The Andrei Sakharov Foundation

06/02/2026

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.

06/01/2026

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

05/24/2026

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

05/21/2026

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

05/19/2026

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.

05/15/2026

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.

05/14/2026

Ending the Unwinnable War — A Thread in the Tapestry

On 15th May 1988, following the Geneva Accords, the Soviet Union began its military withdrawal from Afghanistan. It took another nine months, until 15th February 1989, to complete the evacuation of all troops.

A decade-long war had proved a misadventure. Back in 1979, an internal civil conflict prompted Soviet intervention to stabilize a failing client state — but this triggered a robust American response, rapidly turning the country into a major proxy battlefield, with massive American-led funding and arming of local resistance fighters, the Mujahideen. Soviet actions were reckless, but it was the American response that gave rise to the Taliban and caused even greater suffering for the Afghan nation and the world.

Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader from the 1964 coup displacing Khrushchev until his death in 1982, is credited with the "Brezhnev Doctrine" — the foreign policy tenet that once any country became socialist, it would not be allowed to return to capitalism. This put immense pressure on the Soviet Union to prop up failing regimes. In Afghanistan's case, however, Brezhnev foresaw a very real possibility of a Vietnam-style quagmire and was reluctant to intervene. On Christmas Day 1979, he finally yielded to Politburo hardliners, making an emotional decision, triggered by a political assassination in Kabul, to invade.

Over the following decade, up to two million Afghans were killed and the country's economy destroyed. Soviet troop losses were limited to around 13,000, but the deeply unpopular war opened deep cracks in the Soviet regime. The direct economic cost of the war was modest — but the structural dysfunction of the Soviet economy, long masked by the high oil prices of the 1970s, became fully exposed when oil prices collapsed, draining Soviet foreign reserves.

Andrei Sakharov strongly denounced the invasion from the outset, labeling it a "criminal adventure." He called on the international community to pressure the Soviet Union, including supporting a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. His outspoken opposition — framing the invasion as a threat to world peace and a violation of international law — struck the already frayed nerves of Brezhnev and the Politburo. They channeled their rising anxiety toward Sakharov, exiling him to Gorky in January 1980.

He continued his calls to end the war from that internal exile. Returning in 1989 and elected to the People's Congress, Sakharov again forcefully condemned the Afghan invasion from the public tribune. The Soviet apparatchiks — the majority among the Congress's deputies — listened with soured faces, perhaps dimly aware that the unwinnable war had been but one thread in a tapestry of interlocking failures that would soon bring the USSR itself to an end.

А.Д. Сахаров отвечает на нападки во время 1 съезда народных депутатов СССР в 1989 году.

05/05/2026

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.

04/29/2026

Katya Nikitina Appointed the latest Sakharov Fellow at Bochum.

The literary scholar from Siberia will be based at Ruhr University Bochum from May to October, where she will research the cultural reckoning with the ecological consequences of Russia's war against Ukraine.

Nikitina observes that "in wartime, environmental activism has become a critical site where ecological and political struggles converge. Publicly addressing issues such as the burial of nuclear waste, the creation of anthrax-contaminated livestock burial sites, the illegal exploitation of protected natural areas, or advocating for bans on hunting endangered species is increasingly framed by the state as an act of political disloyalty. Environmental advocacy is now routinely equated with 'discrediting' the Russian Army or 'inciting interethnic hatred'."

This context underscores the need for new research and ethical frameworks capable of recognising non-human life as a subject of care, responsibility, and justice. Nikitina's work is informed by Andrei Sakharov's example of intellectual integrity and ethical accountability, extending these concerns to forms of life and vulnerability that remain largely excluded from dominant political frameworks.

Nikitina completed her BA in Literary Studies at Krasnoyarsk State University before going on to study Polish philology in Katowice, Upper Silesia, where she also completed her doctorate in comparative literature. Her research sits within the field of Animal Studies — an interdisciplinary discipline engaging with ethical and political questions at the intersection of human and non-human life. She is a co-founder of the Posthuman Studies Lab, a post-disciplinary research platform that brings together scholars and artists to critically reimagine the ecological and political legacies of post-Soviet territories.

The Sakharov Fellowships are funded by the German Federal Foreign Office as part of the project "Pathways to Coming to Terms with War and Dictatorship" and are implemented in partnership with Ruhr University Bochum and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF).

04/27/2026

Chernobyl: Scientific Honesty and Political Openness to Assure Nuclear Safety

On 26 April 1986, the Unit 4 RBMK reactor at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl went out of control during a planned test at low power, leading to an explosion and fire that demolished the reactor building and released large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere.

A toxic combination of defective reactor design, deficient safety analysis, disregard for operating procedures, prioritization of power production over safety, and lack of independent regulatory oversight led to the worst nuclear reactor accident in history.

The RBMK design was developed by the same organizations involved in Soviet nuclear weapons, so the same extreme level of secrecy was brought to civilian power reactors. It was forbidden to make public any information about incidents even at foreign plants — technical information about the Three Mile Island accident was classified in the USSR.

Forty years on, the site itself remains a sobering reminder. The EU has financed more than €1 billion worth of activities in Ukraine for nuclear safety, including €423 million for the New Safe Confinement — a massive arch structure placed over the destroyed Unit 4 to prevent radioactive leakage. Following a Russian drone strike in February 2025, this structure was badly damaged. The war in Ukraine has given the anniversary a particularly grim dimension, with the world reminded that nuclear facilities face threats that go beyond engineering.

Well before Chernobyl, Sakharov had been one of the first scientists to publicly quantify the danger of nuclear fallout. In 1958, Sakharov published an estimate of the long-term health impacts from carbon-14 produced by nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere — his first public expression of concern about the weapons work in which he was involved.

When the full scale of the disaster became apparent to him, Sakharov used his moral authority to make a powerful public argument — one that has shaped nuclear safety thinking ever since. Sakharov concluded that mankind cannot renounce nuclear power, and that technical means must be found to guarantee its absolute safety and exclude the possibility of another Chernobyl.

Sakharov put it directly: "People concerned about the potential harmful consequences of the peaceful use of nuclear energy should concentrate their efforts not on attempts to ban nuclear power, but instead on demands to assure its complete safety."

Perhaps Sakharov's most lasting contribution was not a specific technical fix, but his insistence on openness as a prerequisite for safety. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he argued that scientific secrecy and political control of information were themselves dangerous — and Chernobyl dramatically proved him right. He frequently emphasized that nuclear dangers demanded international cooperation and transparency, and his stated concerns about proliferation and the risks of secrecy became central to the post-Chernobyl consensus on nuclear governance.

Sakharov was not the engineer who redesigned nuclear reactors after Chernobyl, but his contributions operated at a deeper level. He was among the first scientists to rigorously quantify radiation risk to the public, he helped bring about the first nuclear test ban treaty, he argued forcefully (and presciently) that secrecy was incompatible with safety, and after Chernobyl he publicly championed both the underground siting of reactors and universal containment structures — ideas very much in line with modern best practice. His greatest legacy may be the principle that scientific honesty and political openness are not luxuries but essential components of nuclear safety itself.