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“... Name the greatest Russian physicist of this century. The public vote would go for Andrei Sakharov – but for moral stature rather than for contributions to knowledge. A generation ago, Pyotr Kapitza would have been supported by many, in the mistaken belief that he was the master mind behind the Russian Bomb ...”

“... those who had remained within the official fold, like Yevtushenko, and those who had not, like Sakharov. When the anti-Stalinist organisation Memorial was founded in 1988 both men joined its leadership. For Sakharov, Memorial was less important than the battles he fought with other dissident colleagues for the rights of ...”

“... times, and despite assuming secular forms, still shapes the ways in which Jews are talked about. Andrei Sakharov intimated as much when he remarked, on the occasion of the Sharansky trial, that in the Soviet Union ‘anti-semitism has been raised to the level of a state religion in a godless state.’ It is also possible to see this tendency to ...”

“... War. The surprise of foreign observers was not lost on the dissidents themselves. As one of them, Andrei Amalrik, put it, it was as if an ichthyologist had discovered talking fish. Suddenly there were natives inside the closely guarded Soviet aquarium who could not only speak, but speak their own minds. Smuggled texts found their way to the West, where they ...”

“... struggle for human rights. For twenty years, from 1948 until his dismissal in 1968, Sakharov masterminded the scientific groundwork for the development and perfection of ever more lethal atomic weapons, blindly and obsessively absorbed in work that he describes as a theoretician’s paradise. His inventive genius was rewarded by election to full ...”

“... propaganda section of an artillery regiment testifies to the extraordinary moral authority which Andrei Sakharov exercised: ‘When I hear people accusing us of killing people over there I could smash their faces in. If you weren’t there and didn’t live through it you have no right to judge us. The only exception was ...”

“... in the USSR into following a rigid party line, and in 1946 theory was ossified in the claim by Andrei Zhdanov, the secretary of the Central Committee of the CP, that the world was divided into two camps: one Soviet and ‘democratic’; the other US-led and ‘imperialistic’. Science, according to the Zhdanov thesis, both reflected and contributed to ...”

“... at Chernobyl was a direct descendant of the prototype built by the team of scientists, including Andrei Sakharov, which formed around Igor Kurchatov and, shortly after the war, developed an atomic bomb. That reactor was designed to meet Kurchatov’s requirements by the engineer Nikolai Dollezhal and was built at the record speed considered advisable ...”

“... NPO Mashinostroyeniya, with its ten thousand employees in Rostov. (At almost the same time, Andrei Sakharov was busy persuading Gorbachev that America’s ‘Star Wars’ programme could never pose a significant threat to Soviet missiles.) The Albatross programme survived the fall of the Soviet Union, though only just: mothballed in the 1990s, it ...”

“... but it was invented for rather different purposes.’ Later in the same interview he noted that ‘Andrei Sakharov said that Stalin was anti-Ukrainian, and other people have said the same. But he was anti-Ukrainian because they gave him trouble. He was also anti a lot of other people.’ Three years earlier, Conquest had told the demographic historian ...”

“... into politics: the most influential were the Memorial Assocation built round the returned exile Andrei Sakharov, dedicated to exhuming the memory of the millions of zeks; the Moscow Tribune, the creation of Tatyana Zaslavskaya and Sakharov again, which stood for radical democratic and economic change; and the ...”

“... were famous largely for being famous in contemporary Western media coverage. But the physicist Andrei Sakharov was a genuine high achiever in his field who had a well worked-out human rights message. General Petr Grigorenko was a professor at a military academy. Pavel Litvinov, grandson of Maxim, Stalin’s foreign minister, had a famous relative, as ...”

“... a friend from his student years. Some time later, a microfilm copy of the manuscript was made by Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, and the microfilm was smuggled to the West in 1970 by Vladimir Voinovich. (It must have been a bit like Celebrity Dissident Pass-the-Parcel.) In 1980 the book was published for the first time; in 1985, Robert Chandler’s ...”

“... responsibility, but he was not the driving force behind the arrests’. He knew and revered Andrei Sakharov, and was reluctant to agree to his eventual banishment to Gorki. But Aleksandr Bovin, one of the shrewdest men on his staff, concluded that Brezhnev ‘simply did not understand the issue of democracy and human rights’. This became all too ...”

“... didn’t get in his way in Washington and Moscow. Arguing with Mrs Thatcher, swapping ideas with Andrei Sakharov or with heretical Italian communists – that was fun. Remaining patient with stupid old dinosaurs like Erich Honecker or evil goblins like Ceaușescu was a penance. Gorbachev seems to have regarded the ‘fraternal ruling parties’ as, on ...”