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97-765: In August 2023, the center was shut down following a ruling by the Moscow City Court, after a request from the Justice Ministry. In 1994, the Public Commission opened the Sakharov Archives in the three-room apartment where Andrei Sakharov lived. The contents of the archive were donated by Yelena Bonner, and include files donated by Russia's Federal Counterintelligence Service. In 1996, the Sakharov Commission opened

194-434: 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

291-575: 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 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,

388-463: A common practice. That technique could be called the "medicalization" of dissidence or psychiatric terror, the now familiar form of repression applied in the Soviet Union to Leonid Plyushch , Pyotr Grigorenko , and many others. Finally, many persons at that time tended to believe that dissidents were abnormal people whose commitment to mental hospitals was quite justified. In the opinion of

485-480: A concern for legality, the rejection of any 'underground' and violent struggle. Throughout the 1960s-1980s, those active in the civil and human rights movement engaged in a variety of activities: The documentation of political repression and rights violations in samizdat (unsanctioned press); individual and collective protest letters and petitions; unsanctioned demonstrations; mutual aid for prisoners of conscience; and, most prominently, civic watch groups appealing to

582-751: 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

679-422: 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

776-506: A letter expressing his support for the latter's stance on human rights. In the wake of Carter's letter to Sakharov, the USSR cautioned against attempts "to interfere' in its affairs under "a thought-up pretext of 'defending human rights.'" Because of Carter's open show of support for Soviet dissidents, the KGB was able to link dissent with American imperialism through suggesting that such protest

873-567: 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

970-496: 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

1067-557: 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 the US. Sakharov believed that in this "tragic confrontation of two outstanding people", both deserved respect, because "each of them

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1164-411: 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

1261-526: A piece of the Berlin Wall stands in the park belonging to the museum. On August 18, 2023, the Sakharov Center was shut down by a Russian court. The Sakharov Center provided a space for open expression in an increasingly restrictive political climate. In 2003, the Sakharov Center was vandalized after organizing a contemporary art exhibition titled "Caution, Religion!". In 2013, Cossacks stormed

1358-488: A psychiatric hospital. According to Soviet dissidents and Western critics, the KGB had routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing public trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. On the grounds that political dissenters in the Soviet Union were psychotic and deluded, they were locked away in psychiatric hospitals and treated with neuroleptics . Confinement of political dissenters in psychiatric institutions had become

1455-455: 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

1552-467: 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 the thermonuclear reaction. This idea of a layered fission-fusion-fission bomb led Sakharov to call it

1649-557: 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. Soviet dissident Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term dissident

1746-437: A significant role in providing a common language for Soviet dissidents with varying concerns, and became a common cause for social groups in the dissident milieu ranging from activists in the youth subculture to academics such as Andrei Sakharov . Due to the contacts with Western journalists as well as the political focus during détente ( Helsinki Accords ), those active in the human rights movement were among those most visible in

1843-586: A symptom (e.g. "delusion of reformism"), and a diagnosis (e.g. " sluggish schizophrenia "). In the 1950s, Soviet dissidents started leaking criticism to the West by sending documents and statements to foreign diplomatic missions in Moscow . In the 1960s, Soviet dissidents frequently declared that the rights the government of the Soviet Union denied them were universal rights, possessed by everyone regardless of race, religion and nationality. In August 1969, for instance,

1940-473: 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 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

2037-630: 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

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2134-487: A violation of human rights and having been designed to counter opposition groups. In fact, the court cited the Sakharov Center's political activity as the main reason for designating it as a "foreign agent". In January 2015, the Tagansky District Court fined the Sakharov Center 300,000 rubles for not voluntarily declaring itself a "foreign agent". The Sakharov Center denies this designation and has appealed

2231-601: 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

2328-566: Is "completely eliminated." Whether talking to about one hundred dissidents in a broadcast to the Soviet people or at the U.S. Embassy, Reagan's agenda was one of freedom to travel, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Andrei Sakharov said, "Everyone wants to have a job, be married, have children, be happy, but dissidents must be prepared to see their lives destroyed and those dear to them hurt. When I look at my situation and my family's situation and that of my country, I realize that things are getting steadily worse." Fellow dissident and one of

2425-759: Is a cover for American espionage in the Soviet Union . The KGB head Yuri Andropov determined, "The need has thus emerged to terminate the actions of Orlov , fellow Helsinki monitor Ginzburg and others once and for all, on the basis of existing law." According to Dmitri Volkogonov and Harold Shukman , it was Andropov who approved the numerous trials of human rights activists such as Andrei Amalrik , Vladimir Bukovsky , Vyacheslav Chornovil , Zviad Gamsakhurdia , Alexander Ginzburg , Natalya Gorbanevskaya , Pyotr Grigorenko , Anatoly Shcharansky , and others: If we accept human rights violations as just "their way" of doing things, then we are all guilty. ( Andrei Sakharov ) Voluntary and involuntary emigration allowed

2522-533: The Baltic states prior to their annexation in 1940 and descendants of the eighteenth-century Volga German settlers also formed a movement to leave the Soviet Union. In 1972, the West German government entered an agreement with the Soviet authorities which permitted between 6,000 and 8,000 people to emigrate to West Germany every year for the rest of the decade. As a result, almost 70,000 ethnic Germans had left

2619-684: The Communist bloc that restrict freedom of emigration and other human rights . The eight member countries of the Warsaw Pact signed the Helsinki Final Act in August 1975. The "third basket" of the Act included extensive human rights clauses. When Jimmy Carter entered office in 1976, he broadened his advisory circle to include critics of US–Soviet détente . He voiced support for

2716-680: The Crimean Tatars aimed to return to Crimea , the Meskhetian Turks to South Georgia and ethnic Germans aimed to resettle along the Volga River near Saratov . The Crimean Tatar movement takes a prominent place among the movement of deported nations. The Tatars had been refused the right to return to the Crimea, even though the laws justifying their deportation had been overturned. Their first collective letter calling for

2813-616: The Ford Foundation . Founded after the example of the Moscow Helsinki Group and similar watch groups in the Soviet bloc, it also aimed to monitor compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords and to provide moral support for those struggling for that objective inside the Soviet bloc. It acted as a conduit for information on repression in the Soviet Union, and lobbied policy-makers in

2910-577: The Initiating Group for Defense of Civil Rights in the USSR appealed to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights to defend the human rights being trampled on by Soviet authorities in a number of trials. Some of the major milestones of the dissident movement of the 1960s included: Our history shows that most of the people can be fooled for a very long time. But now all this idiocy is coming into clear contradiction with

3007-659: The Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR (1969) and the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR (1970). The signing of the Helsinki Accords (1975) containing human rights clauses provided rights campaigners with a new hope to use international instruments. This led to the creation of dedicated Helsinki Watch Groups in Moscow ( Moscow Helsinki Group ), Kiev ( Ukrainian Helsinki Group ), Vilnius ( Lithuanian Helsinki Group ), Tbilisi, and Erevan (1976–77). The civil and human rights initiatives played

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3104-782: The Moscow Helsinki Group chairwoman Lyudmila Alexeyeva , the attribution of a mental illness to a prominent figure who came out with a political declaration or action is the most significant factor in the assessment of psychiatry during the 1960–1980s. At that time Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky wrote A New Mental Illness in the USSR: The Opposition published in French, German, Italian, Spanish and (coauthored with Semyon Gluzman ) A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents published in Russian, English, French, Italian, German, Danish. In 1977–1979 and again in 1980–1982,

3201-548: 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 the Soviet atomic bomb project under Igor Kurchatov and Igor Tamm . Sakharov's study group at FIAN in 1948 came up with

3298-548: The Soviet Union , for which he was deemed a dissident and faced persecution from the Soviet establishment. In his memory, 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,

3395-625: 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 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

3492-601: The Volga Germans to emigrate to West Germany. Soviet Jews were routinely denied permission to emigrate by the authorities of the former Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc . A movement for the right to emigrate formed in the 1960s, which also gave rise to a revival of interest in Jewish culture. The refusenik cause gathered considerable attention in the West. Citizens of German origin who lived in

3589-604: 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 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

3686-519: 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

3783-688: The "Second Culture". Other groups included the Socialists, the movements for socioeconomic rights (especially the independent unions), as well as women's, environmental, and peace movements. Responding to the issue of refuseniks in the Soviet Union, the United States Congress passed the Jackson–Vanik amendment in 1974. The provision in United States federal law intended to affect U.S. trade relations with countries of

3880-676: The 1960s was the Ukrainian movement. Its aspiration was to resist the Russification of Ukraine and to insist on equal rights and democratization for the republic. In Lithuania, the national movement of the 1970s was closely linked to the Catholic movement. Several landmark examples of dissenting writers played a significant role for the wider dissident movement. These include the persecutions of Osip Mandelshtam , Boris Pasternak , Mikhail Bulgakov , and Joseph Brodsky , as well as

3977-476: The 1960s, the early years of the Brezhnev stagnation , dissidents in the Soviet Union increasingly turned their attention towards civil and eventually human rights concerns. The fight for civil and human rights focused on issues of freedom of expression , freedom of conscience , freedom to emigrate , punitive psychiatry , and the plight of political prisoners . It was characterized by a new openness of dissent,

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4074-630: The Crimea", thus legitimizing our banishment from our home country and liquidating us as a nation. Since 1959 more than two hundred of the most active and courageous representatives have been sentenced to terms of up to seven years although they had always acted within the limits of the Soviet Constitution. – Appeal by Crimean Tatars to World Public Opinion, Chronicle of Current Events Issue No 2 (30 June 1968) Several national or ethnic groups who had been deported under Stalin formed movements to return to their homelands. In particular,

4171-597: The Czech dissident movement known as Charter 77 , and publicly expressed concern about the Soviet treatment of dissidents Aleksandr Ginzburg and Andrei Sakharov . In 1977, Carter received prominent dissident Vladimir Bukovsky in the White House, asserting that he did not intend "to be timid" in his support of human rights. In 1979, the US Helsinki Watch Committee was established, funded by

4268-532: The Helsinki Agreement with the same zeal and in the same way as formerly the outspoken legalists expected the Soviet authorities to adhere strictly to the letter of their constitution. Dissident Russian and East European intellectuals who urged compliance with the Helsinki accords have been subjected to official repression. According to Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch , Moscow has taken advantage of

4365-597: The Helsinki security pact to improve its economy while increasing the suppression of political dissenters. 50 members of Soviet Helsinki Groups were imprisoned. Cases of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union were divulged by Amnesty International in 1975 and by The Committee for the Defense of Soviet Political Prisoners in 1975 and 1976. US President Jimmy Carter in his inaugural address on 20 January 1977 announced that human rights would be central to foreign policy during his administration. In February, Carter sent Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov

4462-410: The Jewish and German dissident movements, many in the independent Pentecostal movement pursued emigration. The national movements included the Russian national dissidents as well as dissident movements from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, and Armenia. Among the nations that lived in their own territories with the status of republics within the Soviet Union, the first movement to emerge in

4559-575: The KGB reacted to the Helsinki Watch Groups in Moscow, Kiev, Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Erevan by launching large-scale arrests and sentencing its members to in prison, labor camp, internal exile and psychiatric imprisonment. From the members of the Moscow Helsinki Group , 1978 saw its members Yuri Orlov , Vladimir Slepak and Anatoly Shcharansky sentenced to lengthy labor camp terms and internal exile for " anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" and treason. Another wave of arrests followed in

4656-693: 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

4753-631: The Sakharov Center and interrupted "Moscow Trials," a play based on the trial of Pussy Riot directed by Milo Rau . In 2014, the Center was attacked by Orthodox fundamentalists during events advocating tolerance for the LGBT community . The memorial service for opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was also held in the Sakharov Center. On December 26, 2014, the Sakharov Center was declared a "foreign agent" under Russia's foreign agent law . This law has been criticized both in Russia and internationally as representing

4850-548: The Sakharov Museum and multi-functional social center for Peace, Progress and Human Rights (renamed in 2012 as the Sakharov Center). The main building of the museum was a two-story manor that housed a library and a permanent exhibition dedicated to the history of the dissident movement in the USSR, and to the life and works of Andrei Sakharov . The exhibition was designed by Evgeny Asse. An installation made from

4947-497: The Soviet Criminal Code and the choice between exile abroad (with revocation of their Soviet citizenship), the mental hospital , or the labor camp . Anti-Soviet political behavior, in particular, being outspoken in opposition to the authorities, demonstrating for reform, writing books critical of the USSR were defined in some persons as being simultaneously a criminal act (e.g. violation of Articles 70 or 190-1),

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5044-491: The Soviet Union by the mid-1980s. Similarly, Armenians achieved a small emigration. By the mid-1980s, over 15,000 Armenians had emigrated. Russia has changed in the recent years largely in the social, economic, and political spheres. Migrations from Russian have become less forceful and primarily a result of free will that is expressed by the individual. The religious movements in the USSR included Russian Orthodox , Catholic , and Protestant movements. They focused on

5141-476: 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

5238-673: The Ukrainian Helsinki Group had 37 members, of whom 22 were in prison camps, 5 were in exile, 6 emigrated to the West, 3 were released and were living in Ukraine, 1 ( Mykhailo Melnyk ) committed suicide. The Lithuanian Helsinki Group saw its members subjected to two waves of imprisonment for anti-Soviet activities and "organization of religious processions": Viktoras Petkus was sentenced in 1978; others followed in 1980–1981: Algirdas Statkevičius, Vytautas Skuodys, Mečislovas Jurevičius, and Vytautas Vaičiūnas. Starting in

5335-459: The United States to continue to press the issue with Soviet leaders. US President Ronald Reagan attributed to the view that the "brutal treatment of Soviet dissidents was due to bureaucratic inertia." On 14 November 1988, he held a meeting with Andrei Sakharov at the White House and said that Soviet human rights abuses are impeding progress and would continue to do so until the problem

5432-535: The West (next to refuseniks ). In 1944 THE WHOLE OF OUR PEOPLE was slanderously accused of betraying the Soviet Мotherland and was forcibly deported from the Crimea. [...] [O]n 5 September 1967, there appeared a Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet which cleared us of the charge of treason but described us not as Crimean Tatars but as "citizens of Tatar nationality formerly resident in

5529-458: 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

5626-548: The authorities to rid themselves of many political active intellectuals including writers Valentin Turchin , Georgi Vladimov , Vladimir Voinovich , Lev Kopelev , Vladimir Maximov, Naum Korzhavin , Vasily Aksyonov , psychiatrist Marina Voikhanskaya and others. A Chronicle of Current Events covered 424 political trials, in which 753 people were convicted, and no one of the accused was acquitted; in addition, 164 people were declared insane and sent to compulsory treatment in

5723-411: 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

5820-454: The decision. On September 30, 2015, the Sakharov Center was fined again for failing to label itself as a foreign agent in an article it posted online. On March 12, 2022, the Center published a statement about the Russian invasion of Ukraine on its website, which can be translated, in part, as: Russian society has allowed itself to be dragged into the funnel of a monstrous crisis. The result

5917-973: The early 1980s: Malva Landa, Viktor Nekipelov , Leonard Ternovsky, Feliks Serebrov, Tatiana Osipova, Anatoly Marchenko , and Ivan Kovalev. Soviet authorities offered some activists the "opportunity" to emigrate. Lyudmila Alexeyeva emigrated in 1977. The Moscow Helsinki Group founding members Mikhail Bernshtam, Alexander Korchak, Vitaly Rubin also emigrated, and Pyotr Grigorenko was stripped of his Soviet citizenship while seeking medical treatment abroad. The Ukrainian Helsinki Group suffered severe repressions throughout 1977–1982, with at times multiple labor camp sentences handed out to Mykola Rudenko , Oleksy Tykhy, Myroslav Marynovych , Mykola Matusevych, Levko Lukyanenko , Oles Berdnyk , Mykola Horbal , Zinovy Krasivsky, Vitaly Kalynychenko, Vyacheslav Chornovil , Olha Heyko, Vasyl Stus , Oksana Meshko, Ivan Sokulsky, Ivan Kandyba , Petro Rozumny, Vasyl Striltsiv, Yaroslav Lesiv , Vasyl Sichko, Yuri Lytvyn, Petro Sichko. By 1983

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6014-430: The early Soviet Union, non-conforming academics were exiled via so-called Philosophers' ships . Later, figures such as cultural theorist Grigori Pomerants were among active dissidents. Other intersections of cultural and literary nonconformism with dissidents include the underground poetry and the wide field of Soviet Nonconformist Art , such as the painters of the underground Lianozovo group, and artists active in

6111-540: 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,

6208-521: 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

6305-491: The fact that we have some level of openness. ( Vladimir Voinovich ) The heyday of the dissenters as a presence in the Western public life was the 1970s. The Helsinki Accords inspired dissidents in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia , Hungary , and Poland to openly protest human rights failures by their own governments. The Soviet dissidents demanded that the Soviet authorities implement their own commitments proceeding from

6402-539: The founders of the Moscow Helsinki Group Lyudmila Alexeyeva wrote: What would happen if citizens acted on the assumption that they have rights? If one person did it, he would become a martyr; if two people did it, they would be labeled an enemy organization; if thousands of people did it, the state would have to become less oppressive. According to Soviet dissident Victor Davydoff, totalitarian systems lack mechanisms to change

6499-613: The founding of the Chronicle of Current Events in April 1968. The unofficial newsletter reported violations of civil rights and judicial procedure by the Soviet government and responses to those violations by citizens across the USSR. During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the rights-based strategy of dissent incorporated human rights ideas and rhetoric. The movement included figures such as Valery Chalidze , Yuri Orlov , and Lyudmila Alexeyeva . Special groups were founded such as

6596-413: The freedom to practice their faith and resistance to interference by the state in their internal affairs. The Russian Orthodox movement remained relatively small. The Catholic movement in Lithuania was part of the larger Lithuanian national movement. Protestant groups which opposed the anti-religious state directives included the Baptists , the Seventh-day Adventists , and the Pentecostals . Similar to

6693-404: The human rights museum and cultural center were terminated, having been designated under the Russian foreign agent law , evicting the museum. 55°45′04″N 37°39′31″E  /  55.7511°N 37.6586°E  / 55.7511; 37.6586 Andrei Sakharov Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov ( Russian : Андре́й Дми́триевич Са́харов ; 21 May 1921 – 14 December 1989)

6790-508: 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

6887-525: The international community. Repercussions for these activities ranged from dismissal from work and studies to many years of imprisonment in labor camps and being subjected to punitive psychiatry . Dissidents active in the movement in the 1960s introduced a "legalist" approach of avoiding moral and political commentary in favor of close attention to legal and procedural issues. Following several landmark political trials, coverage of arrests and trials in samizdat became more common. This activity eventually led to

6984-536: 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,

7081-694: 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

7178-472: 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

7275-750: 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 a son. Klavdia would later die in 1969. In 1945, he joined the Theoretical Department of Physical Institute of

7372-562: 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

7469-674: The publication of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn . In literary world, there were dozens of literati who participated in dissident movement, including Vasily Aksyonov , Yury Aikhenvald, Arkadiy Belinkov , Leonid Borodin , Joseph Brodsky , Yuli Daniel , David Dar, Aleksandr Galich , Anatoly Gladilin , Yuliy Kim , Lev Kopelev , Naum Korzhavin , Konstantin Kuzminsky , Vladimir Maksimov , Viktor Nekrasov , Varlam Shalamov , Andrei Sinyavsky , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , Kari Unksova, Georgi Vladimov , Vladimir Voinovich , Venedikt Yerofeyev , and Alexander Zinoviev . In

7566-434: 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 a controlled nuclear fusion reactor,

7663-521: The restoration dates to 1957. In the early 1960s, the Crimean Tatars had begun to establish initiative groups in the places where they had been forcibly resettled. Led by Mustafa Dzhemilev , they founded their own democratic and decentralized organization, considered unique in the history of independent movements in the Soviet Union. The emigration movements in the Soviet Union included the movement of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel and of

7760-461: The term, a dissident is considered to "sit apart" from the regime. As dissenters began self-identifying as dissidents , the term came to refer to an individual whose non-conformism was perceived to be for the good of a society. The most influential subset of the dissidents is known as the Soviet human rights movement. Political opposition in the USSR was barely visible, and apart from rare exceptions, it had little consequence, primarily because it

7857-558: 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

7954-509: 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 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

8051-486: Was a physics professor at the Second Moscow State University and an amateur pianist. His grandfather, Ivan, 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

8148-429: 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,

8245-615: 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 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

8342-450: Was death, destruction and untold suffering in a neighbouring country. What happened means the moral bankruptcy of our society. And with this, regardless of the outcome of events, we will have to live for many years. The way out of this state will require a radical change in the basic attitudes of national identity, if at all it will be possible. On January 24, 2023, Moscow authorities notified the Sakharov Center that all rental agreements with

8439-472: 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

8536-615: 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

8633-441: Was instantly crushed with brute force. Instead, an important element of dissident activity in the Soviet Union was informing society (both inside the USSR and in foreign countries) about violation of laws and human rights and organizing in defense of those rights. Over time, the dissident movement created vivid awareness of Soviet Communist abuses. Soviet dissidents who criticized the state in most cases faced legal sanctions under

8730-720: 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

8827-591: 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

8924-554: 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 ,

9021-628: 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

9118-513: 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

9215-488: 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

9312-449: Was used in the Soviet Union (USSR) in the period from the mid-1960s until the Fall of Communism . It was used to refer to small groups of marginalized intellectuals whose challenges, from modest to radical to the Soviet regime, met protection and encouragement from correspondents, and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities. Following the etymology of

9409-478: 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 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

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