Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov

At dawn on August 12, 1953, the first Soviet hydrogen bomb, RDS-6s, flashed over the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. The core idea of the so-called "sloika" (layer cake) design, alternating fission material and fusion fuel, came from a thirty-two-year-old physicist, Andrei Sakharov. He had worked on thermonuclear theory since joining Igor Tamm's group in 1948, and shortly after the test he was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences, among the youngest in its history.

In an era when the United States had displayed its nuclear monopoly at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet hydrogen bomb ended the age of one-sided nuclear threat and established strategic balance. Sakharov himself understood the work at the time as labor in defense of peace, and he remained at the center of design through the 1955 test of the two-stage thermonuclear device RDS-37. The state made him a Hero of Socialist Labour three times.

Yet those very tests led him elsewhere. In the late 1950s he published calculations showing that radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing inflicted cumulative, no-threshold harm on the world's population, and in 1961 he clashed openly with Khrushchev over the resumption of giant test explosions. The 1963 Moscow treaty banning tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space owed something to the persistent objections of Sakharov, a man who had conducted the tests himself. The hands that built the weapon helped bind it.

Sakharov's turn was not an overnight conversion but a gradual passage of twenty years. From the late 1950s he calculated that fallout from atmospheric tests would take hundreds of thousands of lives, and pressed the leadership to halt them. In 1961 he opposed the giant hydrogen-bomb test to Khrushchev's face and was publicly rebuked. His stubborn persuasion is credited with a part in the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

In 1968 he wrote Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, arguing that before the danger of nuclear war the two systems must converge, and that without intellectual freedom no progress was possible. When the samizdat text was printed in full by the New York Times, the authorities barred him from all secret work. The scientist at the summit of privilege walked into the middle of the human-rights movement.

In 1970 he co-founded the Human Rights Committee and protested by appearing at the trials of political prisoners. In 1975 he became the first Soviet citizen to win the Nobel Peace Prize; forbidden to travel, he was represented by his wife Yelena Bonner, who read the lecture in his stead. The name the conscience of the nation attached itself to him in these years.

When Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in December 1979, Sakharov condemned the invasion publicly to the foreign press. In January he was banished, by administrative measure without trial, to Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), a city closed to foreigners. Through seven years of exile he lived under the landing guard, the wiretaps and the theft of his manuscripts, and went on hunger strike three times, enduring force-feeding, to win treatment abroad for his wife Bonner. His release meanwhile became a touchstone of Soviet-American relations in the West.

One day in December 1986, the watchers installed a telephone in his apartment. The voice on the line the next day was Gorbachev's, telling him to return to Moscow and resume his patriotic work. That single call was the most dramatic signal at home and abroad that glasnost was not propaganda.

Sakharov accepted the return not as a pardon but as a vindication of conviction, and spent his remaining three years demanding the release of all political prisoners and the radicalisation of reform. To work with the power that had once confined him while never ceasing to criticise it: that was the position the late Sakharov chose.

In 1968 Sakharov released his essay "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" in samizdat, and that July the New York Times printed it in full. Facing the risk of mutual annihilation, he argued, capitalism and socialism should converge, each absorbing the other's strengths. He was immediately removed from weapons work, co-founded the Human Rights Committee in 1970, and entered the dissident path. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 but was not allowed to travel, so his wife Yelena Bonner accepted it; in January 1980, immediately after he publicly condemned the intervention in Afghanistan, he was exiled without trial to the city of Gorky. Seven years of exile ended in December 1986 when Gorbachev personally telephoned and invited him back to Moscow.

In the spring of 1989 he was elected a People's Deputy on the Academy of Sciences slate and mounted the rostrum of the First Congress of People's Deputies again and again. Demanding the repeal of Article 6, which enshrined the party's leading role, and a "Decree on Power", he drew jeers and applause at once; when he spoke on the Afghan war, angry shouting from the hall drowned out his words. He became a co-chairman of the Inter-Regional Deputies Group, laying a cornerstone for legal opposition, and died of heart failure on December 14, 1989, while working on a draft of a new constitution.

This archive records his moral seriousness as it was. He chose conscience over comfortable privilege and fought for individual prisoners by name. At the same time, his political program needs critical assessment. What he envisioned was a convergent society with strong social guarantees, yet the political current his authority helped legitimize ended, after his death, in the dissolution of the USSR and the shock therapy of the 1990s. That outcome, industrial collapse and a plunge in life expectancy, stood in direct contradiction to Sakharov's own humanist vision.