Moscow Guide
The Zemlyanoy Gorod
The Sakharov Museum
Address: Beyond Kursk Station, on an embankment of River Yauza
Website: www.sakharov-center.ru
Opening time: Tues– Sun 11am–7pm
The Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center (muzey i obshchestvenniy tsentr imeni Andreya Sakharova) is fronted by a chunk from the Berlin Wall. Opened in 1996 by Sakharov's widow and fellow human rights crusader, Yelena Bonner, it documents the evils of the Soviet era and upholds their ideals in present-day Russia.
On the lower floor are a multilingual library of Gulag-related material and a centre for research and civic outreach. Upstairs is a well-laid-out exhibition, juxtaposing the myths and realities of Communism with artefacts from camps, dossiers of victims and other documentation that brings home the scale and brutality of the Gulag (with archive footage on the monitors, if they're working). The 1950s cultural "thaw" and the 1960s Bards movement are represented by photos, samizdat editions of forbidden books and bootlegged Beatles LPs; the Jewish refuseniki and the Moscow Helsinki Group complete its "Resistance to the Regime" section. Sakharov's own life – a physicist decorated for creating the Soviet H-Bomb, who became the USSR's leading dissident – is detailed in the final part, along with photos of memorials to the victims of Soviet repression and horrific images from present-day Chechnya, where human rights abuses are still routine. As Sakharov said at his Nobel Prize lecture in 1975, "Peace, progress and human rights – these three goals are inextricably linked. It is impossible to achieve any one of these goals while ignoring the others".