100 years ago Andrei Sakharov was born, his exceptional destiny

Andrei Sakharov was born on May 21, 2021 in Moscow and his life paralleled the history of the Soviet Union. He 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, a 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,” he wrote. 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”, sums up the director of the Sakharov Center in Moscow, Sergei Lukashevski, one of the dozen organizations considered ‘foreign agent’ by the authorities. The protest movement in Russia in the last ten years has not made reference to Sakharov, apart from a few exceptions. No one chanted his name in protest marches, although sometimes in Moscow they paraded in the avenue named after him, Prospekt Sakharova: “Only a formal tribute”, like the statues, of power to the Nobel Peace Prize, Scerbakova points out, ” it was accepted, but not its objectives and it was not accepted in the official memory of the country “. The activists who identify with Aleksei Navalny do not use it as a symbol or reference,” too focused on corruption and in any case with little following in the country ” . And among the few political figures to feed on his teachings was the former physicist before politician Boris Nemtsov, killed in front of the Kremlin on February 27, 2015. “Russia lives in a dramatic present, on the one hand, and on the one hand, ‘other in an indifferent present, in a neutral present “, says in an interview with Adnkronos Piero Sinatti, one of the most attentive observers of the Soviet Union and Russia as a journalist for the Gazzetta del Popolo, Stampa sera and then del Sole 24 ore and that continues to follow the opposition against the Putin regime with great attention. There is no one who refers to these figures from the past, including Navalny. The reasons? With the Soviet Union, “an entire system was destroyed”, including its culture and its points of reference. Sakharov “is not remembered, except by a small part of society that continues to regard him as a leading figure” , says Scerbakova. “He did not have official positions, not in history programs. He died too early, when the official opposition in our country began to form. His contribution to politics was in the years of Perestroika, which everyone in Russia considers as a cruel period and want to forget “. He could have been the leader of the opposition, the critical voice, the moral authority that we lack “, adds the historian, specifying however that when Russia turns into a dictatorship,” things have started to change and the interest in Sakharov returns “, also thanks to this anniversary. It is true:” If Sakharov had survived, his voice would have been heard “, adds Sinatti.” He was one of the most important figures in Russian culture of the twentieth century. century “, summarizes Francesca Gori, President of Memorial Italia, on the occasion of the recent conference” One hundred years of Andrei Sakharov. The dissident scientist who changed the twentieth century “, organized by the association together with the Gramsci Foundation and the Circolo Fratelli Rosselli Foundation, in collaboration with the Sakharovskij Center in Moscow, And is important” not only for his activity as a physicist, but also for his political commitment. His thought is fully current even in our days on the grounds of peace, disarmament, defense and the affirmation of civil and human rights. against any dictatorship, for the amnesty of all political prisoners. “Among the most important elements of his legacy, the” indissoluble link “between peace, progress and human rights which he spoke of in the intervention that he was not authorized to make directly , but that it was his wife Elena Bonner who read, at the ceremony for the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, in 1975. Never before is a topical issue in a country that, in addition to trampling the rights of its citizens, has stopped also grow economically and in which the leadership gathers consensus through military actions. A country, Russia, in which memory is again persecuted. With the conviction, last year, for “fabricated charges”, to 13 years in prison. Memorial historian Yuri Dmitriev, who had discovered the mass graves in which the victims of Stalin’s secret police in Karelia were buried. With the revival of Stalin, albeit only for his role in the Great Patriotic War, or that of Henrich Jagoda, one of the protagonists of the terror, whose portrait stood out, in front of the judge and behind the accused, in the makeshift courtroom where the hearing was held for the confirmation of Navalny’s pre-trial detention on his return to Russia last January.