In his 68th year, modern Russia's greatest humanist and libertarian died in the way that most befitted his life -- in the midst of combat for his country's freedoms. He had spent the day of Dec. 14 at a tempestuous meeting of the Interregional Group, a coalition of liberal members of the Congress of People's Deputies that he had helped found. Exhorting, cajoling and arguing with his colleagues, he pressed for the establishment of an alternative political party in opposition to the Communists. Witnesses were shocked at how dramatically Sakharov had aged lately, as he made his faltering way to the podium around 6 p.m. Still, there was nothing irresolute about his short impassioned speech. He defended his earlier, controversial call for a nationwide strike to end the Communists' institutionalized monopoly of Soviet political life. "We cannot take responsibility for what the party is doing," he declared. "It's leading the country into a crisis by dragging its feet on perestroika."
Returning to his tiny Moscow flat, he exulted to his wife and friends, "Tomorrow there will be battle!" They were his last words. He then repaired to his private study to rest and prepare for the next day's passage at arms. Two hours later, his wife found him dead of a heart attack. His heart had been weakened by the stress of decades of persecution and by his hunger strikes and their inevitable consequence: forced feedings and deliberately inadequate medical care. "We won't let you die, but we will make you an invalid," a doctor told him.
"Sakharov was an honest man who was killed many times," said Vitali Korotich, editor of the liberal weekly Ogonyok. The saga of the deathblows inflicted upon Sakharov and his subsequent resurrection reads like a gripping secular sequel to the Russian Orthodox Lives of the Saints. Sakharov had certainly not been expected to survive the frightful ordeal that began in the mid-1970s, when he was targeted by the regime of Leonid Brezhnev as the nation's most dangerous dissident. Vilification in the press, together with threats of imprisonment and assassination, was a common occurrence.
In 1980, after Sakharov repeatedly denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he was placed under house arrest. He and his wife Elena Bonner were held in confinement by KGB guards 24 hours a day in a small apartment in Gorky, 261 miles east of Moscow. There both became increasingly incapacitated by heart disease. Word reached Moscow's dissident community that Bonner's lips and fingernails had turned blue and that Sakharov could hardly take a few steps without being winded. When the Soviets denied Bonner permission to go abroad for an open-heart operation, her husband went on a hunger strike. The authorities relented, but the ailing Sakharov remained under house arrest until 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev summoned him back to Moscow. Sakharov's first words as a free man were a demand for the liberation of all remaining Soviet political prisoners.