The Guardian (UK) April 14, 2003 Anger of Nobel winner's widow Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
The widow of the Nobel Prize winning Russian academic Andrei Sakharov has objected to a statue being erected in his honour in central Moscow because she feels the human rights abuses, poverty and political life of Russia today do not correspond to the principles and memory of her late husband.
Sakharov, who helped to develop the first Soviet hydrogen bomb in the 1950s, became a key opposition figure during communist rule, and was the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his work on human rights.
He died in 1989, but now the Moscow government has said it will provide a prominent site for a monument in Pushkin Square, where Sakharov joined protests in the 1980s.
Leading politicians have lobbied wealthy businessmen to contribute to its funding.
The campaign's initiator, Sergei Yushenkov, an MP and leader of the political party Liberal Russia, said the monument was important "to preserve the memory of the great son of Russia".
But Elena Bonner, Sakharov's widow, wrote to the organisers, bitterly opposing the monument.
She said that plans for a memorial were appropriate in the years immediately after his death as Sakharov's memory was properly understood by the Russian public, still reeling from years of communism.
But she wrote: "Today we live in another country, and the attitude to Sakharov's memory has changed.
"What is Russia today? It is a country in which a third of its population lives below the poverty line... a country waging a bloody war in Chechnya ... a country where nearly every day free mass media are being destroyed by political or financial pressure."
She added: "Such a Russia does not correspond with the idea of a monument to Sakharov."
Mr Yushenkov said he would delay the creation of a fund for the memorial so as not to go "against Elena's will".
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