Nobel Peace Prize Recipient. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, a Soviet physicist, gained international recognition after being awarded the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. According to the Nobel Prize committee, he received this award "for his struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, for disarmament and cooperation between all nations." He was labeled a Soviet dissident, facing national governmental persecution. Disagreeing with him being awarded for his openly stand on nuclear disarmament, the Soviet Union authorities would not allow him to accept the award, thus his wife traveled to Norway to receive it. Not pleased with this action, he was deprived of all his Soviet honorary titles, and the couple was sent in 1980 in internal exile to the town of Gorkij, where they live in near poverty. Only when the USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 were they allowed to return to Moscow in 1986, yet he continues his stance against nuclear disbarment. As a physicist, he was a leading figure in the development of the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb program. He became a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1953. In 1958 he openly opposed nuclear weapon tests, thereafter supporting East-West co-operation and human rights. Working under the supervision of 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient, Igor Tamm, the two men were in charge of the development of a Soviet hydrogen bomb. Tamm had been his doctorate instructor. They developed a fusion reactor to control fusion, using a powerful magnetic field in a donut-shaped device known as a Tokomak Reactor. Born the son of a physicist, who had authored several textbooks, taught college and a talented pianist, he stated that his parents and grandparents largely shaped his personality. In 1938 he started his studies at Moscow State University, where his father had taught. During World War II, the university was evacuated in 1941; he went to Ashkhabad, where he graduated from college. After graduation he worked as a lumberjack. In 1941 he found employment at the Ulyanovsk Ammunition Plant. In 1944, while still employed at the factory, he authored scientific articles on theoretical physics, which were reviewed for publication, giving him the self-confidence though not published. In 1945 he earned his doctorate degree at Lebedev Physics Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and refused an invitation to join the Communist Party. After the war in 1948, he participated in the Russian Atom Bomb Project. The first Soviet atomic device was tested on August 29, 1949. He played a key role in the development of the first megaton-range Soviet hydrogen bomb using a design known as Sakharov's Third Idea, which is called Teller–Ulam design in the United States. For his efforts, he received an award for this design. In 1951 he invented the explosively pumped flux compression generator. By 1950, he supported nuclear control, formally drew attention to radioactive contamination in 1956, and adopted a nuclear test ban treaty in 1963. By 1965, he resumed the studies of fundamental science working with particle physics and physical cosmology. In 1966, he started organized public protest against nuclear weapons. In the early 1970s, he became the target of sustained pressure from his fellow scientists in the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Soviet press for his stand on control of nuclear power and now human rights. After establishing Political Prisoner's Day in the USSR in 1974 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, he was labeled in 1976 by the KGB as the "number one Domestic Enemy." In 1977 he advocated world-wide for the abolition of the death penalty. Starting in 1968, he had published many articles on his thoughts on nuclear control and human rights, and in 1982 a collection of his articles was published. In 1975 he published the text, "My Country and the World." In 1996, a two-volume "Memories," was published on the subject of human rights in Moscow. Besides the Nobel Peace Prize, he received for his work for world peace the Order of the Cross of Vytis from Lithuania posthumously in 2003 and an honorary degree in 1980 from Sapienza University of Rome. In 1974 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca World Prize, an international literary award for "a spokesman for the conscience of mankind". In 1985 he was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal from the Franklin Institute. In 1988, he was awarded the Humanists International Award. Given in his honor, the Sakharov Prize is awarded annually by the European Parliament to people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms. For his scientific efforts, he received the Hero of the Socialist Labor three times: 1953, 1956, and 1962; the Order of Lenin Award four times; the Stalin Prize in 1953; and the Lenin Prize in 1956. He married in 1945 a laboratory assistant and the couple had three children. After his first wife's 1969 death, he married Elena Bonner, a human rights activist. In early 1989 he was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies or Soviet Parliament, where he continued to advocate for the end of the one-party rule and he drafts a new constitution. Before the year ends, he suddenly died from a cardiac event. Mainly countries that were behind the Iron Curtain, there are numerous parks, schools, statues, and streets in named in his honor. The Soviet postal service issued in 1991 a stamp with his image. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov's quote, "Peace, progress, human rights – these three goals are insolubly linked to one another: it is impossible to achieve one of these goals if the other two are ignored."