LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Andrei Sakharov
built 136 days ago
Famous for his physics as well as his championship of human rights, Andrei Sakharov is one of the most influential figures in the history of the Cold War. Dr. Sakharov studied physics at the University of Moscow and spent twenty years on the Soviet nuclear weapons project, and became the orginator of the Soviet nuclear bomb. While working on the project, he grew increasingly discontent with the consequences of his work and began to publish articles about the effects of low-level nuclear radiation. In 1968, he wrote "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom", attacking the Soviet political system. This essay was printed in the New York Times and he lost his position.
Source:
Andrei Sakharov was a physician, a member of the Academy of Sciences of USSR from 1953. He did important researches in astrophysics and was one of the creators of the thermonuclear bomb. For this reason, he was awarded three times Hero of the Socialist Work. In his work Sakharov was already convinced of operating for an ideal of peace and progress: he considered the nuclear balance a deterrent from a global military conflict between the two blocs. He will underline this conviction in the samizdat essay of the 1968 "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom", in which he wishes a gradual approaching between USSR and USA and a strong refusal in USSR of neo-stalinist temptations.
Source:
Last May 21 academician Andrei Sakharov, renowned as one of the developers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later as a dissident and liberal critic of the Stalinist regime, would have celebrated his eightieth birthday. This date was marked by a wave of publications in the Russian press.
Source:
The Andrei Sakharov Archives and Human Rights Center, established at Brandeis University in 1993, are now housed at Harvard University. The documents from that archive were published by the Yale University Press in 2005. These documents are available online. Most of documents of the archive are letters from the head of the KGB to the Central Committee about activities of Soviet dissidents and recommendations about the interpretation in newspapers. The letters cover the period from 1968 to 1991 (Brezhnev stagnation). The documents characterize not only the Sakharov's activity, but that of other dissidents, as well as that of highest-position apparatchiks, and the KGB.
Source:
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. In the course of doing so, Gennady Gorelik answers a fascinating question, whether the Soviet hydrogen bomb was really fathered by Sakharov, or whether it was based on stolen American secrets. Gorelik concludes that while espionage did initiate the Soviet effort, the Russian hydrogen bomb was invented independently. Gorelik ... elucidates the reasons that brought about the seemingly sudden transformation of the top-secret physicist into a public figure in 1968, when Sakharov's famous essay "Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" was distributed in samizdat in the USSR and smuggled out to the West.
Source:
Andrei Sakharov was born on May 21, 1921 into a Moscow family of cultured and liberal intelligentsia. "From childhood, I lived in an atmosphere of decency, mutual help and tact, respect for work, and for the mastery of one's profession." This was, in his own words, the environment that shaped Sakharov's life. At Moscow University where he studied physics, he was quickly recognized as one of the most brilliant students. He was exempted from military service during the war with Nazi Germany and completed his studies in 1942. For several years he worked as an engineer at an armament factory and patented several inventions.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Andrei Sakharov