https://sakharovfoundation.org/

The Andrei Sakharov Foundation, Springfield, VA (2026)

10/16/2026

A Fragment of History, Rendered in Turquoise

From November 2025 to January 2026, the National Gallery of Armenia hosted "History Pictures," an exhibition by young Armenian painter Davit Kochunts (b. 1988). Working from documentary photographs and screenshots, Kochunts explored history as something unstable and fragmented — a shifting mosaic of elusive narratives rather than a fixed record.

The series brought together an unlikely cast: portraits of Luis Buñuel, Michel Foucault, and Andrei Sakharov, alongside images of Armenia's recent conflicts, Marilyn Monroe's funeral, and fragments pulled from social media.

Sakharov's portrait is rendered like an accidental video freeze-frame — his chin cut off by a thick black line. Yet the palette Kochunts chooses, soft turquoise, blue, and grey, gives the image an unexpected warmth.

10/12/2026

Nobel Peace Prize 2026: Navi Pillay

Navi Pillay, an 85-year-old South African jurist and former judge of the International Criminal Court, has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize for promoting international law.

In its press release, the Nobel committee stated: "The Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 goes to a person who with exceptional courage and integrity has led the way towards a more comprehensive global legal order. This year's laureate has been instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted."

The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded 125 years ago. Even then, the Norwegian Nobel Committee underscored the importance of resolving conflicts through international law. Over the decades, more and more conflicts have come to be addressed through diplomacy, treaties and legal mechanisms rather than threats and warfare — a shift many see as a foundation for a more peaceful world. And yet today the system of international law is under significant pressure, and its institutions are increasingly under attack.

President Trump has long sought this award — and in a year that included a war he launched against Iran, he maintained he deserved "8 Nobel Peace Prizes, not just one." On hearing the news, he called the decision "disgraceful and embarrassing," an "indelible stain" on Norway, and said: "We will not forget, Norway."

The award was not without further controversy. Last year, Pillay chaired the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza amounted to genocide — a finding Israel strongly rejects. While the Nobel committee's citation made no mention of this, Israel responded to the award with sharp criticism.

10/08/2026

1979 Sakharov: A Piece of Sky Named for a Dissident

On August 1, 1981, the Minor Planet Center officially published the naming of a stony asteroid from the Vesta family: 1979 Sakharov — a name chosen in honour of Andrei Sakharov.

The asteroid itself had been discovered two decades earlier, on September 24, 1960, during the Palomar–Leiden survey, by astronomers Cornelis and Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld and Tom Gehrels. It was originally catalogued simply as 2006 P-L. (Its number, 1979, is just its place in the sequence of named minor planets — it has nothing to do with any date in its history.)

The naming came at a pointed moment: Sakharov was then in internal exile, and the international scientific community used what channels it had — honours, citations, small acts like this one — to signal that he would not be forgotten.

1979 Sakharov is roughly 4.8 km across and orbits in the inner asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, at a distance of 2.1–2.6 AU. It completes one orbit of the Sun every 3 years and 8 months — and has been quietly doing so ever since, carrying his name with it.

The rendering of the 1979 Sakharov made by Spacereference.org

10/07/2026

And the winner is… Francis Halzen

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics to Francis Halzen — recognition for an idea so audacious it took nearly three decades to prove: that a mountain of Antarctic ice could become humanity's eye on the most violent events in the universe.

Halzen, a Belgian-American scientist based at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, first proposed burying light detectors deep in polar ice to catch neutrinos — ghostly particles that pass through planets, stars, and people almost untouched. Critics doubted it could work. He spent decades proving them wrong, ultimately leading the team that built the IceCube Neutrino Observatory: a cubic kilometre of ice at the South Pole, threaded with thousands of basketball-sized sensors watching for the faint flashes neutrinos leave behind.

The payoff came in stages. In 2013, IceCube recorded the first high-energy neutrinos ever traced to sources beyond our solar system. Then, in 2017, it achieved something science had never done before: it traced a single neutrino back to a specific, erupting galaxy billions of light-years away — a blazar called TXS 0506+056 — opening an entirely new field now known as multi-messenger astronomy, where neutrinos, light, and gravitational waves are read together as one picture of the cosmos.

The Nobel committee honored Halzen "for decisive contributions to the IceCube neutrino observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin." He receives SEK 12 million — about US$1.2m.

10/02/2026

Ms Devin Becker, a PhD student of Scott Hughes, becomes the Inaugural Sakharov Fellow

MIT names its inaugural Sakharov Fellow: astrophysics PhD student Devin Becker advised by Scott Hughes, professor of physics and associate department head at MIT. The honor carries special resonance at an institution whose physicists — led by Herman Feshbach — were among Sakharov's most persistent advocates during his Soviet-era repression.

Andrei Sakharov, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his human rights advocacy, also ranks among the twentieth century's most consequential physicists, with foundational work spanning nuclear and particle physics, muon-catalyzed fusion, plasma physics, and cosmology. ASF carries that legacy forward by backing promising young physicists at pivotal career moments — support that can shape not only a life, but sometimes a field.

MIT is a fitting home for this Fellowship for reasons beyond the department's reputation. When Soviet authorities exiled Sakharov to Gorky in 1980, MIT physicists were among his most persistent advocates. Herman Feshbach, who chaired the Department of Physics and later led the American Physical Society, pressed Soviet authorities on Sakharov's behalf and visited him in Moscow after his release. The founders of MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics were similarly engaged in supporting scientists silenced behind the Iron Curtain — a history preserved in the MIT Institute Archives and in the scholarly record of the International Sakharov Hearings, published by MIT Press.

The connection continues today: this past March, the American Physical Society awarded its Andrei Sakharov Prize to MIT's own Professor Yoel Fink, for his defense of academic freedom and human rights in science.

In establishing this Fellowship, MIT and ASF together keep alive a name — and a set of commitments — that this institution helped protect through difficult times.

https://www.space.mit.edu/people/devin-becker/

10/01/2026

Pushkin House Book Prize 2026

The Pushkin House Book Prize, created in 2013, showcases high quality new non-fiction books published in English that examine Russian culture, history, politics and more. It looks beyond the borders of modern Russia, to include countries, nations and communities which have been affected by the Russian Empire, Soviet Union or Russian Federation. It rewards books that are well-written, well-researched and accessible to the non-specialist reader. Translations from other languages are particularly welcome.

This year’s winner is an American scholar Sophie Pinkham, a writer specialising in Soviet and post-Soviet, socialist and post-socialist culture and Professor of Practice in the Comparative Literature Department at Cornell University. She received the prestigious prize for her book The Oak and The Larch, A Forest History of Russia and its Empires (William Collins, 2026).

The Oak and The Larch is the first English-language account of Russia’s forests to explore them through both environmental and cultural lenses. With one-fifth of the world’s trees growing within Russia’s borders, they have been both witness and an inseparable part of the country’s course through history, from their role in the lives of Indigenous Siberian societies that existed in symbiosis with the forest to medieval societies and the Soviet period. The book is a tribute to a pivotal natural factor that became so symbolic, and yet overlooked, in Russia’s political and cultural history.

According to Pulitzer-winning Benjamin Nathans, professor of history at UPenn and last year’s Pushkin House Book Prize laureate, Pinkham’s book is remarkable for its exquisite descriptions, poetic exploration of the enduring questions of power and identity, and its overall originality.

The shortlist of the prize includes "AIDS in Soviet Russia: A Story of Deception, Despair and Hope" by Rustam Alexander, "Please Live: The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me" by Lana Estemirova, "The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin and the Decline of Modern Russia" by Mikhail Fishman, translated by Michele Berdy, "The Closing of the Russian Mind: How Putin's Ideology Took the Nation Hostage" by Andrei Kolesnikov, "Russian Pendulum: Paradoxes, Practices and Patterns" by Alena Ledeneva and "The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and its Empires" by Sophie Pinkham.

09/14/2026

Yaroslav Shcherbakov removed from the ballot
.. The division of mankind threatens it with destruction.

A Chelyabinsk court cited this Sakharov's quotation — bundled together with an image from a Banksy mural and a line from Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko about the virtues of negotiation over war — as grounds for a copyright complaint against Yaroslav Shcherbakov, the regional leader of the Yabloko party, striking him from the ballot for September's State Duma elections. It was, in fact, the second time in a month that the authorities had removed him: weeks earlier, Russia's Supreme Court had already struck down the federal party list that Shcherbakov himself had led, on similarly technical grounds.

Yabloko is one of Russia's oldest political parties, its ranks filled over the decades with former dissidents and human rights activists. For years, Putin's regime tolerated it as a useful outlet for political mockery — a party permitted just enough space to prove that dissent existed and that it didn't matter. Its best result came in 1993, when it won 7.8% of the vote; support declined steadily after, and it has held no federal Duma seats since 2007.

This year looked different. Running under the slogan "For Peace and Freedom!" — the only registered party in the race with an openly antiwar platform — Yabloko saw its support climb sharply within days of launching its campaign. Reported closed-door polling put its rating as high as 9–10%, nearly double the 5% threshold for parliamentary representation. Videos in support of the party circulated widely on TikTok and Instagram, and endorsements arrived from unexpected quarters, including from activists in Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation. It was not a fringe curiosity; it was a real and rapid consolidation of protest votes behind the one party willing to say plainly that the war should end.

That, evidently, was the problem. Having barred Yabloko from the federal ballot altogether, the regime turned to harassing and disqualifying the party's remaining candidates in single-mandate constituencies on similarly manufactured grounds — Shcherbakov, a 38-year-old lawyer, among them. What his case makes plain is not merely that Sakharov's words remain dangerous in today's Russia, but that a genuine hunger for peace, wherever it surfaces on a ballot, is treated by the Kremlin as a threat to be dismantled with the same bureaucratic apparatus once trained on the dissidents of Sakharov's own generation.

09/14/2026

From Andrei Sakharov's Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom

The division of mankind threatens it with destruction. Civilization is imperiled by: a universal thermonuclear war, catastrophic hunger for most of mankind, stupefaction from the narcotic of "mass culture," and bureaucratized dogmatism, a spreading of mass myths that put entire peoples and continents under the power of cruel and treacherous demagogues, and destruction or degeneration from the unforeseeable consequences of swift changes in the conditions of life on our planet.

In the face of these perils, any action increasing the division of mankind, any preaching of the incompatibility of world ideologies and nations is madness and a crime. Only universal cooperation under conditions of intellectual freedom and the lofty moral ideals of socialism and labor, accompanied by the elimination of dogmatism and pressures of the concealed interests of ruling classes, will preserve civilization.

This is the opening thesis of Sakharov's influential 1968 essay, Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom. Fifty-eight years later, quoting it publicly in Russia can end a political career.

09/07/2026

In the course of celebrating Andrei Sakharov's centennial in Russia in 2021, his granddaughter Marina joined forces with prominent Russian and foreign scientists to create an endowed physics scholarship in Sakharov's name, supporting talented young scientists at two universities with deep ties to his career as a physicist: the Physics Department at MGU, Sakharov's alma mater, and MIPT, where he served as a professor in the 1960s.

This year, the Andrei Sakharov Science Endowment Fund — a Russia-registered endowment — will appoint its sixth cohort of Sakharov Scholars at MIPT (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology), one of Russia's leading universities. Sixteen students pursuing MSc and PhD degrees in fields spanning Sakharov's own broad scientific interests will receive Sakharov scholarships of 60,000 rubles a month (roughly US$700, totaling some US$8,400 annually.)

Candidates are selected each early autumn by a faculty committee at MIPT, using criteria developed jointly by the Fund and the university. Among the Sakharov Scholars each year are PhD students conducting their research at the Theoretical Department of FIAN, the Lebedev Physics Institute — the very institution where Sakharov earned his PhD in 1947 under Nobel laureate Igor Tamm. It was from FIAN that colleagues including Nobel laureate Vitaly Ginzburg and Kavli laureate Andrei Linde set out on their monthly visits to Sakharov during his exile in Gorky, and it was to FIAN that Sakharov returned the very next day after Mikhail Gorbachev freed him in December 1986.

09/03/2026

Andrei Sakharov in Nizhny Novgorod Street Art

Julianna Kulugur and Dmitry Koldarev, two artists from Nizhny Novgorod, have launched a new collaborative project, "Street Postcard," aimed at bringing the city's history to life through visual art. More than sixteen of their collages — built from old photographs, paint, pine cones, and seashells, each framed in the duo's signature gold frame — now grace the buildings whose stories they set out to tell, with historical figures at the heart of each piece.

This past July, the artists installed a postcard portrait of Andrei Sakharov on the tower block where he spent nearly seven years in internal exile, cut off from all but a narrow circle: his wife, children, granddaughter, and a handful of colleagues from FIAN in Moscow. His former apartment there is now home to the Andrei Sakharov Museum. Museum director Elena Yerysheva welcomed the new installation beside the museum's entrance, reflecting on the deep resonance of street art in an urban setting like this one. And indeed, in Nizhny Novgorod's Prioksky District — a landscape of largely indistinguishable Soviet-era apartment blocks — a project that sparks a bit of art into daily life, illuminating the city's own history along the way, feels like a genuinely wonderful thing.

The Andrei Sakharov Foundation

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