Haven’t heard about him before so looked him up, found a couple of interesting quotes about the Soviet Union.

“At first I thought, despite everything that I saw with my own eyes, that the Soviet State was a breakthrough into the future, a kind of prototype for all countries". Then he came, in his words, to “the theory of symmetry: all governments and regimes to a first approximation are bad, all peoples are oppressed, and all are threatened by common dangers.”

Pretty based stuff.

“Yet our state is similar to a cancer cell – with its messianism and expansionism, its totalitarian suppression of dissent, the authoritarian structure of power, with a total absence of public control in the most important decisions in domestic and foreign policy, a closed society that does not inform its citizens of anything substantial, closed to the outside world, without freedom of travel or the exchange of information."

Sounds familiar.

Unfortunately, he was a “free market” advocate and, from the sounds of it, a tool of the capitalist western powers, which is a shame.

They have interesting list of donors, nearly entirely made of institutions of NATO countries, including embassies.

Just some initial research:

The Sakharov Center was created by the Public Commission to Protect the Legacy of Andrei Sakharov, which was an international NGO founded in 1990. An international NGO operating in Russia founded in 1990 is already a LOT to think about.

In 2014 Russia determined that the Center was operating as a foreign agent due to it’s political work. What we can assume from this and the above is that this is a pro-Western, pro-capitalist organization that is operating well within the Western program and that Russia has long been observing it to see who it is connected to and how it is operating as an international NGO with anti-Russian alliances.

Sakharov himself was a political dissident in the USSR because he was a nuclear physicist working on weapons and wanted to see non-proliferation happening. He wrote a letter to the military asking them to “take the Americans at their word” that the Americans would not seek to build anti-ballistic missile defense, despite not having any access to military intelligence about whether the US was trustworthy at the time. He also sought to make this an issue for the public by publishing his opinions in the newspaper, again without the benefit of knowing what military intelligence knew about US intentions. As we can see, history has proven Sakharov wrong.

He spent 12 years on being wrong, openly criticizing the government in person and in writing, attempting to make ABM defense a topic that the public should rally around and force the government’s hand, again without ever having access to what the USSR knew about American intentions regarding ABM. In 1980, when Reagan was elected president and would soon after be pumping up Star Wars, Sakharov was exiled (to a city in Central Russia). Then he got together with less than 8 people to make a committee on “human rights” and worked directly with Western organizations and governments and even supported the US Congress imposing sanctions on the USSR.

From then on he was used by the Western establishment constantly to push this idea that free market capitalism is equivalent to “human rights” and that communist movements violate human rights and therefore should be opposed. They gave him a bunch of awards for advocating for human rights. Granted, this was in the most revisionist period of the USSR when it was undergoing the transition from a communist movement to a capitalist movement rapidly and there was a TON of human rights violations as they worked hard to create a new bourgeoisie. But Sakharov’s conclusions were fundamentally the same conclusions Western imperialist powers use as a pretext for wars of aggression and their own massive history of human rights violations.

So basically, this guy and the commission to protect his legacy were all fundamentally predicated on NOT DEVELOPING MISSILE DEFENSE CAPABILITIES which is what the entire NATO project has become, but because he was opposed to revisionist capitalist Soviet leadership and instead supported what would eventually become the liberal economic shock doctrine that killed millions of former soviet citizens, the West thinks he’s a paragon of human rights.

Ugh what a mess.