Andrei Sakharov — physicist/dissident with roots in the USSR
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was born in Moscow on 21 May 1921. His father, Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, taught physics at Moscow schools and institutes, wrote textbooks and popular science, and was an amateur pianist. Sakharov lived and worked all his life in the Soviet Union.
He entered the physics faculty of Moscow State University in 1938. In 1945 he began graduate work at the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences (FIAN) under Igor Tamm, and in 1948 he was drawn into the work on a thermonuclear weapon. From 1950 he worked at the secret installation at Sarov, where he played a key role in developing the first Soviet hydrogen bomb; the first device was tested on 12 August 1953, and that year, at thirty-two, he was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences.
From the late 1950s he argued against atmospheric nuclear testing. In 1968 he wrote the essay Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, which circulated in samizdat and was published abroad; he was then barred from weapons research and returned to FIAN to work on fundamental physics and cosmology. In 1971 he married the paediatrician Yelena Bonner; his first wife, Klavdia Vikhireva, had died in 1969.
In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Soviet citizen to receive it. He was refused permission to travel to Oslo, and Bonner delivered his Nobel lecture, Peace, Progress, and Human Rights. In January 1980, after he criticised the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, he was detained in Moscow, stripped of his state awards and sent without trial to Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, where he lived under surveillance; Bonner was later sentenced to join him there.
In December 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev telephoned him in Gorky and invited him back to Moscow. In March 1989 he was elected to the new Congress of People's Deputies, in one of the seats reserved for the Academy of Sciences, and was named to the commission drafting a new constitution.
He died in Moscow on 14 December 1989, aged sixty-eight, and is buried in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery. Since 1988 the European Parliament has awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in his name.
"Sakharov never emigrated; exiled internally to Gorky by Soviet authorities from 1980 to 1986."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Moscow
Born in Moscow in 1921, he lived and worked in the USSR all his life. His father, Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, was a physics professor at the Second Moscow State University.
Born in Moscow on 21 May 1921; his father was a physics professor and his mother the daughter of a Tsarist general.
Moscow. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
""You cannot separate peace from freedom, because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.""