Andrei Sakharov’s transformation from a leading Soviet nuclear-weapons scientist into a human-rights activist brought him under sustained state surveillance and retaliation. After he publicly opposed the 1964 election of Lysenkoist scientist Nikolai Nuzhdin to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Sakharov wrote that Nuzhdin was connected to the defamation, firing, arrest, and deaths of scientists. The episode prompted Nikita Khrushchev to order the KGB to gather compromising material on him. By 1970, Sakharov had helped establish the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR, whose petitions and appeals were documented in KGB reports.
The pressure escalated after Sakharov criticized anti-ballistic-missile systems in a July 21, 1967 letter to Soviet leaders and published his 1968 essay “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.” He was barred from military research, subjected to official media attacks from 1972 onward, and exiled to Gorky in January 1980 after years of public dissent. The Soviet state also prevented him from traveling to Oslo for the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize; his wife, Yelena Bonner, accepted on his behalf. His persecution became a lasting symbol of Soviet repression, and the European Parliament later created the Sakharov Prize for human-rights defenders.
