Sakharov, who died on December 14, 1989, was honored or punished by a series of Kremlin leaders — Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and, finally, Gorbachev.  

A physicist and “father of the Soviet H-bomb,” he became the leading champion of human rights in the USSR.  In 1975, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his “struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, for disarmament and cooperation between all nations,” sparking fury in the Kremlin at the implied condemnation of its policies.  

The authorities refused Sakharov permission to travel to Oslo to receive the prize. His wife, Yelena Bonner, whom he married in 1971 after his first wife died, received it on his behalf.  

After demonstrating a talent for theoretical physics at an early age, from 1948, Sakharov had worked on the development of a hydrogen bomb. He believed it was important to break the American monopoly on nuclear weapons. 

From the late 1950s, however, he issued warnings about the consequences of the arms race. He begged Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to cancel the testing of history’s largest ever thermonuclear bomb because another test was not needed for deterrence and its poisons would harm, if not kill, millions of innocent people.  

Even though rebuffed by Khrushchev, Sakharov continued to work on this “Tsar Bomb,” seeking a variation that would emit less radiation. Its detonation in late 1961, not long after Khrushchev’s summit with US President John F Kennedy in Vienna, and the erection of the Berlin Wall, broke the tacit Soviet-US-UK moratorium on nuclear testing that had commenced in 1958. 

Mindful of efforts in Czechoslovakia to develop “Socialism with a Human Face,” in 1968, Sakharov drafted a long essay called “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.” It urged the USSR and the United States to converge and blend the most positive features of each system to halt the arms race and save the planet.  

The essay spread widely through underground printing presses, drawing deep criticism from Communist officials. When it appeared in a Dutch newspaper, Soviet censors ordered Sakharov to disown the tract. He refused.  

On July 22, 1968, his “reflections” appeared in The New York Times and soon as a book, with notes by the journalist Harrison Salisbury. That August, I took a copy of the NY Times version to the reformers in Prague. They knew the contents from Voice of America and the BBC, but were glad to have a printed text. 

As Sakharov feared, the Brezhnev regime invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, and installed a compliant government. Sakharov lost his security clearance and was compelled to leave the Installation where he had worked for many years. He continued to publish more “reflections” and began to campaign for human rights. 

In 1970, the US Embassy in Seoul asked me to help reduce tensions between the two Koreas. I lectured and wrote about Sakharov — a humanist cocooned in a dictatorship who had ideas on the ways a Communist regime could cooperate with liberal capitalism. Later, I expanded that essay in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and in 1975, I added my nomination to those proposing Sakharov for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

For a dozen years, Sakharov embraced open dissent. He stood vigil outside closed courtrooms, wrote appeals for more than 200 prisoners, and continued to write about the need for democracy.  

After he condemned the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the man who had received more honors and medals than any other Soviet citizen was stripped of them all and, with Yelena, was placed under house arrest in the town of Gorky. Not until 1986, a year after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, were they allowed to return to Moscow. 

After Sakharov’s death in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, I worked with Yelena’s daughter Tatiana Yankelevich to establish a Sakharov archive at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, which was later transferred to Harvard. It consisted mainly of KGB reports on Sakharov.  

A Sakharov center and museum was established in Moscow in 1996 under Boris Yeltsin, but in 2023, under Putin, a court ordered its closure, claiming it had illegally hosted exhibitions and conferences.   

Sakharov is now far from the consciousness of most Russians, but his voice couldn’t be more vital. A 2025 survey of 1,617 Russians by the Levada Center asked respondents to name the “most outstanding individuals of all time and peoples,” and the top three were Stalin, Putin, and Lenin. Sakharov’s life was a rejection of the authoritarianism of all three, and a reminder that Russia has more to offer the world than dictatorial experimentation. 

Despite apparently having been forgotten by his own people, Sakharov’s Nobel lecture should resonate everywhere. 

“We should not minimize our sacred endeavors in this world where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for the moment from nothingness into material existence,” he wrote. “We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.” 

Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims (Washington, DC: Westphalia Press, 2023).     

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.

The post Sakharov — A Russian Hero for Our Time appeared first on CEPA.