The Andrei Sakharov Foundation

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.

08/28/2026

The Andrei Sakharov Excellence Program, launched by the ASF in 2023 at Tel Aviv University's Physics Department, continues to cultivate academic distinction among the university's most talented undergraduate and graduate students. The program embeds students in active research groups led by world-renowned faculty, offering opportunities across quantum science, particle physics, cosmology, and condensed matter physics.

The 2025–2026 cohort of nineteen students once again demonstrated the program's extraordinary capacity to deliver research experiences of the highest order. Their work — addressing some of the most profound questions of our time, from the nature of dark matter and the birth of the universe to quantum technologies, advanced materials, and the deepest structures of mathematics — speaks to both their exceptional talent and the outstanding mentorship of Tel Aviv University's faculty.

The ASF is proud to further Dr. Sakharov's scientific legacy through the nurturing of young scientists, and looks forward to welcoming the next cohort of Sakharov physics scholars for the 2026–2027 academic year.

08/26/2026

In Memoriam: Ekaterina Yurievna Shikhanovich (1956 – 2026)

Ekaterina Yurievna Shikhanovich, a driving force behind the Sakharov Archive — the first private archive in modern Russia — passed away on August 21st, after a brief hospitalization at one of Moscow's leading hospitals.

Her father, Yuri Shikhanovich, a formidable professor of mathematics, belonged to the Soviet dissident movement; arrested and sent to the camps twice, he became a close friend of the Sakharov family along the way. Ekaterina grew up inside this world — as a young girl, she helped political prisoners and carried her trusted camera to document events that would later become history.

The Sakharov Archive was Elena Bonner's brainchild, built by the careful hands of Ekaterina — a trained chemistry teacher — together with Bela Koval. Over the years, the two women amassed thousands of documents and photographs, countless video recordings, books, and personal items belonging to Andrei Sakharov, shaping the sprawling collection into a rigorously organized archive.

Reserved and unassuming, Ekaterina drew the quiet affection of everyone who had the privilege of knowing her. Word of her passing brought condolences from around the world, and left her close friends grieving deeply.

Ekaterina could not imagine life without the Sakharov Archive. Now, the Archive must learn to imagine life without her.

May her memory be a blessing. The ASF extends its deepest condolences to Ekaterina Yurievna's friends and family.



About Yuri Shikhanovich:
https://www.facebook.com/SakharovFoundation/posts/pfbid0pogr2C4c6HaJg3BWCqtVsF8TGDtbAXyTs3kAN2UQpWjXX1XvLwmXp625THSRVE4yl

08/25/2026

08/19/2026

Lev Shlosberg, Russian anti-war politician, sentenced to 11 years in a penal colony

On Monday, a court in Pskov — a northwestern Russian city near the Estonian border — convicted Lev Shlosberg, deputy chairman of Yabloko, Russia's only registered opposition party still openly opposing the war. He was sentenced to 11 years and one month, just short of the 12 years prosecutors had demanded. The verdict landed the same day Russia's Supreme Court rejected Yabloko's appeal against being barred from September's parliamentary elections.

Shlosberg was convicted under wartime censorship laws — passed within days of Russia's 2022 invasion — for "discrediting" the armed forces and spreading "false information" about them. The charges stemmed from his participation in an anti-war debate and a social media repost.

"For nothing more than taking part in an anti-war debate and sharing a social media post, Lev Shlosberg faces more than 11 years behind bars. His arbitrary prosecution and sentencing are blatant reprisals for exercising his right to freedom of expression to call for peace," said Marie Struthers, Amnesty International's Eastern Europe and Central Asia Director.

A 63-year-old historian by training, Shlosberg has been a fixture of Pskov public life since the 1990s and a prominent critic of the Putin regime since the 2010s. His draconian sentence carries a personal edge, too: in 2014, he exposed the secret burials of Russian paratroopers killed in Donbas — at a time when the Kremlin was flatly denying any military involvement there. He was brutally attacked and hospitalized shortly after. Twelve years later, that unresolved anger appears to have found its outlet in a politically motivated conviction.

The sentence has drawn sharp condemnation from human rights organizations and Western governments, and protests from Russia's remaining liberal opposition. The ASF believes the sentence must be quashed and calls for Shlosberg's immediate release.

08/18/2026

Ruth Grigorievna Bonner (18 August 1900 – 25 December 1987)

"Ad mortem," an ambulance doctor concluded flatly, leaning over a frail elderly woman in the throes of a severe cardiac episode. No one around her understood the Latin — except Ruth Bonner herself. Prostrate in a tiny guest room at Andrei Sakharov's dacha, the 73-year-old, gymnasium-educated before the revolution, understood perfectly. A thin hand, every finger bone visible, rose from the blanket and made a fig — the Russian gesture of defiance. A survivor of Stalin's purges, Ruth looked frail, but her will was forged of steel. She had no plans of leaving just yet.

Born in Siberia in 1900 to a Jewish family, Ruth became a committed communist in her youth. Her second husband, Georgy Alikhanov, was a founding official of Armenia's Communist Party — and it was he who legally adopted her daughter, Lusik, better known to the world as Elena Bonner. The family's Bolshevik privilege collapsed under the weight of the very system Ruth had devoted her life to. By the mid-1930s, she was quietly breaking down — weeping into her husband's shoulder, unable to reconcile the mounting "guilt" of comrades she'd trusted for years. In 1937, the purges reached her own doorstep: Alikhanov was arrested and shot; Ruth was sent to the Gulag. In January 1946, she returned from the camps briefly — so gaunt and ragged that her own daughter mistook her for a beggar on the doorstep and offered her a piece of bread. Ruth was then sent into internal exile, and it was only after Stalin's death that she was among the first to be rehabilitated.

When Bonner married Sakharov in 1972, he took an immediate liking to his mother-in-law. But history wasn't finished with Ruth: when Sakharov was exiled to Gorky in 1980, fearing for her mother's health, Bonner arranged for Ruth to visit grandchildren in Boston. The visit lasted seven years. Only after Sakharov and Bonner's own return from exile in 1986 did Ruth finally come home, landing in Moscow in June 1987 with her granddaughter and great-grandchildren in tow — grateful to America, and, by all accounts, a softer, warmer person than the one who had left.

She died six months later, on Christmas Day, 1987 — deeply loved by friends and family until the end.

(Episodes recounted in Elena Bonner's memoir, Mothers and Daughters, and by Sakharov's granddaughter Marina in the book Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov and Friends.)

08/12/2026

Yuri Rost — legendary journalist, writer, photographer, and traveler — once received an unusual greeting from a colleague at Literaturnaya Gazeta in late December 1986: "You of all people will certainly be at the Yaroslavl railway station tomorrow." Rost didn't need to ask why. All of Moscow was anticipating the return of Andrei Sakharov after nearly seven years in internal exile in Gorky.

Rost's bond with Sakharov went back further, though. He first interviewed the physicist at his home near the Kurchatov Institute in 1970, just as Sakharov was rebuilding his life after the untimely death of his first wife, Klavdia.

Days after welcoming Sakharov back to Moscow and freedom on December 22, 1986, Rost visited the couple at home, taking more of what would become iconic photographs of Sakharov and Bonner.

Known for carrying forward the humanist tradition of post-war photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ed van der Elsken, and Leonard Freed, Rost became a close family friend of the Sakharovs. His portrait of Sakharov was etched on a commemorative medal marking Sakharov's 70th anniversary in 1991. Years later, after spending many hours in conversation with the by-then-widowed Bonner, Rost published Sakharov. Kefir Needs to Be Warmed: A Love Story Told by Elena Bonner to Yuri Rost.

Rost's decades-long career has brought him some of Russia's highest honors, including the State Prize of the Russian Federation (2000), the Triumph Prize for lifetime achievement in literature and the arts (2001), and the Union of Journalists' Golden Pen of Russia (2004). He has also worked in television and film, notably hosting the documentary series Ragtime, or Torn Time on the Russia-Kultura channel since 2015, exploring the history of culture and art through his own distinctive lens.

Now in his eighties, Rost remains remarkably active. He continues as a columnist for Novaya Gazeta, and in recent years has published a steady stream of new books, including Free Flights in a Hammock (2022) — a finalist for Russia's "Prose of the Year" — Third Wheel: Conversations at the Stable (2023), and both Two Walks with Ilya Kabakov and A Passerby Walked By, Resembling a Passerby (2024).

Rost lives in Moscow.

08/04/2026

Floating head of a freedom thinker

Peter Shapiro, a prolific Russian-American sculptor, created two bronze portraits of Andrei Sakharov. The first was cast in 1989, the year Sakharov died. The second, only subtly different, was unveiled in Washington, DC, in April 2002 at the entrance to Russia House, 1800 Connecticut Avenue — a gift from the sculptor marking Congress's decision to posthumously grant Sakharov US citizenship. The first version remains in Moscow; the second, after standing at Russia House for two decades, disappeared from public view when the building closed in 2022.

By Sakharov's own account, and by the testimony of those fortunate enough to have known him, he was an optimist. As a theoretical physicist, he accepted that the future is undetermined and that many outcomes are possible — and from this he drew his faith in humanity's ability to answer the demands of reason. He liked to say, "Do as you must, and be what it may." And yet Shapiro chose to capture a sombre, almost tragic expression: the scientist supporting his drooping head in a moment of despair.

Perhaps, as is often the case with artists, Shapiro was projecting something of his own history. His mother, Nina Hollander, grew up in Brooklyn and held a degree from Columbia University; in 1932 she left Depression-era America for the Soviet Union in search of a better life. There she fell for a young pharmacist and perfume-maker, Yefim Shapiro, and the couple had two sons — Peter, born in Moscow in 1933, and Yuri. In 1938 the family was shattered: Yefim was arrested, and Nina herself vanished, held for two years in Moscow's prisons on suspicion of being an American spy. The boys were sent to an orphanage for "Children of Enemies of the People" and given a new surname to erase their past, until an uncle managed to get them out. Yefim returned from the camps in 1948 only to be rearrested almost at once; he did not come home for good until 1954, the year after Stalin's death — and by then he rarely spoke at all. Nina lived out her life as a Soviet citizen, having had to give up her American passport to be allowed to travel; she died in 1984. That cancelled passport became her son's unlikely inheritance.

In the years that followed, Shapiro built a long career as a Soviet sculptor, working across a wide range of subjects, from military and cultural figures to, eventually, Sakharov himself. After the Soviet collapse, alarmed by the resurgence of antisemitism and the rise of ultranationalist politics, Shapiro used his mother's old passport to reclaim American citizenship and relocate to the United States. His work can now be found not only across the former Soviet Union, but in Greece, Iceland, and the US, where he spent his final years.

07/31/2026

Journalism as an Act of Conscience

The Russian word поступок — rendered here as "act of conscience" — carries a weight that resists easy translation. It means not merely an action, but a deliberate, principled deed taken at personal cost; a choice that defines character. It is precisely the right word for what Andrei Sakharov embodied throughout his life: the willingness to act on conscience regardless of consequence. And it is the right word for what independent journalism, at its best, demands.
Sakharov understood that authoritarianism does not only suppress dissent — it corrupts the information environment on which any society depends to correct its errors. A regime that controls what citizens know about their own country, their own war, their own leaders, becomes incapable of self-correction. The role of the honest journalist in such a system is not merely professional — it is civic, moral, and in the deepest sense political. Free journalism is not a luxury of open societies; it is one of the essential defences against their closure. Without it, the space for dissent shrinks, accountability disappears, and the conditions for authoritarian consolidation fall quietly into place. The history of the 20th century offers no shortage of evidence for this. The history of the 21st is beginning to add its own.

It was in this spirit that an annual prize bearing Sakharov's name — За журналистику как поступок, Journalism as an Act of Conscience — was established in Russia, first awarded around 2001-2002 and formally endowed with the blessing of Elena Bonner. Administered by the Glasnost Defence Foundation in Moscow, it was awarded each year on 10th December, International Human Rights Day. The jury at various points included Nobel Prize-winning Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich and the popular Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich, then based in Munich. The panel of judges was later headed by the world chess champion Garry Kasparov. The prize recognised both investigative journalism and opinion writing — work that bore witness, named names, and accepted the risks that came with doing so.

Among its laureates were Anna Politkovskaya, the Novaya Gazeta correspondent murdered in Moscow in 2006 for her reporting on Chechnya; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, recognised for articles published from prison in Novaya Gazeta; Zoya Svetova; Boris Vishnevsky; Dmitry Glukhovsky; Radio Svoboda, and Ukrainian outlets including the newspaper Den, Krym.Realii, and Ukrainska Pravda. The list of thirty-three laureates reflects both the breadth of the prize's reach and the deteriorating conditions for independent journalism in Russia over the period it ran.

The prize was funded throughout by Pyotr (Peter) Vins — a man whose own biography reads like a condensed history of Soviet repression and its long aftermath. His grandfather, an American Protestant minister, emigrated to the Soviet Union to preach and died in the Gulag. His father, also a minister, was imprisoned in the 1970s; Andrei Sakharov publicly supported him. Peter himself became a dissident and a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. His father was eventually exchanged for a Soviet spy and expelled to the United States; Peter followed. Returning to Russia in the 1990s, he built a transportation business and in 2001-2002 established the journalism prize as a personal tribute to Sakharov, funding it until 2018. In 2010, a criminal investigation for tax evasion — which Elena Bonner publicly declared politically motivated — forced him to leave Russia again. He moved to Kyiv, remaining there until Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, after which he resettled in the United States. As recently as 2024, he was reported to be helping refugees through Catholic Charities in Oregon — a quiet final chapter consistent with a life spent in service to others.