Word: sakharovs
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Courage came so naturally to Sakharov that it heartened others. Dressed in a worn suit and bedroom slippers, the tall, perpetually bent-over man with shy eyes displayed a lion's boldness when defying the Kremlin. Mocking his own quixotic ways, he once dubbed himself Andrei the Blessed, an honorific that in Russian connotes a kind of holy innocence. Said computer scientist Valentin Turchin, a fellow dissident who emigrated to the U.S.: "There are two categories of people who have left their imprint on humanity: leaders and saints. Sakharov was in the category of saints." One mournful colleague in Moscow...
...Sakharov emerged from the most improbable of backgrounds as a human rights activist and peace advocate. In the 1940s and 1950s, he lived under security wraps as the Soviet Union's top nuclear scientist, cut off from all normal social contacts and followed at all times by a bodyguard. A theoretical physicist ranking with America's J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, he was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After he helped develop the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, he became one of the country's most decorated...
...late 1950s, Sakharov grew deeply concerned about the dangers of atomic fallout. Several times he attempted to use his prestige to halt Soviet nuclear testing. Recalling Sakharov's personal appeals against the atmospheric explosions, Nikita Khrushchev described the nuclear physicist in his memoirs as a "crystal of morality." When his behind-the-scenes lobbying turned to open criticism of the regime, Sakharov was fired from the nuclear program. "The atomic issue was a natural path into political issues," he explained...
...Sakharov participated in a public demonstration for the first time on Dec. 5, 1966, joining a tiny band of dissidents who had assembled in Moscow's Pushkin Square to call for a new and genuine Soviet constitution. His increasingly open defiance of the government caused his three children by his first wife virtually to disown him. Nonetheless, Sakharov gave them his comfortable Moscow apartment and his dacha when he stripped himself of the luxuries he had acquired as a nuclear physicist. He donated his life savings of $153,000, an astronomical sum by Soviet standards, to cancer research...
...Because Sakharov was one of his nation's most distinguished scientists, his devastating critiques of Soviet policies cut deep. In his books, which were published only in the West, he repeatedly pointed to the failure of Soviet society to fulfill the promise of Communist ideology. Sakharov's writings on domestic affairs irked the leadership almost as much as his criticism of Brezhnev's foreign policy, which he characterized as imperialist and expansionist. His mistrust of Kremlin intentions was so strong that he said in 1983 that it might be best for the U.S. to "spend a few billion dollars...