The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxv, [3], 397, [7] pages. Introduction by Joshua Rubenstein. Footnotes. Illustrations. Chronology. List of Abbreviations. Annotated List of KGB Documents. Glossary of Names. Selected Bibliography. Index. Documents translated by Ella Shmulevich, Efrem Yankelevich, and Alla Zeide. This is one of The Annals of Communism Series. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (21 May 1921 - 14 December 1989) was a Soviet physicist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world. Although he spent his career in physics in the Soviet program of nuclear weapons, overseeing the development of thermonuclear weapons, Sakharov also did fundamental work in understanding particle physics, magnetism, and physical cosmology. Sakharov is mostly known for his political activism for individual freedom, human rights, civil liberties and reforms in Russia, for which, he was deemed as a dissident and faced persecution from the Soviet establishment. In his memory, the Sakharov Prize is established by the European Parliament which is awarded annually for the people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms. Joshua Rubenstein is an American activist, writer and scholar of literature, dissent, and politics in the former Soviet Union. He won a National Jewish Book Award in Eastern European studies in 2002 for his book Stalin's Secret Pogrom. Alexander Gribanov is a literary scholar and archivist. He was the literary editor of the Chronicle of Current Events in Moscow. Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989), a brilliant physicist and the principal designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, later became a human rights activist and, as a result, a source of profound irritation to the Kremlin. This book publishes for the first time ever KGB files on Sakharov that became available during Boris Yeltsin's presidency. The documents reveal the untold story of KGB surveillance of Sakharov from 1968 until his death in 1989 and of the regime's efforts to intimidate and silence him. The disturbing archival materials show the KGB to have had a profound lack of understanding of the spiritual and moral nature of the human rights movement and of Sakharov's role as one of its leading figures.