David E. Hoffman: Sakharov Was Russia's Mandela. How Could They Have Forgotten Him?
David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. His book The Oligarchs will be issued in an updated edition in September.
In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev permitted elections for the first popularly elected legislature in Soviet history. The Communist Party still dominated, but about a third of the seats in the 2,250-member chamber were open, and in many of them, establishment party members were booted out. When the first session of the new Congress of People's Deputies opened on May 25, the nation was mesmerized by the televised proceedings. Work stopped on factory floors as millions of people witnessed an astonishing new phase in Gorbachev's revolution from above -- open criticism of the powers that be.
One of the most memorable speakers in those weeks was Andrei Sakharov, the dissident physicist and Nobel Prize winner who was the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. Two years earlier, Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, had been released from exile in Gorky and allowed to return to Moscow, where they were beacons of hope for those who believed in human rights and democracy. Sakharov's appearance in the legislature seemed to be a singularly radiant moment.
On Bonner's death Saturday, June 18, in Boston at age 88, it is worth recalling once again their legacy, one that seems to be fading in today's Russia...