Window on Eurasia

Moscow's Failure to Mark Sakharov Anniversary Reflects Larger Problems

Paul Goble

Tallinn, June 14, 2006 -- Both the Russian government and most of the Russian media passed over in silence the 85th anniversary of the birth of Academician Andrei Sakharov at the end of May, leaving the commemoration of that event to human rights activists and prompting a bitter reflection by one Russian intellectual on where Russia is heading now.

Neither President Putin nor Moscow TV mentioned the event, Dmtriy Prigov says, and there were only give brief articles about the life of the Nobel Prize winning human rights campaigner in the central press
[http://www.polit.ru/author/2006/06/10/saharov.html] and
[http://www.integrum.ru/fio100/200605190710].

Some 500 human rights activists, journalists, and lawyers did mark the anniversary, however, at the Sakharov Museum in Moscow. Yuiy Samodurov, the museumв's director, told them that "we have assembled in order to defend freedom in our country while there is still something to defend"
[http://www.rusnovosti.ru/news/?/20060521/17/15799].

He added that such commemorations of the Soviet-era human rights champion, organized this year for the first time by the msuseum, the Union of Right Forces (SPS), and the Human Rights Movement, are slated to take place every year in the future on the third Sunday in May.

But that action, like the date itself, passed "absolutely unnoticed by the basic means of mass information," Prigov said. "Not one of the main channels even sent someone to cover the events at the Sakharov Center,a situation that he said was "symptomatic" of the direction the country is taking.

Of course, the poet and scultor acknowledged, Russians can reasonably disagree on one or another aspect of Sakharov's career. But, he continued, "for Russia, the name and activity of Sakharov is a phenomenon no less important" than that of rock singers who took part in the Eurovision competition on the same date.

The failure of Russian entrants to win there, Prigov pointed out, attracted a great deal of media attention in Moscow, with the usual complaints about "the direct wrecking of Russophobic foreign juries" somehow being responsible for the failure of Russian entrants to win.

Under those circumstances, he said with obvious irony, "it was clear that there simply wasn't time for Sakharov. All the more so because the president was meeting with members of the youth soccer team." Those events, at least in the eyes of the current government and its
media, he continued, were judged far more newsworthy.

Such a situation not only points to a general decline in Russia in an interest in human rights, Prigov said, but it also highlights the extent to which the government there is encouraging people to think not about those who have contributed to the country in the way that Sakharov did but about others.

"The rest of the world is proud not only of its military heroes, pop stars and politicians, but also of its heroes of the spirit and civic consciousness," of people like Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King -- precisely the kind of people with whom the name of Sakharov should be included.

But there is a deeper problem at work than just forgetting about human rights campaigners like Sakharov, Prigov notes, and that is the loss among new generations of Russians of historical memory altogether, especially among young people.

In his essay, Prigov refers to a conversation between two nine or ten-year-old girls. One asked, "Do you know who Lenin was?" The other paused and then responded with dignity, "You just made him up." In such a situation, recalling the life of Sakharov is difficult, of course, but quite possibly much more important.