Word: sakharovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dissidents? In Russia, there are only a handful, mostly intellectuals, writers and professionals who have achieved some success and even distinction. In the vast Soviet Union, with its 257 million population, Sakharov estimates that between 2,000 and 10,000 dissidents are "prisoners of conscience"; it is impossible to say how many others are still free. They are despised or regarded with suspicion or indifference by most of the population. Their significance does not lie in their numbers, but in the fact that they were driven to protest in the first place-and that their rulers are not sure...
...institutions, harassed in a dozen ways, ranging from merely annoying to brutal. But Soviet dissidents call press conferences, circulate forbidden books and manuscripts, bombard Washington, Paris and the Vatican with their protests. As soon as one of their number is arrested, wives, children and friends set up a clamor. Sakharov is almost a tourist attraction in Moscow, and regularly receives foreign newsmen. None of this would have been conceivable under Stalin...
...Italian comrades, like the French and Spanish, are seemingly prepared to stand up for the Soviet dissidents' right to speak, but not necessarily for what they say. Sakharov is an irritant to the Italian party's smooth, libertarian approach. The party is hesitant to attack him openly because of his eminent stature, but his messages to Jimmy Carter inviting U.S. participation in the human rights campaign are deemed lamentably anti-Soviet in character...
...toilet, a minuscule kitchen; two other small, book-cluttered rooms serve variously as bedrooms, living space and study areas. Yet if there is an epicenter to the Soviet Union's fragmented human rights movement, it is this dingy apartment. For it is the home of Physicist Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov, 55, guiding spirit of the harassed, hunted dissidents of the U.S.S.R...
...There Sakharov welcomes Western journalists to issue yet another appeal to world opinion for Soviet political prisoners. There he counsels and often gives needed sanctuary to other colleagues in dissent. Tall, stoop-shouldered, quick to smile, his gray hair a fringe around his bald crown, Sakharov looks, in these conversations, more like a genial professor holding forth at a home seminar than a man in the process of defying the world's most powerful Communist state. Indeed, the odds of winning his challenge seem so impossible that he sometimes calls himself, with self-deprecating humor, Andrei Blazhenny-a Russian...