The Andrei Sakharov Foundation

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

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.

Andrzej Poczobut is free after more than five years behind the bars.

The ASF warmly welcomes the release by the Belarusian regime of Andrzej Poczobut, journalist and laureate of the Sakharov Prize.

Poczobut is a journalist, essayist, blogger, and activist from Belarus's Polish minority — and, in a former life, a punk musician with the Belarusian group Deviation. Known for his fearless criticism of the Lukashenka regime and his writings on history and human rights, he has been arrested many times over the years. Detained since 2021, he was sentenced to eight years in a penal colony.

Andrzej Poczobut, together with another journalist – Mzia Amaglobeli imprisoned in Georgia – was awarded the 2025 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament on 16 December 2025.

Released on 28 April, he was met at the border by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. On 3 May — Poland's Constitution Day — he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest state decoration for outstanding merit.