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On the night of Dec. 14, 1989, Andrei Sakharov returned to his Moscow apartment from a heated meeting of radical parliamentarians where he had called for the formation of an alternative party to oppose the Communists, lay down for a nap and never awoke. He was 68 when a heart attack felled him. He had been a free man for less than three years.
FOOTNOTE: *Alone Together is the title of Elena Bonner's 1986 account of her life in exile with Sakharov.