guaranteed in theory by the Soviet constitution but denied in practice. He frequently signed petitions, attended trials of dissidents charged with criminal offenses, gave news conferences for foreign journalists in order to publicize cases of abuse, and on several occasions staged hunger strikes. His second wife, Yelena G. Bonner, was herself a prominent human rights activist and encouraged Sakharov in these activities. The Soviet media attacked him as disloyal in 1973, and the assault intensified when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1975. Sakharov was denied permission to attend the Nobel ceremony in Oslo, Norway, on the grounds that he possessed state secrets from his earlier scientific work for the military.

In December 1979 Sakharov denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In retaliation, he was arrested in January 1980 and sent to internal exile in the closed city of Gorky (now Nizhniy Novgorod), the site of one of the Soviet Union’s main submarine-building yards. Despite failing health and harassment by the KGB (State Security Committee), Sakharov managed to circulate open letters and write his memoirs. In December 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev, the new, reform-minded Soviet leader, released him from Gorky, and Sakharov returned to Moscow.

Once freed, Sakharov lent his enormous moral authority to Gorbachev’s policies, all the while pressing him to liberalize political controls as thoroughly as possible. Elected by scholars in the Academy of Sciences as one of their representatives to the new Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1989, he used his seat in the congress to propound his reformist views, often drawing the ire of less progressive members. Sakharov died of a heart attack on December 14, 1989, and was buried with state honors in Moscow. The Russian people mourned him deeply, and many felt that his death created a moral and humanitarian vacuum that was perilous to a nation beginning to reach for democracy.