Sakharov, scientist and dissident

These days are the anniversary of the sudden death, on December 14, 1989, of Andrei Sakharov, the dissident whose life – he was born in Moscow in 1921 – paralleled the history of the Soviet Union. Sakharov was a theoretical physicist who made a fundamental contribution to the development of his country’s nuclear weapons, but also to cosmology, particle physics and nuclear for civilian use. He was a dissident, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, philosopher and a politician. “My fate was in some ways exceptional and I’m not saying it out of false modesty but to be precise. It was bigger than my person, I just tried to live up to it”, wrote Sakharov who, along with others, among the 1987 and 1988, he founded Memorial, the organization for the defense of human rights and the recovery of historical memory that the Kremlin now wants to close. In the midst of the Cold War, “he brought the pacifist and humanist thinking of Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr to the Soviet Union, where these ideas had a disruptive effect”, recently summed up the director of the Sakharov Center in Moscow, Sergei Lukashevski, one of the dozen organizations considered a ‘foreign agent’ by the authorities, as well as Memorial which now, accused of not respecting the obligations imposed by the law introduced by Putin in 2012, risks having to close.