Sakharov's legacy in danger

 Andrey Sakharov, born this day in 1921, was a major Russian protagonist for a nuclear test ban. As EPRS reports:

Born on 21 May 1921 in Moscow, Andrey Sakharov was a physicist who in 1948 joined the Soviet atomic programme, where he played a leading role in work that led to the country’s first successful test of an atomic bomb in 1949. In the 1950s, Sakharov helped to develop the first Soviet hydrogen bomb and the Tsar Bomba, the largest atomic bomb ever exploded.

However, by the late 1950s Sakharov was becoming increasingly concerned about the dangers of these new weapons; together with other nuclear scientists, he persuaded the Soviet authorities to sign a partial test ban treaty with the US and UK in 1963, prohibiting atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests. Sakharov’s opposition to antiballistic missile defences, which he felt would increase the risk of nuclear war, eventually put him at loggerheads with the Soviet regime.

In 1968, Sakharov wrote his ‘Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Co-Existence, and Intellectual Freedom’, warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons and criticising the repression of dissidents. The essay was never published in the Soviet Union, but typewritten copies circulated widely and reached Western media. As a result, he was excluded from weapons research, and instead turned to theoretical fields such as particle physics and cosmology.

Previously celebrated as a ‘hero of Socialist labour’, Sakharov was increasingly regarded as a dissident from then on. In 1970, he co-founded the Moscow Human Rights Committee. His tireless defence of those unjustly persecuted and imprisoned brought him international fame, culminating in the 1975 award of the Nobel Peace Prize, but at home he was denounced by KGB head, Yury Andropov, as ‘domestic enemy No 1’. After Sakharov criticised the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, authorities stripped him of his honours and exiled him to Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), a city that was closed to foreigners.

With perestroika in full swing, in 1986 Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, invited Sakharov to resume his ‘patriotic work’. Back in Moscow, Sakharov played a leading role in organising the Soviet Union’s emerging independent civil society. In 1989, he was elected as an opposition member of the Parliament, where he demanded an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. A few months later, he died of a heart attack.

Civil rights under Putin are regressing and Russia is back in the arms race. What would Sakharov have made of  this?