(1921-1989), physicist, political dissident, and member of the Council of People’s Deputies; recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.
Andrei Sakharov was born into an intelligentsia family in Moscow in 1921. Following in the footsteps of his physicist father, he enrolled at the physics faculty of Moscow University in 1938. Exempted from military service in World War II, Sakharov graduated in 1942 and spent the war years as an engineer at a munitions factory. There he met and married Klavdia Vikhireva (1919-1969), a laboratory technician.
After the war Sakharov undertook graduate work in the laboratory of Igor Tamm. He received his candidate’s degree (roughly equivalent to a Ph.D.) in 1947. In the late 1940s, Sakharov conducted research that led to the explosion of the Soviet hydrogen bomb in 1953. The same year, he was elected a full member of Academy of Sciences. At thirty-two, he was the youngest member in the history of that institution.
Sakharov began to support victims of political oppression as early as 1951 when he sheltered a Jewish mathematician fired from the Soviet weapons program. In 1958 he published two papers on the effects of nuclear explosions and appealed for a ban on atmospheric testing. With this work he began to move beyond physics into political activism.
The 1968 publication in the New York Times of Sakharov’s essay “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom” marked, he wrote in his memoirs, a “decisive step” in his development as a dissident. The essay called for disarmament and rapprochement with the West. As a result of the essay, Sakharov was banned from all weapons research. His wife died shortly thereafter, and Sakharov returned to Moscow and academic physics.
Sakharov became involved in the emerging human rights movement, cofounding the Moscow Human Rights Committee in 1970. Through articles, petitions, interviews, and demonstrations, Sakharov and others in the movement aided political prisoners and advocated the abolition of censorship, an independent judiciary, and the introduction of contested elections. Sakharov married fellow human rights activist Yelena Bonner in 1972. She represented him at the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1975. The Nobel Committee’s citation emphasized Sakharov’s linkage of human rights and international cooperation.
Sakharov’s denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 led to his exile to Gorky in January 1980. He maintained ties with
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Andrei Dimitrievich Sakharov. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS.
Moscow and the West via Bonner until her exile in 1984.
In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev invited Sakharov to return to Moscow. Sakharov immediately became an important and ubiquitous figure in the democratization movement. He was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989. He participated in drafting a new constitution. He lent his personal support to numerous causes, advocating amnesty for political prisoners, disarmament, peaceful solutions to ethnic conflicts, and limits on Gorbachev’s emergency powers. On the eve of his death in December 1989, he was working to abolish Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which enshrined the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. The article was abolished in March 1990. See also: BONNER, YELENA GEORGIEVNA; CONGRESS OF PEOPLE’S DEPUTIES; DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GLAS- NOST; HUMAN RIGHTS
Bonner, Elena. (1986). Alone Together, tr. Alexander Cook. New York: Knopf.
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Lourie, Richard. (2002). Sakharov: A Biography. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Sakharov, Andrei. (1989). Moscow and Beyond, 1986 to 1989, tr. Antonina Bouis. New York: Vintage Books. Sakharov, Andrei. (1990). Memoirs, tr. Richard Lourie. New York: Knopf.
LISA A. KIRSCHENBAUM SALT See STRATEGIC ARMS LIMITATION TREATIES. SALTYKOV-SHCHEDRIN LIBRARY See NATIONAL
LIBRARY OF RUSSIA.
(1826-1889), one of Russia’s greatest satirists.
Writing for leading radical journals of his time, Sovremennik (The Contemporary) (1862-1865) and Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) (1868-1889), Saltykov (pen name Shchedrin) created the most biting satires in Russian literature.
Among his best-known books are Istoriia odnogo goroda (History of a Town) (1869-1870) and Gospoda Golovlevy (The Golovlyov Family) (1875- 1880). History is an account of despotic mayors’ rule of a fictitious town Glupov (Foolsville). The mayors can be distinguished from each other only by the degree of their incompetence and ill will. The book is a satire on the whole institution of Russian statehood and the very spirit that pervades the Russian way of life: routine mismanagement, needless oppression, and pointless tyranny. At the same time, it is an attack on the Russian people for their passivity toward their own fate, for their acceptance of violence and oppression of their rulers.
The Golovlyov Family is a study of the institution of the family as cornerstone of society. In this novel, Saltykov describes moral and physical decline of three generations of a Russian gentry family. The nickname of the novel’s protagonist, Iudushka (“Little Judas”), whose treacherous behavior toward his nearest family is a matter of daily business, became part of Russian speech.
Among Saltykov’s other better-known works are Pompadur i pompadurshi (Pompadours and Pom- padouresses) (1863-1874), Sovremennaia idilliia
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
(Contemporary Idyll) (1877-1883), and Skazki (Fairy Tales) (1869-1886). See also: INTELLIGENTSIA; JOURNALISM
Draitser, Emil. (1994). Techniques of Satire: The Case of Saltykov-Shchedrin. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Saltykov-Shchedrin, M. E. (1977). The Golovlyov Family. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Saltykov-Shchedrin, M. E. (1984). The Pompadours. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
The fifty- to eighty thousand Sami (Lapps) live mostly in northern Norway and Sweden, some in Finland, and only about 3 percent (1,600) in the Kola peninsula of the Russian Federation. They represent less than 0.2 percent of the Murmansk oblast population. They reached the Gulf of Bothnia around 1300. Sami and Finnic languages are not mutually intelligible, having split some three thousand years ago. Three to ten Sami languages are distinguished, and the standard literary Sami in the Nordic countries is difficult to understand for the Kola (Kild) Sami, who are also unfamiliar with its Latin script. The reputed Asian features are actually encountered in only 25 percent of the Sami population.
Inhabiting most of present Finland and Karelia one thousand years ago, the Sami were pushed toward the Arctic Ocean by Scandinavian, Finnish, Russian, and Karelian booty seekers. Those in the west were forced to adopt Catholicism and later Lutheranism. Greek Orthodoxy was imposed on the Kola Samis in the early 1500s, after they were subjected by Novgorod around 1300. The first western Sami book was printed in 1619, and the Bible in 1811, while the first Kola Sami book appeared in 1878.
Reindeer herding remains a major occupation. The Soviet Russian authorities annihilated the traditional Kola Sami settlements in the 1930s, relocating them repeatedly to ever larger state or collective farms, where overgrazing severely reduced the number of reindeer. By now Lujaur (Lovozero in Russian) in central Kola remains the only partly Sami district. In 1937 Moscow ordered
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
