Sakharov Dies: Soviet Dissident and Nuclear Architect

Andrei Sakharov died on December 14, 1989, in Moscow, at sixty-eight. Three years earlier he had been released from seven years of internal exile in Gorky, where the KGB had followed him everywhere and his wife Yelena Bonner had been his sole connection to the outside world. He was the man who designed the Soviet hydrogen bomb. The RDS-37, tested in 1955, was the first true thermonuclear weapon the Soviets deployed, and the Tsar Bomba tested in 1961 remains the most powerful nuclear explosion ever conducted. Then he spent the second half of his life trying to limit what weapons like his could do. His 1968 essay "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" circulated in samizdat and argued that the survival of civilization required convergence between the Soviet and Western systems, nuclear disarmament, and freedom of thought. The Soviet establishment viewed him as a traitor. He was stripped of his security clearances, removed from weapons work, and increasingly harassed as his human rights advocacy intensified. He championed individual prisoners of conscience, opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and called for democratic reforms that the leadership regarded as existential threats. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 while still in the Soviet Union. They did not let him go to Stockholm to collect it. Bonner accepted on his behalf. His exile to Gorky in 1980 was punishment for his public criticism of the Afghanistan war. Gorbachev personally called him to announce the end of his exile in December 1986. He returned to Moscow and was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989. He died of a heart attack in his study three months later, at the moment when the Soviet system he had helped build and then tried to reform was collapsing around him.