The Andrei Sakharov Foundation

10 July 1943

On that day, Andrei Sakharov and Klavdia Vikhireva were married — signing the registry in Ulyanovsk, then running home through the fields hand in hand, laughing and celebrating their young love. Both were in their early twenties.

Klavdia's parents had laid out a festive meal for the young couple and a handful of their friends: boiled new potatoes, a little lard, a few small cucumbers, and shots of vodka to toast the new family. A simple meal — but a genuine treat in wartime.

Andrei's father-in-law, Alexey Vikhirev, a master machinist at the local factory, gave the young groom a generous gift: a length of cloth he had been awarded for outstanding work. It was more than a luxury — it was a necessity. A new pair of trousers was sorely needed.

In the months that followed, Andrei and Klavdia often walked together after work, and Andrei would share his vision of the life that awaited them: "We will have our own apartment — three rooms — and technological progress will allow us to watch films at home!" Klavdia would look at her husband with adoring eyes, quietly convinced that he lived in a world of fantasy.

The Andrei Sakharov Bridge in the Netherlands

The Andrej Sacharovbrug (Andrei Sakharov Bridge) is a major box girder road bridge in the Netherlands that crosses the Nederrijn (Lower Rhine) river. Located in the city of Arnhem, it connects the districts of Malburgen and IJsseloord on the N325 (Pleijroute).

Opened on November 3, 1987, the bridge spans approximately 760 metres with a main central span of 133 metres. It was named in honour of Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The bridge was given his name in 1990, with his widow Elena Bonner attending the ceremony. At the same time, two more Arnhem bridges were named after other remarkable men: Nelson Mandela, the man who brought an end to apartheid in South Africa, and John Frost, the Lieutenant-Colonel of the British Army who led his paratroopers to the Rhine bridge during the September 1944 Battle of Arnhem.

Elena Bonner (15 February 1923 – 18 June 2011)

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the passing of Elena Georgievna Bonner — a fierce Soviet dissident, human rights activist, and wife of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov.

Born in Turkmenistan to a Jewish mother and Armenian father, she was given the name Lyusik at birth — which is why those closest to her always called her Lyusya. Her parents were committed Bolsheviks, and her early life blended the relative comfort afforded to Party officials with the widespread hardships that followed the Revolution, Civil War, and the era of military communism. In 1937, her world shattered when her stepfather was shot in Stalin's purges and her mother was sent to the Gulag on the standard charge of being a "member of a traitor's family."

With barely four years to find her footing — caring for her younger brother while finishing school — war broke out. She volunteered for the front, serving as a frontline nurse, was wounded twice, and was honorably discharged as a disabled veteran in 1946.

In 1970, Bonner met the recently widowed Andrei Sakharov. Their shared commitment to moral values and human rights deepened quickly into love, and their marriage in January 1972 forged one of history's most remarkable partnerships in the struggle for human dignity.
Bonner was a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. In 1975, when Sakharov was denied an exit visa to travel to Oslo, she delivered his Nobel lecture in his place — while he listened in on Radio Liberty, filled with pride.

Throughout Sakharov's unlawful internal exile to Gorky, Bonner was his lifeline to the outside world, fighting Soviet authorities determined to silence him — something he considered worse than death. When Gorbachev allowed their return to Moscow in December 1986, she worked alongside him until his sudden death in December 1989, serving as his comrade-in-arms, his sounding board, his secretary, his moral compass — and, above all, the love of his life.

After Sakharov's death, Bonner devoted herself tirelessly to his legacy: founding the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, securing his archives, researching his biography, and publishing remarkable books. Despite serious health challenges, she never slowed down — splitting her time between Russia and the United States, surrounded by the children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren she so adored. All who knew her miss not only a tireless defender of freedom, but a woman of extraordinary human warmth — always present, always ready to help, and utterly unbowed by the powers that sought to silence her.

On the Other Side of the Window
Documentary by Dmitry Zavilgelsky and Boris Altshuler

"Andrei Dmitrievich, you were at the top floor of power in the Soviet Union," a journalist suggested to Sakharov upon his return from internal exile. "I'm not on the top floor. I'm next to the top floor — on the other side of the window," came his ironic reply. It is a perfect encapsulation of a life that defied easy categorization: insider and dissident, architect of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and one of its most eloquent critics.

Andrei Sakharov was a three-time Hero of Socialist Labor and the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb — a man whose analytical memos were read by the Politburo and the KGB leadership, and whose opinions were heeded at the very highest levels of the state. (After Nikita Khrushchev's downfall, his party comrades counted among his failures the fact that he had failed to share a memo from Comrade Sakharov.) Formally, Sakharov enjoyed the privileges of the highest elite — special provisions, a dacha, and a security detail that felt more like unwanted surveillance — yet he refused to join the Communist Party. He refused, in fact, to play by anyone's rules, placing conscience above every other consideration and openly declaring that his values and the system's principles were fundamentally at odds.

Physicist and human rights activist Boris Altshuler knew Sakharov for many years — his father, Lev Altshuler, had worked on thermonuclear weapons at Arzamas-16, and his younger brother Alexander was a classmate of Sakharov's daughter Tatiana. Altshuler channeled this long acquaintance into a meticulously researched book, aptly titled Sakharov and Power: On the Other Side of the Window, tracing Sakharov's fraught relationship with Soviet authority.

His collaboration with film director Dmitry Zavilgelsky produced a critically acclaimed documentary of the same spirit: Andrei Sakharov: On the Other Side of the Window (2022). Drawing on Altshuler's book, the film presents rare documents from KGB and Communist Party archives, alongside Sakharov's own fraughtdrawings, skillfully animated by Dmitry Geller.

The film is available with English subtitles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIUDQclDLAo

The Past by Decree
How Putin's Russia Chose Which Victims to Remember

In Moscow, there was once a museum dedicated to the victims of the Gulag. There is now a plan to replace it with something rather different — a Museum of Memory that remembers, by design, only the suffering that serves the Kremlin's purposes. The past, in Putin's Russia, is too important to be left to historians.

The history of the twentieth century in the Soviet lands is a complex and near-unbroken chronicle of suffering. From the inglorious First World War — ended in a dishonourable separate peace — through the horrors of the Civil War, Military Communism, and a succession of famines, to the rising tide of Stalinist repression: catastrophe followed catastrophe, until all of it was subsumed, temporarily, by the industrial slaughter of the Second World War.

The statistics of that war remain staggering. Between 8.7 and 11.4 million Soviet soldiers died — the highest military death toll of any nation in the conflict. Civilian losses were higher still: estimates range from 15 to 19 million, the consequence of deliberate massacre, genocide, starvation, and disease in conditions of almost incomprehensible brutality.

The scale of Stalinist repression is harder to establish, and has been subject to sharp revision. Before the declassification of Soviet archives in 1991, émigré sources put the death toll of Stalin's mass terror as high as 20 million — a figure that scholarly consensus has since substantially reduced. Based on the archival record, historians now estimate approximately 3.3 million deaths attributable to the repression directly, of whom nearly 800,000 were executed between 1923 and 1953, with the remainder perishing in the Gulag or during deportations. To this must be added the victims of Stalin's famines — a further 5.5 to 6.5 million deaths — bringing the total toll of excess deaths attributable to Stalin's rule to somewhere between 9 and 10 million. But death counts alone do not capture the full scale of what was inflicted: between 14 and 20 million Soviet citizens passed through the Gulag, many of them scarred irrevocably — physically and psychologically. And Stalin's mass deportations of entire peoples — the Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, and Karachay — bear the hallmark of genocide by any reasonable definition.

Both historical realities are authentic. Hitler's terror visited upon the Soviet peoples, and Stalin's terror visited upon his own citizens, are not in competition; they are twin horrors of the same century. But suppressing one memory in order to amplify the other is politically expedient for Putin's regime, which is invested in a narrative of the Soviet people as victors and victims — triumphant in war, targeted by a genocidal European enemy. From this narrative, a further transition follows with a certain logic: if Europe's historic agenda was the destruction of Russia, then Russia's current war is not aggression but self-defence — or better still, pre-emption of an attack that was coming regardless. The past is made to authorise the present.

Viewed through this lens, the work of Memorial — preserving the memory of Stalinist repression — becomes not scholarship but subversion, not remembrance but an attack on national identity. It is designated "anti-Russian" and "extremist" and shut down accordingly. Meanwhile, the concept of "genocide against the Soviet nations" is written into law, enshrining one half of the historical truth while the other is suppressed.

Attempts to conscript history into the service of political power rarely succeed in the long run. The archives exist. The testimony exists. The work of Memorial, though the organisation has been formally liquidated, lives on in the records it compiled, the researchers it trained, and the international networks it helped to build. What cannot be said openly in Moscow today is being said — and preserved — elsewhere. The FSB's architects of historical revision may feel confident in their project. But historical memory, once gathered and shared, is remarkably difficult to destroy. The names of the dead have a way of outlasting the reputations of those who would erase them.