Word: man
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sakharov was an honest man who was killed many times," said Vitali Korotich, editor of the liberal weekly Ogonyok. The saga of the deathblows inflicted upon Sakharov and his subsequent resurrection reads like a gripping secular sequel to the Russian Orthodox Lives of the Saints. Sakharov had certainly not been expected to survive the frightful ordeal that began in the mid-1970s, when he was targeted by the regime of Leonid Brezhnev as the nation's most dangerous dissident. Vilification in the press, together with threats of imprisonment and assassination, was a common occurrence...
...When the Soviets denied Bonner permission to go abroad for an open-heart operation, her husband went on a hunger strike. The authorities relented, but the ailing Sakharov remained under house arrest until 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev summoned him back to Moscow. Sakharov's first words as a free man were a demand for the liberation of all remaining Soviet political prisoners...
Courage came so naturally to Sakharov that it heartened others. Dressed in a worn suit and bedroom slippers, the tall, perpetually bent-over man with shy eyes displayed a lion's boldness when defying the Kremlin. Mocking his own quixotic ways, he once dubbed himself Andrei the Blessed, an honorific that in Russian connotes a kind of holy innocence. Said computer scientist Valentin Turchin, a fellow dissident who emigrated to the U.S.: "There are two categories of people who have left their imprint on humanity: leaders and saints. Sakharov was in the category of saints." One mournful colleague in Moscow...
...They perched in a pool hall and watched him wield a cue like a master swordsman in The Color of Money. They flew to the Caribbean to join him in a frothy Cocktail. They traveled with him on a cross- country journey to fraternal reconciliation in Rain Man. And with each adventure, audiences adjusted their estimation of the young man -- from Most Likely to Succeed to All-American Dreamboat to Serious Actor worth taking seriously...
...horizon. Just ask two masters he has apprenticed with: Dustin Hoffman, the decade's most lauded actor, and Paul Newman, the last golden exemplar of Hollywood star quality. "There's no sense of a crest in Tom," says Hoffman, who won an Oscar as Cruise's brother in Rain Man. "His talent is young, his body is young, his spirit is young. He's a Christmas tree -- he's lit from head to toe." Newman, who played Cruise's mentor in The Color of Money, considers the young actor's competitors and says, "Tom may be the only survivor...