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.

The post 37th Anniversary: A Watershed Moment in the Soviet History first appeared on Andrei Sakharov Foundation.

In 2021, during the centenary of Sakharov’s birth, which was marked across the country, the idea of erecting a monument in Moscow was actively discussed. One proposed location was Prospekt Sakharova, a major thoroughfare in central Moscow. However, the authorities openly expressed concern that combining a street bearing his name with a monument could turn the site into a focal point for political protest.

Following the start of the war against Ukraine, Russian authorities swiftly suppressed nearly all public expressions of dissent. Even laying flowers at existing monuments to Ukrainian writers has, at times, led to detention by police. Despite this, placing flowers in certain locations on specific dates remains one of the few ways to express defiance and protest against the Kremlin.

Andrei Sakharov’s statue in St Petersburg, erected in 2003, has become one such site. In the past three years, people have gathered there to lay flowers on the dates marking Alexei Navalny’s birth and death. Since 2024, the monument—situated in a quiet square surrounded by the historic buildings of St Petersburg University—has evolved into an informal meeting place to honour Navalny, while drawing parallels between the two men, both of whom courageously opposed the regime. Anti-war single-person pickets, as well as small commemorations for victims of political repression, also occasionally take place at the site.

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This was a daring question that Andrei Sakharov posed to Lavrentiy Beria in the early 1950s. Beria, the feared head of the secret police, had been appointed by Stalin to lead Department S, which was tasked with developing nuclear weapons for the Soviet Union. His reply was blunt, essentially suggesting that a market-based approach in a free country produced superior results.

Twenty years later, Andrei Sakharov, together with fellow physicist Valentin Turchin and historian Roy Medvedev, felt compelled to continue this discussion with Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership. In their “Letter of the Three,” they called for a free and open debate on the democratization of the Soviet Union. Academic rather than polemical in tone, the letter proposed a 14-point program of reforms, including the release of all prisoners of conscience, increased investment in education and the environment, judicial reform, and free elections. They warned that without democratization, the USSR would fall further behind in technological progress, education, and healthcare.

The Soviet authorities responded predictably: with harassment and searches. Medvedev was dismissed from his position, and Turchin was forced into exile abroad. Eventually, Sakharov himself was sent into internal exile in the city of Gorky.

Gorbachev’s perestroika finally arrived in 1985, echoing the gradual democratization proposed by Sakharov and his colleagues some 15 years earlier. Arguably, it came too late. By then, the USSR was on the brink of bankruptcy, with its republics already pushing for independence.

The full text in Russian

* From left to right: Turchin, Medvedev, Sakharov. The illustration is taken from the Moskvich mag.

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President Vladimir Putin has regularly evoked World War II history in justifying the invasion, claiming it was needed to “denazify” Ukraine and stop “genocide” against the Russian-speaking population of partially occupied eastern Ukraine.

Today, an announcement came that the museum will at last re-open – but in a rebranded capacity, as a Museum of Memory, dedicated to the genocide of the Soviet nations by the Nazis. The newly appointed director of the museum Kalashnikova defined the mission of the new museum as “cultivating a strong rejection of Nazism in all its forms in the current generation.”

The Stalin’s GULAG system was comprised of around 30,000 labor camps. According to the estimates, between 14 and 25 million Soviet citizens were imprisoned in the GULAG between 1929 and 1953 (the year when Stalin died). Contrary to popular belief, the majority of inmates were not political prisoners but were often held for petty crimes, such as being late to work or “theft of state property” (like taking a few potatoes from a field). The low estimate of deaths in the GULAG stands at 1.5 million people, while some estimates place it much higher, up to 15 million. Stalin’s mass repressions caused mass death and suffering, affecting most families in the USSR.

In 2001, the GULAG museum was founded by one of the system’s survivors, Anton Anton-Ovsyenko, eventually becoming a large state-funded museum. Its vast collection of personal testimonies and artefacts served to document the Soviet repression and Stalinist crimes against their own people.

P.S. In the beginning of this week two European structures of the Memorial, International Memorial Association and the Zukunft Memorial were added to the list of “undesirable” organizations of Russian Justice Ministry, so they can’t legally operate in Russia any more.

The Memorial is the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the oldest organisation specialised on the history of the Soviet repressions. Andrei Sakharov was its first chairman.

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In 1991, upon disintegration of the USSR, Gluzman founded the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, setting out to break up the Soviet legacy of dehumanizing the most vulnerable and bringing rehabilitation and modern healthcare to Ukrainian hospitals.

Gluzman’s exceptional courage and adherence to ideals of humanism, renunciation of using psychiatry against political dissidents as well as for dissemination of ethical principles during the reform of mental health service in Ukraine earned him many awards and recognitions from international organizations, including the Geneva Prize for Human Rights in Psychiatry from the World Psychiatric Organization.

Gluzman refused to evacuate from Kiyv, his birthplace, when the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine began four years ago. He remained living on the 15th floor of a tower block in the suburb of Kyiv, with increasingly frequent blackouts caused by Russia’s incessant targeting of civilian infrastructure, which often kept him unable to leave the building. At the end, the combined toll of his labor camp past and deprivations caused by the war were too much. On February 16th, Gluzman died in a hospital in his beloved Kiyv.

Please read a beautiful tribute to the man “whose only currency was truth”, written by his long-term comrade-in-arms Robert van Voren. Robert is a distinguished human rights activist who frequently visited Gluzman in Kyiv and carries out important work supporting mental health of Ukrainians affected by the war.

The post In Memoriam: Semyon Gluzman (10.09.1946 – 16.02.2026) first appeared on Andrei Sakharov Foundation.

Join thousands of graduates of the online human rights defence school named after Elena Bonner. The course is completely free for successful applicants. The course runs over a period of three months, with twice weekly evening or weekend online lectures, seminars and workshops, providing a balanced mix of theory and practice in the field of human rights defence.

Originally founded by Sakharov Center in Moscow in 2020, the school has been run as an independent project after Sakharov Center’s forced liquidation in 2023. The current intensive program, taught by experienced lawyers and human rights activists, is aimed at those living in Russia and Russians abroad. An important feature of the program is helping like-minded individuals to find each other while learning about human rights advocacy.

Personal data of participants is not collected, out of concern for everyone’s safety.

Additional information either through Telegram bot https://t.me/HRschool_bot or at https://bonner.center/

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Anna Narinskaya provided the following narration:
“In Gorky, Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner were placed in an apartment without a telephone. KGB officers were always on duty in the entrance hall. When no one was at home, the apartment was regularly searched. KGB cars followed Sakharov and his wife wherever they went.

But even this massive surveillance wasn’t enough. Sakharov was watched by lots of agents with hidden cameras who pretended to be ordinary passersby, shop assistants, and clinical staff. In addition, cameras were installed in many places that Sakharov visited regularly, such as the hospital.”

During the years of Perestroika, when the KGB archives were briefly made available, the surviving video footage was handed over to the Sakharov’s family.

The post Sakharov Under Surveillance. An Exhibit at The Nobel Prize Museum. 6 February 2026 first appeared on Andrei Sakharov Foundation.