ABSTRACT
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov who played a crucial role in the human rights movement was not the first Soviet dissenter but he became the most famous. Andrei's formative years in the late twenties and thirties were a stormy period in Soviet history; like most others, the Sakharov family was also affected by the purges and the terror. Sakharov writes in his autobiography that every family he knew suffered casualties. In 1973 a major campaign was launched against Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. According to a document referred to it had been decided in 1975 to exile the Sakharovs to Sverdlovsk, where they would have made the acquaintance of Boris Yeltsin. In any case, Sakharov's main interest was not politics but, in the footsteps of his father, physics and mathematics. He had tutors during his early years and when he went to school first at the age of twelve, he was well in advance of his class and found it a waste of time.
