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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Documentary by Dmitry Zavilgelsky and Boris Altshuler

“Andrei Dmitrievich, you were at the top floor of power in the Soviet Union,” a journalist suggested to Sakharov upon his return from internal exile. “I’m not on the top floor. I’m next to the top floor — on the other side of the window,” came his ironic reply. It is a perfect encapsulation of a life that defied easy categorization: insider and dissident, architect of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and one of its most eloquent critics.

Andrei Sakharov was a three-time Hero of Socialist Labor and the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb — a man whose analytical memos were read by the Politburo and the KGB leadership, and whose opinions were heeded at the very highest levels of the state. (After Nikita Khrushchev’s downfall, his party comrades counted among his failures the fact that he had failed to share a memo from Comrade Sakharov.) Formally, Sakharov enjoyed the privileges of the highest elite — special provisions, a dacha, and a security detail that felt more like unwanted surveillance — yet he refused to join the Communist Party. He refused, in fact, to play by anyone’s rules, placing conscience above every other consideration and openly declaring that his values and the system’s principles were fundamentally at odds.

Physicist and human rights activist Boris Altshuler knew Sakharov for many years — his father, Lev Altshuler, had worked on thermonuclear weapons at Arzamas-16, and his younger brother Alexander was a classmate of Sakharov’s daughter Tatiana. Altshuler channeled this long acquaintance into a meticulously researched book, aptly titled Sakharov and Power: On the Other Side of the Window, tracing Sakharov’s fraught relationship with Soviet authority.

His collaboration with film director Dmitry Zavilgelsky produced a critically acclaimed documentary of the same spirit: Andrei Sakharov: On the Other Side of the Window (2022). Drawing on Altshuler’s book, the film presents rare documents from KGB and Communist Party archives, alongside Sakharov’s own fraughtdrawings, skillfully animated by Dmitry Geller.

The film is available with English subtitles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIUDQclDLAo

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A 1991 Documentary by Sherry Jones

“He had a duty to live longer” — so says one of the people interviewed in this film, produced by the American documentary-maker Sherry Jones, who spent time in Moscow between 1987 and 1991. From 1983 until 2009, Jones made over twenty films for Frontline on PBS, and her proximity to the Soviet Union in its final years gave her rare access to the people and institutions that shaped this portrait.

It may come as no surprise that a documentary shot so soon after Sakharov’s death in December 1989 conveys a deep sense of his presence. For Elena Bonner, his widow; Tatiana Sakharova, his daughter; and Ekaterina and Irina Sakharov, his cousins who grew up alongside him in his childhood home in central Moscow — the feelings were still raw, his absence still hard to bear. What is perhaps more revealing is how many people beyond his immediate circle realised, only after he was gone, just how profound their loss was. Watching the film today offers an unparalleled glimpse into Sakharov’s world through the eyes of family, friends and colleagues, set against archive footage obtained from the Soviet Ministry of Atomic Power (now Rosatom) and, remarkably, the KGB.

The film runs for an hour and a half and is packed with substance. Fellow physicists — among them Viktor Adamsky, who worked with Sakharov directly on nuclear weapons, and Evgeny Feinberg, a leading scientist from the Lebedev Institute in Moscow who visited Sakharov during his internal exile in Gorky — speak with authority about his science. A remarkable line-up of Soviet dissidents, including Vera Lashkova, Pavel Litvinov, and Alexander Lavut, alongside politicians such as Alexander Yakovlev, give their accounts of his activism and its significance.

One of the film’s most striking conclusions concerns Sakharov’s political foresight: he is described as “surprisingly realistic in his predictions for the future” — a judgement that lands with particular weight when viewed from today’s vantage point. Many of those interviewed speak of feeling orphaned by his death, and more than one voices the belief that had Sakharov lived longer, the democratic changes then transforming Russia might have taken deeper root — that his moral authority might have checked, or at least slowed, the reassertion of KGB and FSB power over political life that came to define the following decades. After all, throughout his life, Sakharov had shown, time and again, that a single voice of unimpeachable integrity could alter the course of events.

Seen with hindsight, the film is suffused with foreboding — a portrait of a society at a crossroads, grieving a man whose presence might have helped it choose differently.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9oo30a

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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.

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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

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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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