Volume 52, Number 1 · January 13, 2005
Hero
By Aryeh Neier
Defending Human Rights in Russia: Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969–2003
by Emma Gilligan
Routledge Curzon, 253 pp., $95.00
In December 1986, Soviet officials suddenly installed a telephone in the apartment to which Andrei Sakharov had been exiled in Gorky for almost seven years. The KGB agents who had kept him under constant surveillance disappeared, and President Mikhail Gorbachev telephoned to inform him that he was free to return to Moscow 'to resume your patriotic work.' Sa-kharov was by then known internationally as a brilliant physicist, the father of the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb, as well as an advocate of nuclear disarmament and an outspoken proponent of human rights. He had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, and had been condemned to internal exile in January 1980 for denouncing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and for calling for a boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games the following summer.
Review, 3886 words
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