Academician Andrey Sakharov's path from thermonuclear weapons to exile in Gorky

“I live in a flat whose doors are guarded by the police round the clock. Nobody is admitted to see me except members of my family. The price my old friend from Gorky pays for knowing us is an interrogation by the KGB after every visit. There is no telephone in the flat. I receive very few letters, most of them from people who want to re-educate me or simply to insult me. Strangely, I get the same kind of letters from the West too. But some letters also reach me from the Western world with warm words in them. And I am immensely grateful to those who send them.”

Together with Esquire we have prepared a short essay and a chronicle of the life of Academician Andrei Sakharov: an outstanding human rights defender, a man of peace, a great scientist, an intellectual of crystal integrity. He began with work at a military plant and in scientific research, gave 20 years of his life to the development of thermonuclear weapons, then decades to public statements and human rights work, and lost 7 years to rightless, enforced exile in Gorky.