The Andrei Sakharov Foundation

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.

In Memoriam. Liza Semyonov, 20 November 1955 – 4 June 2026

In early January 1982, Liza and her husband Alexey Semyonov began their honeymoon amid freezing temperatures in Butte, Montana. The unorthodox choice of destination had a particular logic: it was in Butte, in June 1981, that the couple had been married — except that the bride had not been present. Montana is one of the states that permit marriage by proxy, and the couple had desperately hoped that the Soviet authorities would allow Liza to leave the Soviet Union and join her husband in the United States.

When it became clear that the Soviet authorities would not relent, Alexey's mother Elena Bonner and her husband Andrei Sakharov began a hunger strike, demanding that the authorities stop destroying the lives of a young couple whose only wish was to be together. The fight for Liza resonated around the world, with spontaneous protests outside Soviet embassies — demonstrators carrying signs reading "Visa for Liza."

After seventeen days, the Soviet authorities yielded to international pressure and issued Liza's exit visa.

On the couple's arrival in Butte, they were greeted with snow flurries and a letter from President Reagan — requested by Senator Max Baucus of Montana, and one that, given the political weight of the moment, had to be cleared by the National Security Council before it could be sent:

"Dear Liza and Alexey, Mrs. Reagan and I join the community of Butte, Mont., in sending you our warm welcome. We are delighted to share in this special time with you and to send our best wishes for every joy and blessing in your life together. God bless you."

With that, the couple settled into life together: welcoming two children into the world, watching them grow, and delighting in a family that would eventually encompass seven grandchildren. And, throughout it all, dancing — Liza and Alexey were accomplished amateur tango dancers who performed competitively and never stopped.

"Life often felt unjust, but death is the greatest injustice of all" — a thought Andrei Sakharov returned to more than once. Today, it feels very close. Liza left us too young: always beautiful and graceful, sharp, intellectually alive, endlessly interesting and genuinely interested in others. At this Foundation, everyone knew and adored her. Some had known her for decades; several, for more than half a century. We all feel the loss deeply, and offer our most heartfelt condolences to Alexey, their children and grandchildren, and the whole family.

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

Defending human rights is a new definition of being "extremist"

The state that rewrites the past cannot tolerate evidence of the present, and so it seeks to ban both at once.

On June 4, 2026, Russian authorities added a leading human rights organisation, OVD-Info, along with 35 others, to its federal list of "extremist" groups. The designation is not merely symbolic. Participating in or financing an extremist organisation is punishable by up to 12 years in prison. Even displaying the symbols of a listed group carries a sentence of up to four years. Individuals suspected of involvement may themselves be added to the list and have their assets frozen indefinitely.

The move follows the Supreme Court's April 9th ruling to ban "International Public Movement Memorial" — along with its alleged affiliated branches — in a hearing classified as "top secret" and conducted without Memorial's own lawyers present. The entire process was concluded in a single session. Memorial Human Rights Center, a former key partner of OVD-Info, had already been forcibly liquidated in 2021.

OVD-Info, named after the Russian abbreviation for "police department," was founded in 2011 in response to a mass crackdown on peaceful protest. In the years since, it has provided legal assistance in freedom of assembly and expression cases to tens of thousands of people, operated a 24/7 hotline for victims to report abuses and seek help, and systematically documented state repression. It has helped over 2,300 applicants win cases before the European Court of Human Rights.

OVD-Info has pledged to continue its work. But the "extremist" label is precisely designed to make that pledge dangerous to keep — and dangerous for anyone who answers it. What Russia is criminalising is not violence, not incitement, not any recognisable definition of extremism: it is the act of writing down what happened, of answering a phone call from someone in a cell, of standing beside the accused in court. If documenting abuses makes an organisation extreme, then the standard being applied says far more about the state enforcing it than about those it seeks to silence.

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. Hi**er'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.

In the Shadow of Andrei Sakharov
A 1991 Documentary by Sherry Jones

"He had a duty to live longer" — so says one of the people interviewed in this film, produced by the American documentary-maker Sherry Jones, who spent time in Moscow between 1987 and 1991. From 1983 until 2009, Jones made over twenty films for Frontline on PBS, and her proximity to the Soviet Union in its final years gave her rare access to the people and institutions that shaped this portrait.

It may come as no surprise that a documentary shot so soon after Sakharov's death in December 1989 conveys a deep sense of his presence. For Elena Bonner, his widow; Tatiana Sakharova, his daughter; and Ekaterina and Irina Sakharov, his cousins who grew up alongside him in his childhood home in central Moscow — the feelings were still raw, his absence still hard to bear. What is perhaps more revealing is how many people beyond his immediate circle realised, only after he was gone, just how profound their loss was. Watching the film today offers an unparalleled glimpse into Sakharov's world through the eyes of family, friends and colleagues, set against archive footage obtained from the Soviet Ministry of Atomic Power (now Rosatom) and, remarkably, the KGB.

The film runs for an hour and a half and is packed with substance. Fellow physicists — among them Viktor Adamsky, who worked with Sakharov directly on nuclear weapons, and Evgeny Feinberg, a leading scientist from the Lebedev Institute in Moscow who visited Sakharov during his internal exile in Gorky — speak with authority about his science. A remarkable line-up of Soviet dissidents, including Vera Lashkova, Pavel Litvinov, and Alexander Lavut, alongside politicians such as Alexander Yakovlev, give their accounts of his activism and its significance.

One of the film's most striking conclusions concerns Sakharov's political foresight: he is described as "surprisingly realistic in his predictions for the future" — a judgement that lands with particular weight when viewed from today's vantage point. Many of those interviewed speak of feeling orphaned by his death, and more than one voices the belief that had Sakharov lived longer, the democratic changes then transforming Russia might have taken deeper root — that his moral authority might have checked, or at least slowed, the reassertion of KGB and FSB power over political life that came to define the following decades. After all, throughout his life, Sakharov had shown, time and again, that a single voice of unimpeachable integrity could alter the course of events.

Seen with hindsight, the film is suffused with foreboding — a portrait of a society at a crossroads, grieving a man whose presence might have helped it choose differently.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9oo30a

Sakharov at 105: A Bridge That Remains Standing

On the 105th anniversary of Andrei Sakharov's birth, his legacy was quietly marked across Russia. Book exhibitions dedicated to his life opened in Moscow's Natural Sciences Library and in regional libraries in Ryazan, Irkutsk, Kursk, Toropets, Saratov, and Vladivostok — covering not only his scientific achievements but also his dissident activity and social thought. Articles appeared in Lenta.ru, Gazeta.ru, and Komsomolskaya Pravda; an exhibition at the Rosatom pavilion at VDNKh — the great Soviet-era Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy in Moscow — featured a narrated video on his life and work.

These are modest gestures. They must be read against a backdrop that Sakharov himself would have recognised with sorrow. In the fifth year of its full-scale war against Ukraine, the Kremlin has continued to escalate its crackdown on Russian civil society, targeting critics both inside the country and in exile. In 2025 alone, the Justice Ministry designated 215 individuals and organisations as "foreign agents," including news outlets, journalists, artists, and civil society activists. The space for the kind of open, pluralist society Sakharov spent his life advocating has rarely been narrower.
And yet the anniversary was marked. Sakharov's name was spoken, in public, in institutions funded by the Russian state. That is not nothing.

It points to something that sets Sakharov apart from almost any other figure of the Cold War era: he is one of the exceedingly rare individuals viewed with genuine respect on both sides of what has become, once again, a deep civilisational divide. In the West he is remembered as a dissident and Nobel Peace laureate, a conscience who spoke truth to Soviet power. In Russia he remains the father of the hydrogen bomb — a patriot, a man of the state, a titan of Soviet science — whose later convictions many may quietly admire even where they cannot say so aloud. This dual identity is not a contradiction. It is precisely what makes him a potential point of reference when the time comes, as it eventually must, to think about rebuilding.

That time is not now. The most plausible near-term scenarios for the conflict in Ukraine range from prolonged low-intensity confrontation to a ceasefire, with a genuine and lasting peace agreement remaining the hardest outcome to achieve. Even a ceasefire, should one materialise, would leave unresolved the deeper questions: about sovereignty, about accountability, about what kind of Russia might eventually emerge from this period. Political renewal inside Russia itself — the precondition for any durable rapprochement — remains, for now, a distant prospect rather than an imminent one.

But distant is not the same as impossible. History moves in ways that confound prediction. The Soviet system, which once seemed immovable, did not outlast Sakharov by long. What endures from his example is the insistence that the work of reason and conscience must continue even when the odds appear overwhelming — that détente and rapprochement are not merely diplomatic transactions but expressions of a deeper willingness, as he put it in his Nobel lecture, to build a better world. In that lecture, Sakharov called on humanity not to minimise its sacred endeavours, concluding: "We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive."

Those words were addressed to a world living under the shadow of nuclear arsenals, divided by ideology, and seemingly locked into permanent confrontation. They were not written for easier times. They were written for times like these.



University of Saratov's library marks Sakharov's anniversary with a cabinet display

Today is 105 years of Sakharov’s birth. His 85th was marked by a large gathering in Moscow, organised by the now closed Sakharov Center.

Here are two videos from this gathering. Other materials from the Sakharov May Freedom Festival 2006 will be published later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB6e72mjgyQ&t=1285s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n9-00QqEqA&t=2550s

The Destruction of Gulag Memory in Russia: silencing the present and erasing the past

In 2024, Gulag History Museum was forced to close, with the authorities citing fire risks. The "fire safety" pretext was transparently false. High-ranking Kremlin officials and the FSB were behind the decision to close the museum; a Moscow government official told The Moscow Times that multiple inspections had not detected any fire safety violations.

The real trigger was an act of institutional resistance: Gulag History Museum director Roman Romanov refused to alter a section on Stalin-era repression in a new exhibition at the Museum of Moscow.

The collateral damage extended further: the director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Elizaveta Likhacheva, was fired in January 2025 after publicly defending the Gulag Museum against its closure, illustrating a purge of non-aligned cultural cadres. The regime sent a clear signal that even expressing solidarity with the museum's mission was professionally lethal.

The new institution will abandon the topic of Soviet state terror and instead be dedicated to the "genocide of the Soviet people" and N**i war crimes. Visitors will learn about "manifestations of N**ism, biological weapons testing on Soviet citizens by the Japanese, the liberating mission of the Red Army, and trials of N**i criminals."

To lead it, authorities appointed Natalya Kalashnikova, a veteran of the war in Ukraine, holder of medals "To a Participant of the Special Military Operation" and "For Contribution to Strengthening Defence." The appointment is itself a statement of intent — this is a wartime propaganda institution, not a historical one.

There is still no date of opening of the new museum, but Verstka, an independent investigative publication, reported on 13 April that the exhibitions of the Gulag Museum in Moscow were being packed up and moved away. The Gulag Museum collection is not destroyed, but now it’s unclear where it is.

This closure is not an isolated act — it is the culmination of a systematic dismantling of Gulag memory infrastructure:

In April 2025, Russia's Supreme Court ruled that Memorial, a human rights movement founded to document Stalin-era crimes, is an extremist organisation and banned it — the culmination of a decade of unrelenting pressure since it was designated a "foreign agent" in 2016. In its decision, the court characterised Memorial as "anti-Russian," devoted to destroying "historical, cultural, spiritual and moral values."

Sergey Lukashevsky, the Sakharov Centre's director, now based in Berlin, said: "The recent rebranding [of Museum of Gulag] sends a clear signal that the Russian authorities are prepared to do anything to remove the history of political repression from public view. The parallels with today's situation in Russia are simply too obvious."

The institution that preserved the memory of what trials during Stalin’s repressions represented — the Gulag museum founded by another former prisoner, Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko — has now been extinguished and replaced with its own inversion. The regime is not merely silencing the present: it is methodically erasing the past.

In memoriam. Nina M Litvinova (August 9, 1945 - May 12, 2026)
a prominent ocean researcher and lifelong dissident

My angel, my sister Nina, is gone.

This was one short sentence, in which Pavel Litvinov, 84-year-old Nina’s older brother, poured out his heart. His younger sister, intelligent, beautiful, with limitless empathy, a human rights activist who had been helping political prisoners since the 1960s, had left the world. Nina Litvinova, a prominent ocean researcher and lifelong dissident, took her own life at 80. Her body was found on Wednesday on a street in central Moscow.

A moment of profound grief settled over the small surviving community of Russian liberals and anti-war activists, many of them now in exile.

Her note said life had become "unbearable" since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. "I tried to help them, but I'm exhausted, and I suffer day and night from helplessness," she wrote of those jailed for opposing the war. "I'm ashamed, but I gave up. Please forgive me."

Memorial published an obituary describing her as a participant in the dissident movement who had spent decades supporting political prisoners. She attended the trials of historian Yuri Dmitriev and hearings in the cases of Oleg Orlov (now free in Berlin) and Zhenya Berkovich. "She was always there where the pain was greatest," the obituary reads.

Her brother Pavel is the famous dissident — he was among the eight protesters who staged a rare demonstration on Red Square in 1968 against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, for which he was sentenced to five years of internal exile. He emigrated to the United States in 1974 and now lives in New York at age 84.

For all the tragedy, most Russians who find themselves in the hermetically sealed information environment of today’s Russia, will encounter this story, if at all, filtered through state media's depoliticized framing — an old woman's death, a family connection to Soviet history. Her grandfather, Maksim Litvinov, had served as Soviet foreign minister until Stalin dismissed him in 1939 — partly, it is widely believed, so as not to antagonize Hi**er with a Jewish face at the head of Soviet diplomacy.

She wrote that she was ashamed, that she gave up. She did not give up. She bore witness to the suffering of others for six decades, and when words failed, she made her death a final, unanswerable act of conscience. Nina Litvinova's life will outlast the regime that made her despair necessary.

The ASF offers its deepest condolences to Pavel Litvinov, Maria Slonim, Lara Litvinov, and other close family members.