Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (Андрей Дмитриевич Сахаров, 1921-1989) was a Soviet nuclear physicist, a principal designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, and later the USSR’s best-known human rights advocate. After years in the closed weapons program, he broke publicly with the Soviet leadership in 1968 with the essay “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom,” circulated in samizdat and published abroad. In 1970 he co-founded the Moscow Human Rights Committee, and in 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which Soviet authorities did not allow him to collect in person.

Sakharov was a central target of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, which ran surveillance, harassment, and press campaigns against him and his wife, Elena Bonner. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov described him to KGB officers as “domestic enemy number one.” After he condemned the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the Politburo exiled him in January 1980 to the closed city of Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), where he remained under KGB watch until Mikhail Gorbachev allowed his return to Moscow in December 1986. He was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989 and died that December.

The KGB’s own reports on Sakharov, released after 1991, document how the security services shaped official propaganda about him at home and abroad.

Sources

• Rubenstein, Joshua, and Alexander Gribanov, eds. The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov. Yale University Press, 2005.
• Satter, David. “Book Review: The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov.” Hudson Institute, August 24, 2005.
• Ehrman, John. Review of The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov. Studies in Intelligence 50, no. 2 (2006).
• Sakharov, Andrei. Memoirs. Knopf, 1990.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.