Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, friends.
My name is Arkady Ostrovsky.
It is a true honour and privilege for me, to say a few words on behalf of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation which has partnered with Carnegie Hall to organise this concert. It celebrates the life and thoughts of Andrei Sakharov, a great Russian physicist and humanist born on this day 21st of May just over a century ago, in 1921. His ideas and his values helped to define the 20th century well beyond Soviet borders. And these ideas and values are just as relevant today.
Both as a scientist and as a humanist, Sakharov was concerned with facts, reality and truth - not ideologies, fantasies and lies. Both as a scientist and as a humanist, he saw truth not as relative, but as an absolute category. And he knew what happens when people in power disregards the very concept of truth and base their entire system on lies.
In November 1955, the Soviet Union tested one of the deadliest weapons ever created by humans, the H-bomb - seven hundred times more powerful than the one that razed Hiroshima ten years earlier. The 34-year old Sakharov, who masterminded the thermo-nuclear device, described the explosion which he observed from 70 kilometres away: a blinding, yellow-white sphere touching the horizon; a stem of a mushroom forming below it, a heatwave that blasted his ears; the vision of air tearing.
Twenty years later, in 1975 Sakharov was awarded a Nobel Prize. It was not for physics It was for peace. Because in the years that followed, Sakharov came to realise that human rights were not just an ideal that could be treated separately from the issues of security, but an essential condition of that security. That a state that abuses human rights of its own people will inevitably pose a threat to the outside world. So he became one of the most vocal defenders of human rights the world over. In his Nobel peace prize lecture, delivered by his wife, Elena Bonner, he stated:
“Peace, progress, human rights - these three goals are inextricably linked. It’s impossible to achieve one of them, if the others are ignored…I am convinced that freedom of conscience, together with other civic rights, provides both the basis for scientific progress and a guarantee against its misuse to harm mankind.”
Today as Russia continues to shell Ukrainian cities and as tensions mount between America and China, that principle is more relevant than ever.
The Russian state has recognised the relevance of Sakharov’s ideas by banning the Sakharov centre and evicting it from its premises in Moscow, but shutting down Memorial – Russia’s revered human rights organisation which Sakharov helped to found, and by filling its jails with those who protest against the war. Sakharov would have surely wanted them mentioned.
Today’s event, however, pays tribute to Sakharov’s ideas - and those who continue to follow them – not with bullets and sounds of prison locks, but with music. Thank you to all the musicians who have agreed to perform today and thank you to Carnegie Hall for hosting this very special event. Enjoy the music.
