MOSCOW, Oct 21, Reuter: Scientist Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s best known human rights campaigner, was elected to the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences on Thursday, Tass News Agency said.
His election came less than two weeks ago after he was released from seven years of internal exile in the closed city of Gorky on the personal intervention of Kremlim leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
A meeting of the association of Soviet Scientists also voted unanimously to restore full membership to Nilolai Bukharin, a leading Bolshevik theoretician who was disgraced and executed under Dictator Josef Stalin.
“Bukharin’s explosion from the academy (in 1987) was a deplorable fact in the history of our association, a fact which we had to correct,” Tass quoted one academician as saying.
Sakharov was appointed to the 47 member Presidium during secret ballot elections for the academy’ s top posts, Tass said the elections brought about the most sweeping changes in the academy’s existence.
Tass said scientists debated the nominations for eight hours, “in an unbiased way, without mincing matters.”
Sakharov, a leading Nuclear Physicist who helped develop the first soviet hydrogen bomb in 1953, gave up his prestigious career to campaign for wider human rights in his country.
After his release from Exile, Sakharov expressed support for Gorbachev’s “perestroika” drive to reshape soviet society while continuing to call for the release of all political prisoners in the Soviet Union.
Sakharov was elected to the academy of sciences when he was 32, the youngest person to ever join. Although he was stripped of several top honors, including the order of Lenin when he was banished, he remained an academician.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 28, 1988
