Born 100 years ago, Andrei Sakharov was one of the most prominent dissidents in Soviet history. He also supported Baltic independence and visited the Lithuanian capital. Vilnius should celebrate him with a memorial plaque, argue Tomas Venclova and Robert van Voren.
In a few days at the train station in Ekaterinburg a plaque will be unveiled dedicated to the great Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam and his wife Nadezhda, who in 1934 were for a short time at the train station on their way to exile. A few years later Osip would pass the train station once again, this time alone, on the way to his ultimate death in the Gulag in 1938.
The plaque, made by the sculptor Nikolai Predein, is the result of a meeting three years ago when a group of people were discussing the situation under Putin and one of them said “well, if they would put up a plaque for Mandelshtam”, thinking this would be impossible under Putin’s repressive regime. It appeared it was not impossible.
The fact that it appeared possible is not the only remarkable aspect of this story. In this case the most remarkable aspect is the fact that Mandelshtam was at the train station only a few hours, yet it was enough to earn him a plaque.
In the fall of 2020, we asked the Vilnius municipality to put up a plaque on Tauro Street 10 commemorating the fact that Andrei Sakharov stayed there in December 1975 at the flat of a future member of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, Eitan Finkelshtein.
He was in town in order to attend the trial against his close friend Sergei Kovalyov, who had been arrested in Vilnius among others because of his support for Lithuanian dissidents, and was tried in Vilnius for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. He was ultimately sentenced to seven years in a camp and three years of exile, which he served in the far out region of Magadan.
Sakharov’s stay in Vilnius is important also for another reason. While Sakharov was staying at Tauro street, his wife Yelena Bonner was in Oslo, receiving on his behalf the Nobel Peace Prize. He himself was not allowed to travel to Oslo, banned from international travel because of “holding state secrets”.
Sakharov was at that time already the leading figure in the human rights movement in the USSR, but was above all one of the most important nuclear physicists of the USSR and had at the age of 32 become the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences.
He is known as the “father of the Hydrogen Bomb”, and since its development had become an outspoken opponent of nuclear proliferation and had made his voice heard to the Soviet leadership on many occasions. Initially this only irritated the Soviet leadership, to whom he had direct access because of his position, but gradually he was more and more ostracised and by 1973 a vicious press campaign had been unleashed against him, short of accusing him as a traitor of the motherland.
Vilnius municipality turned down our request because he stayed only a few days at Tauro street, and because there is already a Sakharov square in Vilnius. This square is a story in itself, because it is located in the outskirts of Vilnius, is not a square but the corner of an area that can best be described as windy and isolated, and basically consists of a solitary bench standing in the middle of nowhere with an inscription that has been severely affected by time.
The city has a plan to refurbish it, but it is unclear how and attempts to involve the Sakharov family in its design have been unsuccessful. The year 2021 is the Andrei Sakharov Centennial, as he was born on May 21, 1921, and in many cities of the world his legacy will be celebrated. However, as we were told, Vilnius has probably no funds available to carry out the refurbishment this year.
Sakharov stood at the birth of the human rights movement in the USSR since its inception and remained steadfast and undeterred in spite of all the repressive measures. He spoke out in defence of many politically repressed, including many Lithuanian political prisoners.
In fact, in his Nobel Peace Prize Speech he named several of them by name. He also signed a memorandum by Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian dissidents, in which they demanded the annulment of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the withdrawal of occupational forces from the Baltic states.
It is no exaggeration that Sakharov played an important role in the political developments in Europe that eventually led to the demise of the Soviet empire and, in 1990, created the opportunity for Lithuania to declare independence again.
For his role, he spent almost seven years in internal exile, watched and harassed by KGB around the clock and psychologically tortured in vile, sophisticated ways. However, his activities inspired other freedom fighters, including Lithuanians.
Lithuania should be grateful to Andrei Sakharov, and in fact it was. In 2003 President Adamkus honored Sakharov’s widow Elena Bonner with the Gedimino Medal Third Class exactly for her and her husband’s contribution to Lithuanian independence and their defence of freedom of speech in Lithuania.
Considering the above, we cannot understand the logic that it would be not opportune for Vilnius to commemorate Sakharov’s stay by putting up a plaque on a building, which we are even willing to finance ourselves, as we have indicated. We would strongly urge the municipality to reconsider its decision.
Vilnius should be proud to link the name of Sakharov to its city, and not with some “square” in the outskirts where hardly a person ever comes, but in the center so that tourists can visit the place and see this important part of Lithuania’s history and its struggle for freedom and independence.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of LRT.
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