The ground-breaking research in controlled thermonuclear fusion conducted by Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov led to the development of the Soviet Union’s first hydrogen bomb. Sakharov advocated civil liberties and social reform in his own country and cordial relations with non-Communist countries. For his human-rights work he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1975. For his outspoken criticism of Soviet policies he was sentenced to internal exile in 1980.
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was born in Moscow on May 21, 1921. His father was also a physicist. At the age of 26 Sakharov received his doctorate from the P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute. He was a professor there from 1945 to 1980. He became a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1953. In 1968 the physicist published an essay in which he strongly advocated radical reductions in nuclear arms. He founded the Committee for Human Rights in 1970. In 1973 he received the Eleanor Roosevelt Peace award.
In 1980 he won the Fritt Ord prize but was stripped of all of his Soviet awards, including the Stalin prize and his decoration in the Order of Lenin. In the same year, his criticism of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan resulted in his exile to Gorky.
Sakharov’s first wife died in the late 1960s, and in 1971 he married pediatrician Yelena Bonner. In 1984 Bonner was also exiled to Gorky because of her “anti-Soviet activities.” Bonner was allowed to come to the United States for six months in 1985. There she saw relatives and underwent open-heart surgery. She returned to Gorky, and in December 1986 both Bonner and Sakharov were allowed to return to Moscow. Bonner was pardoned, and in 1988 Sakharov was allowed to leave the Soviet Union for the first time. In April 1989 he was elected to the new Soviet legislature. Sakharov won one of the 12 seats in the new Congress of People’s Deputies that had been reserved for members of the Academy of Sciences.
