These are modest gestures. They must be read against a backdrop that Sakharov himself would have recognised with sorrow. In the fifth year of its full-scale war against Ukraine, the Kremlin has continued to escalate its crackdown on Russian civil society, targeting critics both inside the country and in exile. In 2025 alone, the Justice Ministry designated 215 individuals and organisations as “foreign agents,” including news outlets, journalists, artists, and civil society activists. The space for the kind of open, pluralist society Sakharov spent his life advocating has rarely been narrower.

And yet the anniversary was marked. Sakharov’s name was spoken, in public, in institutions funded by the Russian state. That is not nothing.

It points to something that sets Sakharov apart from almost any other figure of the Cold War era: he is one of the exceedingly rare individuals viewed with genuine respect on both sides of what has become, once again, a deep civilisational divide. In the West he is remembered as a dissident and Nobel Peace laureate, a conscience who spoke truth to Soviet power. In Russia he remains the father of the hydrogen bomb — a patriot, a man of the state, a titan of Soviet science — whose later convictions many may quietly admire even where they cannot say so aloud. This dual identity is not a contradiction. It is precisely what makes him a potential point of reference when the time comes, as it eventually must, to think about rebuilding.

That time is not now. The most plausible near-term scenarios for the conflict in Ukraine range from prolonged low-intensity confrontation to a ceasefire, with a genuine and lasting peace agreement remaining the hardest outcome to achieve. Even a ceasefire, should one materialise, would leave unresolved the deeper questions: about sovereignty, about accountability, about what kind of Russia might eventually emerge from this period. Political renewal inside Russia itself — the precondition for any durable rapprochement — remains, for now, a distant prospect rather than an imminent one.

But distant is not the same as impossible. History moves in ways that confound prediction. The Soviet system, which once seemed immovable, did not outlast Sakharov by long. What endures from his example is the insistence that the work of reason and conscience must continue even when the odds appear overwhelming — that détente and rapprochement are not merely diplomatic transactions but expressions of a deeper willingness, as he put it in his Nobel lecture, to build a better world. In that lecture, Sakharov called on humanity not to minimise its sacred endeavours, concluding: “We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.”

Those words were addressed to a world living under the shadow of nuclear arsenals, divided by ideology, and seemingly locked into permanent confrontation. They were not written for easier times. They were written for times like these.

The post Sakharov at 105: A Bridge That Remains Standing first appeared on Andrei Sakharov Foundation.

Here are two videos from this gathering. Other materials from the Sakharov May Freedom Festival 2006 will be published later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB6e72mjgyQ&t=1285s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n9-00QqEqA&t=2550s

The post Today is 105 years of Sakharov’s birth first appeared on Andrei Sakharov Foundation.

The real trigger was an act of institutional resistance: Gulag History Museum director Roman Romanov refused to alter a section on Stalin-era repression in a new exhibition at the Museum of Moscow.

The collateral damage extended further: the director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Elizaveta Likhacheva, was fired in January 2025 after publicly defending the Gulag Museum against its closure, illustrating a purge of non-aligned cultural cadres. The regime sent a clear signal that even expressing solidarity with the museum’s mission was professionally lethal.

The new institution will abandon the topic of Soviet state terror and instead be dedicated to the “genocide of the Soviet people” and Nazi war crimes. Visitors will learn about “manifestations of Nazism, biological weapons testing on Soviet citizens by the Japanese, the liberating mission of the Red Army, and trials of Nazi criminals.”

To lead it, authorities appointed Natalya Kalashnikova, a veteran of the war in Ukraine, holder of medals “To a Participant of the Special Military Operation” and “For Contribution to Strengthening Defence.” The appointment is itself a statement of intent — this is a wartime propaganda institution, not a historical one.

There is still no date of opening of the new museum, but Verstka, an independent investigative publication, reported on 13 April that the exhibitions of the Gulag Museum in Moscow were being packed up and moved away. The Gulag Museum collection is not destroyed, but now it’s unclear where it is.

This closure is not an isolated act — it is the culmination of a systematic dismantling of Gulag memory infrastructure:
In April 2025, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that Memorial, a human rights movement founded to document Stalin-era crimes, is an extremist organisation and banned it — the culmination of a decade of unrelenting pressure since it was designated a “foreign agent” in 2016. In its decision, the court characterised Memorial as “anti-Russian,” devoted to destroying “historical, cultural, spiritual and moral values.”

Sergey Lukashevsky, the Sakharov Centre’s director, now based in Berlin, said: “The recent rebranding [of Museum of Gulag] sends a clear signal that the Russian authorities are prepared to do anything to remove the history of political repression from public view. The parallels with today’s situation in Russia are simply too obvious.”

The institution that preserved the memory of what trials during Stalin’s repressions represented — the Gulag museum founded by another former prisoner, Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko — has now been extinguished and replaced with its own inversion. The regime is not merely silencing the present: it is methodically erasing the past.

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Nina M Litvinova (August 9, 1945 – May 12, 2026)

a prominent ocean researcher and lifelong dissident

My angel, my sister Nina, is gone.

This was one short sentence, in which Pavel Litvinov, 84-year-old Nina’s older brother, poured out his heart. His younger sister, intelligent, beautiful, with limitless empathy, a human rights activist who had been helping political prisoners since the 1960s, had left the world. Nina Litvinova, a prominent ocean researcher and lifelong dissident, took her own life at 80. Her body was found on Wednesday on a street in central Moscow.

A moment of profound grief settled over the small surviving community of Russian liberals and anti-war activists, many of them now in exile.

Her note said life had become “unbearable” since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “I tried to help them, but I’m exhausted, and I suffer day and night from helplessness,” she wrote of those jailed for opposing the war. “I’m ashamed, but I gave up. Please forgive me.”

Memorial published an obituary describing her as a participant in the dissident movement who had spent decades supporting political prisoners. She attended the trials of historian Yuri Dmitriev and hearings in the cases of Oleg Orlov (now free in Berlin) and Zhenya Berkovich. “She was always there where the pain was greatest,” the obituary reads.

Her brother Pavel is the famous dissident — he was among the eight protesters who staged a rare demonstration on Red Square in 1968 against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, for which he was sentenced to five years of internal exile. He emigrated to the United States in 1974 and now lives in New York at age 84.

For all the tragedy, most Russians who find themselves in the hermetically sealed information environment of today’s Russia, will encounter this story, if at all, filtered through state media’s depoliticized framing — an old woman’s death, a family connection to Soviet history. Her grandfather, Maksim Litvinov, had served as Soviet foreign minister until Stalin dismissed him in 1939 — partly, it is widely believed, so as not to antagonize Hitler with a Jewish face at the head of Soviet diplomacy.

She wrote that she was ashamed, that she gave up. She did not give up. She bore witness to the suffering of others for six decades, and when words failed, she made her death a final, unanswerable act of conscience. Nina Litvinova’s life will outlast the regime that made her despair necessary.

The ASF offers its deepest condolences to Pavel Litvinov, Maria Slonim, Lara Litvinov, and other close family members.

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Poczobut is a journalist, essayist, blogger, and activist from Belarus’s Polish minority — and, in a former life, a punk musician with the Belarusian group Deviation. Known for his fearless criticism of the Lukashenka regime and his writings on history and human rights, he has been arrested many times over the years. Detained since 2021, he was sentenced to eight years in a penal colony.

Andrzej Poczobut, together with another journalist – Mzia Amaglobeli imprisoned in Georgia – was awarded the 2025 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament on 16 December 2025.

Released on 28 April, he was met at the border by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. On 3 May — Poland’s Constitution Day — he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state decoration for outstanding merit.

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Nikitina observes that “in wartime, environmental activism has become a critical site where ecological and political struggles converge. Publicly addressing issues such as the burial of nuclear waste, the creation of anthrax-contaminated livestock burial sites, the illegal exploitation of protected natural areas, or advocating for bans on hunting endangered species is increasingly framed by the state as an act of political disloyalty. Environmental advocacy is now routinely equated with ‘discrediting’ the Russian Army or ‘inciting interethnic hatred’.”

This context underscores the need for new research and ethical frameworks capable of recognising non-human life as a subject of care, responsibility, and justice. Nikitina’s work is informed by Andrei Sakharov’s example of intellectual integrity and ethical accountability, extending these concerns to forms of life and vulnerability that remain largely excluded from dominant political frameworks.

Nikitina completed her BA in Literary Studies at Krasnoyarsk State University before going on to study Polish philology in Katowice, Upper Silesia, where she also completed her doctorate in comparative literature. Her research sits within the field of Animal Studies — an interdisciplinary discipline engaging with ethical and political questions at the intersection of human and non-human life. She is a co-founder of the Posthuman Studies Lab, a post-disciplinary research platform that brings together scholars and artists to critically reimagine the ecological and political legacies of post-Soviet territories.

The Sakharov Fellowships are funded by the German Federal Foreign Office as part of the project “Pathways to Coming to Terms with War and Dictatorship” and are implemented in partnership with Ruhr University Bochum and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF).

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A toxic combination of defective reactor design, deficient safety analysis, disregard for operating procedures, prioritization of power production over safety, and lack of independent regulatory oversight led to the worst nuclear reactor accident in history.

The RBMK design was developed by the same organizations involved in Soviet nuclear weapons, so the same extreme level of secrecy was brought to civilian power reactors. It was forbidden to make public any information about incidents even at foreign plants — technical information about the Three Mile Island accident was classified in the USSR.

Forty years on, the site itself remains a sobering reminder. The EU has financed more than €1 billion worth of activities in Ukraine for nuclear safety, including €423 million for the New Safe Confinement — a massive arch structure placed over the destroyed Unit 4 to prevent radioactive leakage. Following a Russian drone strike in February 2025, this structure was badly damaged. The war in Ukraine has given the anniversary a particularly grim dimension, with the world reminded that nuclear facilities face threats that go beyond engineering.

Well before Chernobyl, Sakharov had been one of the first scientists to publicly quantify the danger of nuclear fallout. In 1958, Sakharov published an estimate of the long-term health impacts from carbon-14 produced by nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere — his first public expression of concern about the weapons work in which he was involved.

When the full scale of the disaster became apparent to him, Sakharov used his moral authority to make a powerful public argument — one that has shaped nuclear safety thinking ever since. Sakharov concluded that mankind cannot renounce nuclear power, and that technical means must be found to guarantee its absolute safety and exclude the possibility of another Chernobyl.

Sakharov put it directly: “People concerned about the potential harmful consequences of the peaceful use of nuclear energy should concentrate their efforts not on attempts to ban nuclear power, but instead on demands to assure its complete safety.”

Perhaps Sakharov’s most lasting contribution was not a specific technical fix, but his insistence on openness as a prerequisite for safety. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he argued that scientific secrecy and political control of information were themselves dangerous — and Chernobyl dramatically proved him right. He frequently emphasized that nuclear dangers demanded international cooperation and transparency, and his stated concerns about proliferation and the risks of secrecy became central to the post-Chernobyl consensus on nuclear governance.

Sakharov was not the engineer who redesigned nuclear reactors after Chernobyl, but his contributions operated at a deeper level. He was among the first scientists to rigorously quantify radiation risk to the public, he helped bring about the first nuclear test ban treaty, he argued forcefully (and presciently) that secrecy was incompatible with safety, and after Chernobyl he publicly championed both the underground siting of reactors and universal containment structures — ideas very much in line with modern best practice. His greatest legacy may be the principle that scientific honesty and political openness are not luxuries but essential components of nuclear safety itself.

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The striking portrait of Dr Andrei Sakharov — the sitter wearing a red shirt, a colour somehow at odds with the scientist’s famously modest demeanour — was painted in 1998, nearly a decade after Sakharov’s untimely death. Vyacheslav Tsai, a painter based in Nizhny Novgorod, the city to which Sakharov and his wife had been exiled in the 1980s, drew on photographs from that period to create his tribute to the Soviet dissident, a man with deep ties to the region.

In 1999, a trade delegation from Nizhny Novgorod visited Sharansky — then serving as Israel’s minister of trade and industry — and presented him with the portrait. His admiration for Sakharov was no secret.

Sharansky, trained as a physicist, became one of the leading voices in the Soviet Jewry movement’s campaign for the right to Aliyah. In that struggle, he grew close to Sakharov and his family, eventually serving as Sakharov’s press secretary. That bond endures to this day.

The Jackson-Vanik Amendment, signed into law in January 1975, enshrined the right to free emigration — but Soviet authorities were determined to apply it on their own terms. Sharansky’s desire to repatriate to Israel earned him the label of traitor and a threat of capital punishment. In 1977, he was sentenced to thirteen years in a penal colony.

It was the unwavering determination of his wife, Avital, that helped bring him home: in 1986, after nine years, Sharansky was released in a dramatic prisoner exchange on the Bridge of Spies (formally, Glienicke Bridge) in Berlin. With tears in his eyes after nearly a decade apart, he greeted Avital with a quip: “Sorry, dear, I got a bit delayed.”

The post A Portrait on the Wall first appeared on Andrei Sakharov Foundation.

Recent laureates include the Ukrainian organization Truth Hounds (2023) and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee (2019), continuing a tradition supporting those targeted for their beliefs.

Other laureates include Sergey Kovalev, Svetlana Gannushkina, Lilia Shibanova, Novaya Gazeta, and Committee for the Prevention of Torture.

In 2025 the Norwegian Helsinki Committee was labelled an undesirable organisation in Russia.

Ine Marie Eriksen Søreide, Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs pictured at the 2019 awards ceremony.

The post The Norwegian Helsinki Committee first appeared on Andrei Sakharov Foundation.

In March 1989, for the first time since 1918, contested elections to a Soviet legislative body took place. This alone was revolutionary. Many senior Communist Party officials who ran as deputies were defeated. The elections brought a new wave of democratic and nationalist political leaders into politics. Boris Yeltsin won a landslide victory from an at-large seat in Moscow.

Notable non-endorsed candidates elected included anti-corruption prosecutor Telman Gdlyan, physicist Andrei Sakharov, lawyer Anatoly Sobchak, and ethnographer Galina Starovoytova. One Politburo member and five Central Committee members lost re-election to non-endorsed candidates, causing shock in the Party. When the First Congress convened in May 1989, the televised proceedings featuring speeches by figures such as Andrei Sakharov riveted the public.

Under Putin, a very young Russian democracy gradually moved to a hybrid political system and then to a much more closed authoritarian regime.

The backslide of democracy in Russia accelerated significantly following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The 2024 elections were the most unfree Russian elections since the demise of the Soviet Union. They were set up not simply as a plebiscite for the president, but also as an endorsement of Russia’s war against Ukraine and a proof of unity. While elections are held in Russia today, there is no viable or meaningful alternative to Putin on the ballot: no independent candidate would stand a chance at a national level and occasional wins on local level are becoming less likely with each elections cycle.

The contrast with the 1989 elections is striking and almost paradoxical. The 1989 Soviet elections — held under a communist dictatorship — produced genuine shocks. Today’s Russian elections, held under a nominally constitutional republic with the language of democracy, are by most measures less free than those last Soviet-era contests. The machinery of managed democracy has proven more durable than the Soviet system it replaced — precisely because it maintains the forms of electoral legitimacy while hollowing out its substance entirely.

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