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Sakharov's most lasting contribution to mankind may have been his effort to limit nuclear testing and encourage multilateral disarmament, for which he won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. But he was best known as the indefatigable champion of the dissident, the downtrodden and the persecuted in his country. It was in this role that he incurred the deadly wrath of Brezhnev and the KGB. In the decade before Sakharov's banishment to Gorky, his two-room apartment was a haven for men and women who had fallen afoul of Soviet totalitarianism. Sitting at his enamel-top kitchen table, drinking apple-flavored tea, he dispensed precious counsel and gifts of money to an endless stream of visitors in trouble.
Courage came so naturally to Sakharov that it heartened others. Dressed in a worn suit and bedroom slippers, the tall, perpetually bent-over man with shy eyes displayed a lion's boldness when defying the Kremlin. Mocking his own quixotic ways, he once dubbed himself Andrei the Blessed, an honorific that in Russian connotes a kind of holy innocence. Said computer scientist Valentin Turchin, a fellow dissident who emigrated to the U.S.: "There are two categories of people who have left their imprint on humanity: leaders and saints. Sakharov was in the category of saints." One mournful colleague in Moscow summoned up a more scientific metaphor. "We've lost our moral compass -- the compass that showed us the way during these decisive years of perestroika," said space scientist Roald Sagdeyev. "He taught us to use simple words like conscience and humanity."
Sakharov emerged from the most improbable of backgrounds as a human rights activist and peace advocate. In the 1940s and 1950s, he lived under security wraps as the Soviet Union's top nuclear scientist, cut off from all normal social contacts and followed at all times by a bodyguard. A theoretical physicist ranking with America's J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, he was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After he helped develop the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, he became one of the country's most decorated men. But he remained unknown because his honors were bestowed in secret. In those years, Sakharov believed he had a useful function: "When I began working on this terrible weapon, I felt subjectively that I was working for peace, that my work would help foster a balance of power."
In the late 1950s, Sakharov grew deeply concerned about the dangers of atomic fallout. Several times he attempted to use his prestige to halt Soviet nuclear testing. Recalling Sakharov's personal appeals against the atmospheric explosions, Nikita Khrushchev described the nuclear physicist in his memoirs as a "crystal of morality." When his behind-the-scenes lobbying turned to open criticism of the regime, Sakharov was fired from the nuclear program. "The atomic issue was a natural path into political issues," he explained.