Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
DOI: 10.1063/1.881252
At the time of his death from a heart attack on 14 December 1989, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was recognized both as a great scientist and as a persistent and uncompromising fighter for human rights and political freedom for all. He lived to see his Russian homeland start on the path toward implementing the principles of democracy to which he had devoted the last two decades of his life. His leadership in the struggle of conscience and principle against raw political power earned him worldwide accolades as the conscience of humanity. Gentle and modest in person, but of unconquerable persistence in his commitment to principle and opposition to injustice, he had become, in the memorial words of a Russian commentator, both “the saint and martyr of perestroika.” With the end of his life, the curtain fell on a morality play with the dimensions of a historical epic.
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More about the authors
Sidney Drell, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Lev Okun, Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Moscow.
