The 2025–2026 cohort of nineteen students once again demonstrated the program’s extraordinary capacity to deliver research experiences of the highest order. Their work — addressing some of the most profound questions of our time, from the nature of dark matter and the birth of the universe to quantum technologies, advanced materials, and the deepest structures of mathematics — speaks to both their exceptional talent and the outstanding mentorship of Tel Aviv University’s faculty.

The ASF is proud to further Dr. Sakharov’s scientific legacy through the nurturing of young scientists, and looks forward to welcoming the next cohort of Sakharov physics scholars for the 2026–2027 academic year.

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Her father, Yuri Shikhanovich, a formidable professor of mathematics, belonged to the Soviet dissident movement; arrested and sent to the camps twice, he became a close friend of the Sakharov family along the way. Ekaterina grew up inside this world — as a young girl, she helped political prisoners and carried her trusted camera to document events that would later become history.

The Sakharov Archive was Elena Bonner’s brainchild, built by the careful hands of Ekaterina — a trained chemistry teacher — together with Bela Koval. Over the years, the two women amassed thousands of documents and photographs, countless video recordings, books, and personal items belonging to Andrei Sakharov, shaping the sprawling collection into a rigorously organized archive.

Reserved and unassuming, Ekaterina drew the quiet affection of everyone who had the privilege of knowing her. Word of her passing brought condolences from around the world, and left her close friends grieving deeply.

Ekaterina could not imagine life without the Sakharov Archive. Now, the Archive must learn to imagine life without her.

May her memory be a blessing. The ASF extends its deepest condolences to Ekaterina Yurievna’s friends and family.

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Shlosberg was convicted under wartime censorship laws — passed within days of Russia’s 2022 invasion — for “discrediting” the armed forces and spreading “false information” about them. The charges stemmed from his participation in an anti-war debate and a social media repost.

“For nothing more than taking part in an anti-war debate and sharing a social media post, Lev Shlosberg faces more than 11 years behind bars. His arbitrary prosecution and sentencing are blatant reprisals for exercising his right to freedom of expression to call for peace,” said Marie Struthers, Amnesty International’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia Director.

A 63-year-old historian by training, Shlosberg has been a fixture of Pskov public life since the 1990s and a prominent critic of the Putin regime since the 2010s. His draconian sentence carries a personal edge, too: in 2014, he exposed the secret burials of Russian paratroopers killed in Donbas — at a time when the Kremlin was flatly denying any military involvement there. He was brutally attacked and hospitalized shortly after. Twelve years later, that unresolved anger appears to have found its outlet in a politically motivated conviction.

The sentence has drawn sharp condemnation from human rights organizations and Western governments, and protests from Russia’s remaining liberal opposition. The ASF believes the sentence must be quashed and calls for Shlosberg’s immediate release.

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Rost’s bond with Sakharov went back further, though. He first interviewed the physicist at his home near the Kurchatov Institute in 1970, just as Sakharov was rebuilding his life after the untimely death of his first wife, Klavdia.

Days after welcoming Sakharov back to Moscow and freedom on December 22, 1986, Rost visited the couple at home, taking more of what would become iconic photographs of Sakharov and Bonner.

Known for carrying forward the humanist tradition of post-war photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ed van der Elsken, and Leonard Freed, Rost became a close family friend of the Sakharovs. His portrait of Sakharov was etched on a commemorative medal marking Sakharov’s 70th anniversary in 1991. Years later, after spending many hours in conversation with the by-then-widowed Bonner, Rost published Sakharov. Kefir Needs to Be Warmed: A Love Story Told by Elena Bonner to Yuri Rost.

Rost’s decades-long career has brought him some of Russia’s highest honors, including the State Prize of the Russian Federation (2000), the Triumph Prize for lifetime achievement in literature and the arts (2001), and the Union of Journalists’ Golden Pen of Russia (2004). He has also worked in television and film, notably hosting the documentary series Ragtime, or Torn Time on the Russia-Kultura channel since 2015, exploring the history of culture and art through his own distinctive lens.

Now in his eighties, Rost remains remarkably active. He continues as a columnist for Novaya Gazeta, and in recent years has published a steady stream of new books, including Free Flights in a Hammock (2022) — a finalist for Russia’s “Prose of the Year” — Third Wheel: Conversations at the Stable (2023), and both Two Walks with Ilya Kabakov and A Passerby Walked By, Resembling a Passerby (2024).

Rost lives in Moscow.

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By Sakharov’s own account, and by the testimony of those fortunate enough to have known him, he was an optimist. As a theoretical physicist, he accepted that the future is undetermined and that many outcomes are possible — and from this he drew his faith in humanity’s ability to answer the demands of reason. He liked to say, “Do as you must, and be what it may.” And yet Shapiro chose to capture a sombre, almost tragic expression: the scientist supporting his drooping head in a moment of despair.

Perhaps, as is often the case with artists, Shapiro was projecting something of his own history. His mother, Nina Hollander, grew up in Brooklyn and held a degree from Columbia University; in 1932 she left Depression-era America for the Soviet Union in search of a better life. There she fell for a young pharmacist and perfume-maker, Yefim Shapiro, and the couple had two sons — Peter, born in Moscow in 1933, and Yuri. In 1938 the family was shattered: Yefim was arrested, and Nina herself vanished, held for two years in Moscow’s prisons on suspicion of being an American spy. The boys were sent to an orphanage for “Children of Enemies of the People” and given a new surname to erase their past, until an uncle managed to get them out. Yefim returned from the camps in 1948 only to be rearrested almost at once; he did not come home for good until 1954, the year after Stalin’s death — and by then he rarely spoke at all. Nina lived out her life as a Soviet citizen, having had to give up her American passport to be allowed to travel; she died in 1984. That cancelled passport became her son’s unlikely inheritance.

In the years that followed, Shapiro built a long career as a Soviet sculptor, working across a wide range of subjects, from military and cultural figures to, eventually, Sakharov himself. After the Soviet collapse, alarmed by the resurgence of antisemitism and the rise of ultranationalist politics, Shapiro used his mother’s old passport to reclaim American citizenship and relocate to the United States. His work can now be found not only across the former Soviet Union, but in Greece, Iceland, and the US, where he spent his final years.

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It was in this spirit that an annual prize bearing Sakharov’s name — За журналистику как поступок, Journalism as an Act of Conscience — was established in Russia, first awarded around 2001-2002 and formally endowed with the blessing of Elena Bonner. Administered by the Glasnost Defence Foundation in Moscow, it was awarded each year on 10th December, International Human Rights Day. The jury at various points included Nobel Prize-winning Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich and the popular Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich, then based in Munich. The panel of judges was later headed by the world chess champion Garry Kasparov. The prize recognised both investigative journalism and opinion writing — work that bore witness, named names, and accepted the risks that came with doing so.

Among its laureates were Anna Politkovskaya, the Novaya Gazeta correspondent murdered in Moscow in 2006 for her reporting on Chechnya; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, recognised for articles published from prison in Novaya Gazeta; Zoya Svetova; Boris Vishnevsky; Dmitry Glukhovsky; Radio Svoboda, and Ukrainian outlets including the newspaper Den, Krym.Realii, and Ukrainska Pravda. The list of thirty-three laureates reflects both the breadth of the prize’s reach and the deteriorating conditions for independent journalism in Russia over the period it ran.

The prize was funded throughout by Pyotr (Peter) Vins — a man whose own biography reads like a condensed history of Soviet repression and its long aftermath. His grandfather, an American Protestant minister, emigrated to the Soviet Union to preach and died in the Gulag. His father, also a minister, was imprisoned in the 1970s; Andrei Sakharov publicly supported him. Peter himself became a dissident and a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. His father was eventually exchanged for a Soviet spy and expelled to the United States; Peter followed. Returning to Russia in the 1990s, he built a transportation business and in 2001-2002 established the journalism prize as a personal tribute to Sakharov, funding it until 2018. In 2010, a criminal investigation for tax evasion — which Elena Bonner publicly declared politically motivated — forced him to leave Russia again. He moved to Kyiv, remaining there until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, after which he resettled in the United States. As recently as 2024, he was reported to be helping refugees through Catholic Charities in Oregon — a quiet final chapter consistent with a life spent in service to others.

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This poster is an artifact from the international campaign demanding an end to the persecution of Andrei Sakharov, who had been internally exiled to Gorky — now Nizhny Novgorod — since January 1980. Produced in Paris in 1984, it carries the title Honour to the Sakharovs and the subtitle Champions of Freedom. The artist, identified as Marie O’Connor, inscribed on the work itself: Tribute to Sakharov.

1984 was a classical darkest hour before the dawn. An almost total information blackout made it excruciatingly stressful for the Sakharovs’ families — in Moscow and in the United States — and for the many around the world who had taken up their cause. Almost nothing was known of Andrei’s and Elena’s daily situation, their health, or their fate. It was precisely this silence that gave solidarity campaigns like this one their urgency and their moral weight.

The image is rich in symbolism. Sakharov is shown behind a dark vertical bar, evoking imprisonment despite his status as an internal exile rather than a prisoner. His raised hands suggest both peaceful resistance and innocence. The white dove visible behind him is an unmistakable symbol of peace. It is a powerful image of confinement and witness — direct, mute, and deeply felt. This was clearly a committed act of artistic solidarity, not a commercial commission.

One small curiosity: several artistic representations of Sakharov — including this poster and a commemorative stamp issued in 2021 — depict him with blue eyes. In reality, his eyes were a light hazel-green.

The lower right corner identifies the publisher as Combattants de la Liberté, a Paris-based solidarity organisation, and lists the printer as L’Atelier Marie Fecond, 1 Avenue Octave-Gréard, Paris. The exact date of publication remains to be confirmed through archival research — the BnF’s records would be the most reliable source.

The post A Striking Vintage Political Poster first appeared on Andrei Sakharov Foundation.

Opened on November 3, 1987, the bridge spans approximately 760 metres with a main central span of 133 metres. It was named in honour of Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The bridge was given his name in 1990, with his widow Elena Bonner attending the ceremony. At the same time, two more Arnhem bridges were named after other remarkable men: Nelson Mandela, the man who brought an end to apartheid in South Africa, and John Frost, the Lieutenant-Colonel of the British Army who led his paratroopers to the Rhine bridge during the September 1944 Battle of Arnhem.

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The second season of the Dar Prize

On June 19, 2026, the award ceremony for the winners of the second season of the Dar Prize took place in Montreux, Switzerland. The prize is a grant for translation into three languages: English, German, and French. The Award’s mission is to promote Russian-language literature, uniting all who read and write in Russian regardless of their place of residence, and to foster a Russian culture free from politics.

This year, three books from the shortlist received an equal number of jury votes: “A Little Paradise” by Ksenia Buksha, “Lullaby for Mariupol” by Alexandra Krashevskaya, and “Days of Repentance” by Oleg Radzinsky. Unsurprisingly, all three books deal with the war in one way or another.

Present at the ceremony were the winners Alexandra Krashevskaya (“Lullaby for Mariupol”), Oleg Radzinsky (“Days of Repentance”), and the winner of the readers’ vote from the first season, Sergei Solovyov (“Shakti’s Smile”). They were presented with special prizes created by sculptors Konstantin Benkovich and Igor Frolov. The third winner, Ksenia Buksha (“A Little Paradise”), was unable to attend and will be presented with her award at the ceremony for the winners of the third season.
Alexandra Krashevskaya’s “Lullaby for Mariupol” has become one of the most powerful testimonies of war in recent years. The subtitle, Thirty Dreams Without Waking, gives the book its structure: thirty dream-chapters, from the first explosions in February to the evacuation in May 2022. But these are not dreams in any ordinary sense — they are the state of dissociation into which a person sinks when reality becomes unbearable. “You suddenly and distinctly fall into a deep, hopeless sleep. One from which there is no waking.”

In Oleg Radzinsky’s “Days of Repentance”, a Moscow family desperately tries to follow the regime’s doctrine of keeping politics at arm’s length, only to be confronted with the catastrophic realities brought by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Their world is shattered — yet true atonement remains elusive, mirroring the moral paralysis of contemporary Russian society. Spiritual healing, the novel suggests, remains a fading dream.

The Dar Prize continues to grow in both reach and resonance. This year, the award was supported by a number of organisations committed to the survival of free Russian culture, among them the Andrei Sakharov Foundation. As the third season gets underway, the prize stands as a reminder that literature — even, and perhaps especially, in the darkest of times — remains one of the most honest witnesses we have.

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Liza Semyonov (November 20, 1955 – June 4, 2026)

In early January 1982, Liza and her husband Alexey Semyonov began their honeymoon amid freezing temperatures in Butte, Montana. The unorthodox choice of destination had a particular logic: it was in Butte, in June 1981, that the couple had been married — except that the bride had not been present. Montana is one of the states that permit marriage by proxy, and the couple had desperately hoped that the Soviet authorities would allow Liza to leave the Soviet Union and join her husband in the United States.

When it became clear that the Soviet authorities would not relent, Alexey’s mother Elena Bonner and her husband Andrei Sakharov began a hunger strike, demanding that the authorities stop destroying the lives of a young couple whose only wish was to be together. The fight for Liza resonated around the world, with spontaneous protests outside Soviet embassies — demonstrators carrying signs reading “Visa for Liza.”

After seventeen days, the Soviet authorities yielded to international pressure and issued Liza’s exit visa.

On the couple’s arrival in Butte, they were greeted with snow flurries and a letter from President Reagan — requested by Senator Max Baucus of Montana, and one that, given the political weight of the moment, had to be cleared by the National Security Council before it could be sent:

“Dear Liza and Alexey, Mrs. Reagan and I join the community of Butte, Mont., in sending you our warm welcome. We are delighted to share in this special time with you and to send our best wishes for every joy and blessing in your life together. God bless you.”

With that, the couple settled into life together: welcoming two children into the world, watching them grow, and delighting in a family that would eventually encompass seven grandchildren. And, throughout it all, dancing — Liza and Alexey were accomplished amateur tango dancers who performed competitively and never stopped.

“Life often felt unjust, but death is the greatest injustice of all” — a thought Andrei Sakharov returned to more than once. Today, it feels very close. Liza left us too young: always beautiful and graceful, sharp, intellectually alive, endlessly interesting and genuinely interested in others. At this Foundation, everyone knew and adored her. Some had known her for decades; several, for more than half a century. We all feel the loss deeply, and offer our most heartfelt condolences to Alexey, their children and grandchildren, and the whole family.

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