Word: sakharov
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...Interregional Group, a coalition of liberal members of the Congress of People's Deputies that he had helped found. Exhorting, cajoling and arguing with his colleagues, he pressed for the establishment of an alternative political party in opposition to the Communists. Witnesses were shocked at how dramatically Sakharov had aged lately, as he made his faltering way to the podium around 6 p.m. Still, there was nothing irresolute about his short impassioned speech. He defended his earlier, controversial call for a nationwide strike to end the Communists' institutionalized monopoly of Soviet political life. "We cannot take responsibility for what...
...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...
...after Sakharov repeatedly denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he was placed under house arrest. He and his wife Elena Bonner were held in confinement by KGB guards 24 hours a day in a small apartment in Gorky, 261 miles east of Moscow. There both became increasingly incapacitated by heart disease. Word reached Moscow's dissident community that Bonner's lips and fingernails had turned blue and that Sakharov could hardly take a few steps without being winded. When the Soviets denied Bonner permission to go abroad for an open-heart operation, her husband went on a hunger strike...
...Sakharov's most lasting contribution to mankind may have been his effort to limit nuclear testing and encourage multilateral disarmament, for which he won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. But he was best known as the indefatigable champion of the dissident, the downtrodden and the persecuted in his country. It was in this role that he incurred the deadly wrath of Brezhnev and the KGB. In the decade before Sakharov's banishment to Gorky, his two-room apartment was a haven for men and women who had fallen afoul of Soviet totalitarianism. Sitting at his enamel-top kitchen table, drinking...
...economic reforms will not work unless they are radically expanded. As Andrei Sakharov put it, "In the absence of radical reforms in the Soviet system, credits and technological aid will only prop up an ailing system and delay the advent of democracy...