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84-461: It was founded in 1982, inspired in part by an appeal from Dr. Andrei Sakharov for the creation of a "unified international committee to defend all Helsinki Watch Group members", and also to co-ordinate their work. The IHF was founded in response, both to provide an organization which the various independent Helsinki committees could use to support each other, as well as provide an international body to strengthen their work. The original members were

168-483: A church , stealing a horse , or, as before, with two prior "strikes"), as well as arson and treason . The trend to increase the number of capital crimes continued: in 1649, this list included 63 crimes, a figure that nearly doubled during the reign of Tsar Peter I (Peter the Great). The methods of execution were extremely cruel by modern standards and included drowning , burying alive , and forcing liquid metal into

252-434: A collapse and an anticollapse , which are an alternative to the couple black hole and white hole in the wormhole model. Sakharov also proposed the idea of induced gravity as an alternative theory of quantum gravity . Since the late 1950s Sakharov had become concerned about the moral and political implications of his work. Politically active during the 1960s, Sakharov was against nuclear proliferation . Pushing for

336-558: A controlled nuclear fusion reactor, the tokamak , which is still the basis for the majority of work in the area. Sakharov, in association with Tamm, proposed confining extremely hot ionized plasma by torus shaped magnetic fields for controlling thermonuclear fusion that led to the development of the tokamak device. In 1951 he invented and tested the first explosively pumped flux compression generators , compressing magnetic fields by explosives . He called these devices MK (for MagnetoKumulative ) generators. The radial MK-1 produced

420-518: A decline from 68 percent in 2002 and 61 percent in 2012. This survey found that the death penalty now has a higher approval rating in urban areas (77 percent in Moscow for example), with men and among the elderly. According to the Levada Center figures, the proportion of Russians seeking abolition of the death penalty was 12 percent in 2002, 10 percent in 2012 and 11 percent in 2013. According to

504-751: A key issue in US–Soviet relations. In a secret detailed letter to the Soviet leadership of July 21, 1967, Sakharov explained the need to "take the Americans at their word" and accept their proposal for a "bilateral rejection by the USA and the Soviet Union of the development of antiballistic missile defense" because an arms race in the new technology would otherwise increase the likelihood of nuclear war. He also asked permission to publish his manuscript, which accompanied

588-422: A large superconductor solenoid to magnetically compress and focus underground nuclear explosions into a shaped charge effect. He theorized this could focus 10 protons per second on a 1 mm surface. After 1965 Sakharov returned to fundamental science and began working on particle physics and physical cosmology . He tried to explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe; in that regard, he

672-528: A law that would abolish capital punishment, as well as a recommendation to reduce the number of capital crimes and require the authorities to treat those on death row humanely. Although the order may be read as not legally abolishing capital punishment, this was eventually the practical effect, and it was accepted as such by the Council of Europe as Russia was granted membership in the organization. However, since executions continued in 1996 after Russia signed

756-567: A list of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in the Soviet Union and stated that he shared the prize with them. By 1976, the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov , was prepared to call Sakharov "Domestic Enemy Number One" before a group of KGB officers. Sakharov was arrested on 22 January 1980, following his public protests against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, and

840-474: A member of the Council. Whether the moratorium has happened as a matter of legal right is controversial. On 16 May 1996, President Boris Yeltsin issued a decree "for the stepwise reduction in the application of capital punishment in conjunction with Russia's entry into the Council of Europe ", which is widely cited as de facto establishing such a moratorium. The decree called on the legislature to prepare

924-496: A member of the academy, publicly spoke out against full membership for Nuzhdin and held him responsible for "the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists." In the end, Nuzhdin was not elected, but the episode prompted Nikita Khrushchev to order the KGB to gather compromising material on Sakharov. The major turn in Sakharov's political evolution came in 1967, when anti-ballistic missile defense became

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1008-411: A normal one. Yet our state is similar to a cancer cell – with its messianism and expansionism, its totalitarian suppression of dissent, the authoritarian structure of power, with a total absence of public control in the most important decisions in domestic and foreign policy, a closed society that does not inform its citizens of anything substantial, closed to the outside world, without freedom of travel or

1092-455: A pulsed magnetic field of 25 megagauss (2500 teslas ). The resulting helical MK-2 generated 1000 million amperes in 1953. Sakharov then tested a MK-driven "plasma cannon" where a small aluminum ring was vaporized by huge eddy currents into a stable, self-confined toroidal plasmoid and was accelerated to 100 km/s. Sakharov later suggested replacing the copper coil in MK generators with

1176-554: A secondary fission device inside the fusion cylinder to assist with the compression of the fusion fuel and generate neutrons to convert some of the lithium to tritium, producing a mixture of deuterium and tritium. Sakharov's idea was first tested as RDS-37 in 1955. A larger variation of the same design which Sakharov worked on was the 50 Mt Tsar Bomba of October 1961, which was the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated. Sakharov saw "striking parallels" between his fate and those of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller in

1260-681: A senior pathologist present at the autopsy, it is most likely that Sakharov died of an arrhythmia consequent to dilated cardiomyopathy at the age of 68. He was interred in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. Capital punishment in Russia Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Russia but is not used due to a moratorium and no death sentences or executions have been carried out since 2 August 1996 . Russia has had an implicit moratorium in place since one

1344-611: A son. Klavdia would later die in 1969. In 1945, he joined the Theoretical Department of Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences under Igor Tamm in Moscow. In 1947, Sakharov was successful in defending his thesis for the Doctor of Sciences (lit. Doktor Nauk ), which covered the topic of nuclear transmutation . After World War II , he researched cosmic rays . In mid-1948 he participated in

1428-630: A universe with a positive curvature and a zero cosmological constant, and a universe with a negative curvature and a slightly negative cosmological constant. Those last two models feature what Sakharov calls a reversal of the time arrow, which can be summarized as follows: He considers times t > 0 after the initial Big Bang singularity at t = 0 (which he calls "Friedman singularity" and denotes Φ) as well as times t < 0 before that singularity. He then assumes that entropy increases when time increases for t > 0 as well as when time decreases for t < 0, which constitutes his reversal of time. Then he considers

1512-652: A widely recognized and open dissident in Moscow. He stood vigil outside closed courtrooms, wrote appeals on behalf of more than 200 individual prisoners, and continued to write essays about the need for democratization. In 1970, Sakharov was among the three founding members of the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR , along with Valery Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov . The Committee wrote appeals, collected signatures for petitions and succeeded in affiliating with several international human rights organizations. Its work

1596-441: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Andrei Sakharov Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov ( Russian : Андре́й Дми́триевич Са́харов ; 21 May 1921 – 14 December 1989) was a Soviet physicist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate , which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world. Although he spent his career in physics in the Soviet program of nuclear weapons , overseeing

1680-558: The Bolsheviks as part of their Red Terror . Over the next several decades, the death penalty was alternately permitted and prohibited, sometimes in very quick succession. The list of capital crimes likewise underwent several changes. Under the rule of Joseph Stalin , many were executed during the Great Purge in the 1930s. Many of the death sentences were pronounced by a specially appointed three-person commission of officials,

1764-570: The Constitutional Court of Russia issued a temporary stay on any executions for a rather technical reason, but granting the moratorium an unquestionable legal status for the first time. According to the Constitution, as quoted above, a death sentence may be pronounced only by a jury trial, which was not yet implemented in some regions of the country. The court found that such disparity makes death sentences illegal in any part of

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1848-525: The NKVD troika . The exact number of executions is debated, with archival research suggesting it to be between 700,000 and 800,000, whereas an official report to Nikita Khrushchev from 1954 cites 642,980 death penalty sentences. Another report in 1956 cites 688,503 death penalty sentences, of which 681,692 were carried out during the years of 1937-1938 . (see also Joseph Stalin § Death toll and allegations of genocide ). The verdict of capital punishment in

1932-488: The Russian Constitution states that everyone has the right to life, and that "until its abolition, the death penalty may only be passed for the most serious crimes against human life." Additionally, all such sentences require jury trial . The inclusion of the abolition wording has been interpreted by some as a requirement for capital punishment to be abolished in the future. The current Penal Code permits

2016-927: The Russian Orthodox Church , although his father was a non-believer. When Andrei was about thirteen, he realized that he did not believe in God. However, despite being an atheist , he did believe in a "guiding principle" that transcends the physical laws. After schooling, Sakharov studied physics at the Moscow State University in 1938 and, following evacuation in 1941 during the Eastern Front with Germany , he graduated in Aşgabat in Turkmenistan . In 1943, he married Klavdia Alekseyevna Vikhireva, with whom he raised two daughters and

2100-616: The Sakharov Prize was established and is awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was born in Moscow on 21 May 1921, to a Russian family. His father, Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, was a physics professor at the Second Moscow State University and an amateur pianist. His grandfather, Ivan,

2184-489: The Soviet atomic bomb project under Igor Kurchatov and Igor Tamm . Sakharov's study group at FIAN in 1948 came up with a second concept in August–September 1948. Adding a shell of natural, unenriched uranium around the deuterium would increase the deuterium concentration at the uranium-deuterium boundary and the overall yield of the device, because the natural uranium would capture neutrons and itself fission as part of

2268-614: The Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR . At least one woman was executed during this time, Antonina Makarova , on 11 August 1979. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation carried out the death penalty intermittently, with up to 10 or so officially a year. In 1996, pending Russia's entry into the Council of Europe , a moratorium was placed on the death penalty, which is still in place as of 2024. Article 20 of

2352-539: The balance of nuclear terror  ... may have helped to prevent one. But I am not at all sure of this; back then, in those long-gone years, the question didn't even arise. What most troubles me now is the instability of the balance, the extreme peril of the current situation, the appalling waste of the arms race ... Each of us has a responsibility to think about this in global terms, with tolerance, trust, and candor, free from ideological dogmatism, parochial interests, or national egotism." In 1950 he proposed an idea for

2436-719: The H-bomb for the United States since "all steps by the Americans of a temporary or permanent rejection of developing thermonuclear weapons would have been seen either as a clever feint, or as the manifestation of stupidity. In both cases, the reaction would have been the same – avoid the trap and immediately take advantage of the enemy's stupidity." Sakharov never felt that by creating nuclear weapons he had "known sin", in Oppenheimer's expression. He later wrote: After more than forty years, we have had no third world war , and

2520-576: The Helsinki Federation for Human Rights to support his mistress. He channeled money from human rights projects to his bank account, and used the organization's ATM card for personal purposes which went unnoticed for six years. After its closure, IHF's complete archives were transferred to the Blinken Open Society Archives which acts as the organisation's official repository. This human rights -related article

2604-554: The IHF acted as a clearing house for this information, disseminating it to governments, inter-governmental organizations, the press and the public at large. Karl zu Schwarzenberg served as chairman of the federation from 1984 to 1991. The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights was awarded the European Human Rights Prize in 1989, jointly with Lech Wałęsa . In January 2008, an Austrian court convicted

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2688-557: The IHF's former financial manager, the Austrian Rainer Tannenberger, of the embezzlement of €1.2 million. Tannenberger was sentenced to three years in prison, with two of them suspended. The IHF's resulting insolvency had driven it to file for bankruptcy in Austria, its country of registration, and to be dissolved on 27 November 2007. An IHR accountant was sentenced to three years for embezzling $ 1.8 million from

2772-693: The Kremlin's willingness to allow freer emigration for Soviet Jews. In 1972, Sakharov became the target of sustained pressure from his fellow scientists in the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Soviet press. The writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to his defence. In 1973 and 1974, the Soviet media campaign continued, targeting both Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn for their pro-Western, anti-socialist positions. Sakharov later described that it took "years" for him to "understand how much substitution, deceit, and lack of correspondence with reality there was" in

2856-432: The Soviet Union was called the "Supreme Measure of Punishment" (Vysshaya Mera Nakazaniya, VMN). Verdicts under Article 58 (counter-revolutionary activity) often ended with a sentence that was abbreviated as VMN, and usually followed by executions through shooting, although other frequent verdicts were 10-year and 25-year (dubbed "Сталинский четвертак" Stalinskiy chetvertak , "Stalin's Quarter") sentences. The death penalty

2940-476: The Soviet ideals. "At first I thought, despite everything that I saw with my own eyes, that the Soviet State was a breakthrough into the future, a kind of prototype for all countries". Then he came, in his words, to "the theory of symmetry: all governments and regimes to a first approximation are bad, all peoples are oppressed, and all are threatened by common dangers.": ...symmetry between a cancer cell and

3024-411: The Soviet juridical system, depending on the level of the court that first sentenced the convict to death. Shooting was the only legal means of execution, though the exact procedure has never been codified. Unlike most other countries, the execution did not involve any official ceremony: the convict was often given no warning and taken by surprise to eliminate fear, suffering, and resistance. Where warning

3108-615: The UN and the UK condemned the verdict, supporting this claim. The men were released following a prisoner exchange. And the Donetsk People's Republic later joined Russia in September 2022 removing the death penalty sentence from their criminal code. A survey conducted by the same company in 2012 (on a sample of 3,000) found that 62 percent of the respondents favored a return to the use of

3192-572: The US. Sakharov believed that in this "tragic confrontation of two outstanding people", both deserved respect, because "each of them was certain he had right on his side and was morally obligated to go to the end in the name of truth." While Sakharov strongly disagreed with Teller over nuclear testing in the atmosphere and the Strategic Defense Initiative , he believed that American academics had been unfair to Teller's resolve to get

3276-424: The United States. Before his Third Idea , Sakharov tried a "layer cake" of alternating layers of fission and fusion fuel. The results were disappointing, yielding no more than a typical fission bomb. However the design was seen to be worth pursuing because deuterium is abundant and uranium is scarce, and he had no idea how powerful the US design was. Sakharov realised that in order to cause the explosion of one side of

3360-418: The absolute requirements of the Council of Europe for all members is the abolition of capital punishment. However, the council has accepted temporary moratoria. Consistent with this, on 25 January 1996, the Council required Russia to implement a moratorium immediately and fully abolish capital punishment within three years to approve its bid for inclusion in the organization. In a month, Russia agreed and became

3444-550: The agreement, the council was not satisfied and presented Russia with several ultimatums, threatening to expel the country if capital punishment continued to be carried out. In response, several more laws and orders were enacted, and Russia has not executed anyone since Golovkin's execution in August 1996. After the moratorium was announced and the maximum sentence was officially increased from 25 years to life in prison, multiple death row inmates committed suicide. On 2 February 1999,

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3528-458: The anti-ballistic missile defense as a major threat of world nuclear war. After the essay was circulated in samizdat and then published outside the Soviet Union, Sakharov was banned from conducting any military-related research and returned to FIAN to study fundamental theoretical physics. For 12 years, until his exile to Gorky ( Nizhny Novgorod ) in January 1980, Sakharov assumed the role of

3612-411: The case when the universe at t < 0 is the image of the universe at t > 0 under CPT symmetry but also the case when it is not so: the universe has a non-zero CPT charge at t = 0 in this case. Sakharov considers a variant of this model where the reversal of the time arrow occurs at a point of maximum entropy instead of happening at the singularity. In those models there is no dynamic interaction between

3696-499: The country to completely ban capital punishment. Medieval Russia practiced the death penalty extensively. One of the first legal documents resembling a modern penal code was enacted in 1398, which mentioned a single capital crime : a theft performed after two prior convictions (an early precursor to the current three-strikes laws existing in several U.S. states ). The Pskov Code of 1497 extends this list significantly, mentioning three specialized theft instances (those committed in

3780-506: The country, even those that do have the process of trial by jury implemented. According to the ruling, no death sentence may be passed until all regions of the country have jury trials. In April 2013, President Vladimir Putin said that lifting the moratorium was inadvisable. However, when Russia was suspended from the Council of Europe in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine , and subsequently announced its intention to withdraw from

3864-451: The death penalty for five crimes: No crime has a mandatory death sentence; each of the five sections mentioned above also permits life imprisonment , as well as a prison sentence of 8 to 30 years. Males under the age of 18 or over the age of 60 at the time of commission, along with all females, are ineligible for capital punishment. The Penal Execution Code specifies that the execution is to be carried out "privately by shooting". One of

3948-481: The death penalty, and 21 percent still supported the moratorium. In this survey, five percent of the respondents supported the abolition of the death penalty, and 66 percent supported the death penalty as a valid punishment. According to a 2013 survey by the Levada Center , 54 percent of the respondents favored an equal (38 percent) or greater (16 percent) use of the death penalty as before the 1996 moratorium,

4032-550: The death penalty, while 39% were against. After two terrorists were executed in Belarus in 2012 for their role in the 2011 Minsk Metro bombing , the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that he urged all European countries to join the moratorium, including Belarus. However, he said that it is an internal affair of each state, and that, despite condemning the execution, Russia still

4116-661: The death penalty. The Russian media and the court claimed that Aslin had confessed to "having undergone drilling aimed at carrying out terrorist acts" and that Pinner is recognised in the UK as a mercenary for partaking in the wars in Iraq and Syria . The men have said they were serving in the Ukrainian Marines, making them active-duty soldiers who should be protected by the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war;

4200-462: The development of thermonuclear weapons, Sakharov also did fundamental work in understanding particle physics, magnetism, and physical cosmology. Sakharov is mostly known for his political activism for individual freedom , human rights , civil liberties and reforms in the Soviet Union , for which he was deemed a dissident and faced persecution from the Soviet establishment. In his memory,

4284-540: The end of atmospheric tests, he played a role in the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty , signed in Moscow. Sakharov was also involved in an event with political consequences in 1964, when the Soviet Academy of Sciences nominated for full membership Nikolai Nuzhdin, a follower of Trofim Lysenko (initiator of the Stalin-supported anti-genetics campaign Lysenkoism ). Contrary to normal practice, Sakharov,

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4368-521: The exchange of information. Sakharov's ideas on social development led him to put forward the principle of human rights as a new basis of all politics. In his works, he declared that "the principle ' what is not prohibited is allowed ' should be understood literally", and defied what he saw as unwritten ideological rules imposed by the Communist Party on the society in spite of a democratic Soviet Constitution (1936): I am no volunteer priest of

4452-473: The fuel to symmetrically compress the fusion fuel, a mirror could be used to reflect the radiation. The details had not been officially declassified in Russia when Sakharov was writing his memoirs, but in the Teller–Ulam design, soft X-rays emitted by the fission bomb were focused onto a cylinder of lithium deuteride to compress it symmetrically. This is called radiation implosion . The Teller–Ulam design also had

4536-508: The idea, but simply a man with an unusual fate. I am against all kinds of self-immolation (for myself and for others, including the people closest to me). In a letter written from exile, he cheered up a fellow physicist and free market advocate with the words: "Fortunately, the future is unpredictable and also – because of quantum effects – uncertain." For Sakharov, the indeterminacy of the future supported his belief that he could and should take personal responsibility for it. In 1973, Sakharov

4620-750: The independent Helsinki committees of Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United States; an international secretariat was established in Vienna. The secretariat supported and provided liaison member Helsinki committees and associated human rights groups, and represented them at the international political level. At the time IHF was dissolved, it had forty-six member committees. The IHF also had direct links with individuals and groups supporting human rights in countries where no Helsinki committees exist. In addition to gathering and analyzing information on human rights conditions in OSCE countries,

4704-536: The issue of Karabakh is a matter of ambition, for the Armenians of Karabakh, it is a matter of life and death". Soon after 9 p.m. on 14 December 1989, Sakharov went to his study to take a nap before preparing an important speech he was to deliver the next day in the Congress. His wife went to wake him at 11 p.m. as he had requested but she found Sakharov dead on the floor. According to the notes of Yakov Rapoport,

4788-694: The letter, in a newspaper to explain the dangers posed by that kind of defense. The government ignored his letter and refused to let him initiate a public discussion of ABMs in the Soviet press. Since 1967, after the Six Day War and the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict , he actively supported Israel , as he reported more than once in the press, and also maintained friendly relations with refuseniks who later made aliyah . In May 1968, Sakharov completed an essay, "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom". He described

4872-516: The matter to be both serious and strong came from Catherine II ( Catherine the Great ), whose liberal views were consistent with her acceptance of the Enlightenment . In her Nakaz of 1767, the empress expressed disdain for the death penalty, considering it to be improper, adding: "In the usual state of the society, the death penalty is neither useful nor needed." However, an explicit exception

4956-729: The organisation, former President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev endorsed restoring the death penalty in Russia. Russia was eventually expelled from the Council of Europe in March 2022. Following the Crocus City Hall attack in March 2024, many senior members of United Russia called for the return of the death penalty in Russia. On 9 June 2022, the Supreme Court of the Donetsk People's Republic convicted Aiden Aslin , Shaun Pinner (both British), and Brahim Saadoune ( Moroccan ) as mercenaries and sentenced them to

5040-472: The other" at the instant ''t'' = 0 when the density is infinite, and decay with an excess of quarks when ''t'' > 0, realizing total CPT symmetry of the universe. All the phenomena at t < 0 are assumed in this hypothesis to be CPT reflections of the phenomena at t > 0. His legacy in this domain are the famous conditions named after him: Baryon number violation, C-symmetry and CP-symmetry violation, and interactions out of thermal equilibrium. Sakharov

5124-562: The policies of perestroika and glasnost , called Sakharov to tell him that he and his wife could return to Moscow. In 1988, Sakharov was given the International Humanist Award by the International Humanist and Ethical Union . He helped to initiate the first independent legal political organizations and became prominent in the Soviet Union's growing political opposition. In March 1989, Sakharov

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5208-493: The same source, the proportion of Russians approving of the moratorium increased from 12 percent in 2002 to 23 percent in 2013. A 2019 Levada Center poll found the number of Russians who support the death penalty’s return had climbed to nearly half, with 49% of Russian respondents saying they would like to see the return of the death penalty, an increase from 44% in 2017. 19% said the death penalty should be abolished. A 2024 poll found that 53% of Russians in favour of restoring

5292-466: The thermonuclear reaction. This idea of a layered fission-fusion-fission bomb led Sakharov to call it the sloika , or layered cake. The first Soviet atomic device was tested on August 29, 1949. After moving to Sarov in 1950, Sakharov played a key role in the development of the first megaton-range Soviet hydrogen bomb using a design known as Sakharov's Third Idea in Russia and the Teller–Ulam design in

5376-466: The throat. Elizabeth (reigned 1741–1762) did not share her father Peter's views on the death penalty, and officially suspended it in 1745, effectively enacting a moratorium. This lasted for 11 years, at which point the death penalty was permitted again, after considerable opposition to the moratorium from both the nobility and, in part, from the Empress herself. Perhaps the first public statement on

5460-467: The times after Peter the Great , hanging for military men and shooting for civilians became the default means of execution, though certain types of non-lethal corporal punishment , such as lashing or caning , could result in the convict's death. In the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia , convicts awaited execution for around 9–18 months since the first sentence. That was the time typically needed for two or three appeals to be processed through

5544-558: The universe at t < 0 and t > 0. In his first model the two universes did not interact, except via local matter accumulation whose density and pressure become high enough to connect the two sheets through a bridge without spacetime between them, but with a continuity of geodesics beyond the Schwarzschild radius with no singularity , allowing an exchange of matter between the two conjugated sheets, based on an idea after Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov . Novikov called such singularities

5628-550: Was a lawyer in the former Russian Empire who had displayed respect for social awareness and humanitarian principles (including advocating the abolition of capital punishment ). Sakharov's mother, Yekaterina Alekseevna Sofiano, was a daughter of Aleksey Semenovich Sofiano, a general in the Tsarist Russian Army with Greek heritage. Sakharov's parents and paternal grandmother, Maria Petrovna, largely shaped his personality; his mother and grandmother were members of

5712-642: Was a major supporter of the war on terror. Historically, various types of capital punishment were used in Russia, such as hanging , breaking wheel , burning , beheading , flagellation by knout until death, etc. During the times of Ivan the Terrible , capital punishment often took exotic and torturous forms, impalement being one of its most common types. Certain crimes incurred specific forms of capital punishment, e.g. coin counterfeiters were executed by pouring molten lead into their throats, while certain religious crimes were punishable by burning alive. In

5796-543: Was again abolished on 26 May 1947, the strictest sentence becoming 25 years' imprisonment before it was restored on 12 May 1950: first for treason and espionage , and then for aggravated murder . According to Western estimates, in the early 1980s Soviet courts passed around 2,000 death sentences every year, of which two-thirds were commuted to prison terms. According to the GARF archives database, between 1978 and 1985 there were 3,058 death sentences that had been appealed to

5880-429: Was also interested in explaining why the curvature of the universe is so small. This led him to consider cyclic models, where the universe oscillates between contraction and expansion phases. In those models, after a certain number of cycles the curvature naturally becomes infinite even if it had not started this way: Sakharov considered three starting points, a flat universe with a slightly negative cosmological constant,

5964-548: Was among the reasons for the legislature's refusal to approve a new version of the Penal Code. Just one year later, the Decembrist revolt failed, and a court sentenced 36 of the rebels to death. Nicholas I's decision to commute all but five of the sentences was highly unusual for the time, especially taking into account that revolts against the monarchy had almost universally resulted in an automatic death sentence, and

6048-472: Was detained, and Sakharov began a hunger strike , demanding permission for his wife to travel to the United States for heart surgery. He was forcibly hospitalized and force-fed . He was held in isolation for four months. In August 1984, Bonner was sentenced by a court to five years of exile in Gorky. In April 1985, Sakharov started a new hunger strike for his wife to travel abroad for medical treatment. He again

6132-615: Was elected to the new parliament, the All-Union Congress of People's Deputies and co-led the democratic opposition, the Inter-Regional Deputies Group . In November the head of the KGB reported to Gorbachev on Sakharov's encouragement and support for the coal miners' strike in Vorkuta. In December 1988, Sakharov visited Armenia and Azerbaijan on a fact-finding mission. He concluded, "For Azerbaijan

6216-411: Was established by President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, and explicitly established by the Constitutional Court of Russia in 1999 and reaffirmed in 2009. In pre- Tsarist medieval Russia, capital punishment was relatively rare and was even banned in many, if not most, principalities . The Law of Yaroslavl (c. 1017) put restrictions on what crimes warranted execution. Later, the law was amended in much of

6300-471: Was given, it was usually just a few minutes. The process was usually carried out by a single executioner, usage of firing squads being limited to wartime executions. The most common method was to make the convict walk into a dead-end room and shoot him from behind in the back of the head with a handgun . In some cases, the convict could be forced down on his knees. Some prisons were rumored to have specially designed rooms with fire slits. Another method

6384-720: Was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize , and in 1974, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca . Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him "a spokesman for the conscience of mankind". In the words of the Nobel Committee's citation: "In a convincing manner Sakharov has emphasised that Man's inviolable rights provide the only safe foundation for genuine and enduring international cooperation." Sakharov

6468-591: Was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to collect the prize. His wife, Yelena Bonner , read his speech at the ceremony in Oslo , Norway. On the day the prize was awarded, Sakharov was in Vilnius , where the human rights activist Sergei Kovalev was being tried. In his Nobel lecture, "Peace, Progress, Human Rights", Sakharov called for an end to the arms race, greater respect for the environment, international cooperation, and universal respect for human rights. He included

6552-737: Was officially outlawed on March 12, 1917, following the February Revolution and the establishment of the Russian Republic . On May 12, 1917, the death penalty became applicable to soldiers at the front. The Soviet government confirmed the abolition almost immediately after the October Revolution but restored it soon after. Most notably, Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan was executed on 4 September 1918 for her attempt to assassinate Lenin six days earlier. Hangings and shootings were very extensively employed by

6636-438: Was perhaps due to society's changing views of the death penalty. By the late 1890s, capital punishment for murder was virtually never carried out, but substituted with 10 to 15 years imprisonment with hard labor, although it still was carried out for treason (for example, Alexander Ulyanov was hanged in 1887). However, in 1910, capital punishment was reintroduced and expanded, although still very seldom used. The death penalty

6720-554: Was sent to the city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod , a city that was off limits to foreigners. Between 1980 and 1986, Sakharov was kept under Soviet police surveillance. In his memoirs, he mentioned that their apartment in Gorky was repeatedly subjected to searches and heists. Sakharov was named the 1980 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association . In May 1984, Sakharov's wife, Yelena Bonner ,

6804-400: Was still allowed for the case of someone who, even while convicted and incarcerated, "still has the means and the might to ignite public unrest". This specific exception applied to mutineers of Pugachev's Rebellion in 1775. Consistent with Catherine's stance, the next several decades marked a shift in public perception against the death penalty. In 1824, the very existence of such a punishment

6888-628: Was taken to a hospital and force-fed. In August, the Politburo discussed what to do about Sakharov. He remained in the hospital until October 1985, when his wife was allowed to travel to the United States. She had heart surgery in the United States and returned to Gorky in June 1986. In December 1985, the European Parliament established the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought , to be given annually for outstanding contributions to human rights. On 19 December 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev , who had initiated

6972-513: Was the first to give a theoretical motivation for proton decay . Proton decay was suggested by Wigner in 1949 and 1952. Proton decay experiments had been performed since 1954 already. Sakharov was the first to consider CPT-symmetric events occurring before the Big Bang : We can visualize that neutral spinless maximons (or photons) are produced at ''t'' < 0 from contracting matter having an excess of antiquarks, that they pass "one through

7056-488: Was the subject of many KGB reports and brought Sakharov under increasing pressure from the government. Sakharov married a fellow human rights activist, Yelena Bonner , in 1972. By 1973, Sakharov was meeting regularly with Western correspondents and holding press conferences in his apartment. He appealed to the US Congress to approve the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment to a trade bill, which coupled trade tariffs to

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