Sakharov Nominated as Candidate for Seat in New Soviet Parliament
Soviet human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov was nominated Thursday as a candidate for elections to a new Parliament that will replace the existing Supreme Soviet.
Sakharov, 67, winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, was chosen to stand in March for one of the 75 seats reserved for scientists in the new Congress of People’s Deputies, which will elect from its members a new Supreme Soviet to sit in permanent session.
Sakharov, a leading physicist in the Soviet nuclear program in the late 1940s and early 1950s, emerged as a champion of human rights at the height of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1970s.
In 1980, he was exiled to the closed city of Gorky, but he was released six years later after the personal intervention of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
Since his return to Moscow, Sakharov has kept up his pressure on Soviet authorities to improve their human rights record while at the same time expressing support for Gorbachev’s drive for political, social and economic reform.
In October he was elected to the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences and for the first time was granted permission to travel abroad.
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