Word: sovietism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Witnesses were shocked at how dramatically Sakharov had aged lately, as he made his faltering way to the podium around 6 p.m. Still, there was nothing irresolute about his short impassioned speech. He defended his earlier, controversial call for a nationwide strike to end the Communists' institutionalized monopoly of Soviet political life. "We cannot take responsibility for what the party is doing," he declared. "It's leading the country into a crisis by dragging its feet on perestroika...
...after Sakharov repeatedly denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he was placed under house arrest. He and his wife Elena Bonner were held in confinement by KGB guards 24 hours a day in a small apartment in Gorky, 261 miles east of Moscow. There both became increasingly incapacitated by heart disease. Word reached Moscow's dissident community that Bonner's lips and fingernails had turned blue and that Sakharov could hardly take a few steps without being winded. When the Soviets denied Bonner permission to go abroad for an open-heart operation, her husband went on a hunger strike...
...downtrodden and the persecuted in his country. It was in this role that he incurred the deadly wrath of Brezhnev and the KGB. In the decade before Sakharov's banishment to Gorky, his two-room apartment was a haven for men and women who had fallen afoul of Soviet totalitarianism. Sitting at his enamel-top kitchen table, drinking apple-flavored tea, he dispensed precious counsel and gifts of money to an endless stream of visitors in trouble...
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...