born May 21, 1921, Moscow, Russia
died Dec. 14, 1989, Moscow
Russian nuclear physicist and human rights advocate.
He worked with I.Y. Tamm (18951971) to develop the Soviet Union's first hydrogen bomb, but in 1961 he opposed Nikita Khrushchev 's plan to test a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere. In 1968 he published in the West "Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," which called for nuclear arms reduction and criticized Soviet repression of dissidents. He and his wife, Yelena G. Bonner, continued to advocate civil liberties and reform in the Soviet Union. In 1975 Sakharov received the Nobel Prize for Peace but was forbidden to travel to Oslo to receive it. In 1980 he was exiled to the closed city Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod); his wife was exiled there in 1984. They were released in 1986 and returned to Moscow. Elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in April 1989, Sakharov had his honours restored and saw many of the causes for which he had fought and suffered become official policy under Mikhail Gorbachev .