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Andrei Sakharov: Soviet Union
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Andrei Sakharov was an unlikely hero in Cold War Russia. A brilliant physicist more inclined to the little miracles of the laboratory than to the glare of public scrutiny. A man of abundant vision, courage and conscience whose mark on Russian history is unmistakable, but whose footsteps have all but vanished. His childhood home is now a police station. His place of exile, the sealed city of Gorky, is now Nizny Novgorod. The Soviet Congress of People's Deputies, where he made his triumphant return, is now the Russian Duma.
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Andrei Sakharov was in many ways the USSR’s Robert Oppenheimer: both deeply involved in developing the first ‘weapons of mass destruction’, only to later turn away from the so-called objectivity of science to confront the difficult issues of conscience. Honoured for his contribution to the Soviet Union’s military dominance, an increasingly recalcitrant Sakharov was later sent into a seven-year exile. Some twenty years later in 1975, he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
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How did Andrei Sakharov, a theoretical physicist and the acknowledged father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, become a human rights activist and the first Russian to win the Nobel Peace Prize? In his later years, Sakharov noted in his diary that he was "simply a man with an unusual fate." To understand this deceptively straightforward statement by an extraordinary man, The World of Andrei Sakharov, the first authoritative study of Andrei Sakharov as a scientist as well as a public figure, relies on previously inaccessible documents, recently declassified archives, and personal accounts by Sakharov's friends and colleagues to examine the real context of Sakharov's life.
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The life of Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov spanned the years from Lenin to Gorbachev, from an expanding Soviet empire to the collapse of that empire. Sakharov was father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, a much-decorated hero of the Soviet Union, an exiled human rights activist, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner and a man who, with his wife, stared down the most dangerous government in the world. Who was Andrei Sakharov?
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In the fall of 1962, when his life took its fateful turn, Andrei Sakharov was not yet known to the world. He was 41 years old, a decorated Soviet physicist developing atomic weapons of terrifying power deep in the heart of the Soviet Union. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were locked in a frenzied contest for nuclear superiority. That September the Kremlin was to conduct two massive atmospheric tests of bombs that Sakharov had helped design. Sakharov feared the radioactive fallout from the second test would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.
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Andrei Sakharov is often called the "father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb," but most people know him as one of the twentieth century's most ardent and unrelenting champions of human rights and freedoms. It was for his work as an outspoken dissident to the Soviet regime that the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 1975. The citation called him "the conscience of mankind" saying that he "has fought not only against the abuse of power and violations of human dignity in all its forms, but has in equal vigor fought for the ideal of a state founded on the principle of justice for all." The Soviet authorities denied him permission to go to Norway to receive his award.
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