"Lenin's Tomb" by David Remnick page 302

I just finished the chapter about the death of Andrei Sakharov. He was a nuclear physicist who helped the U.S.S.R. achieve nuclear weapons capability, but around the the mushroom cloud of the first ground test, he saw the light. The rest of his life he dedicated to changes. He spurred Gorbachev relentlessly in the congress, often having to be silenced by the "Great open-minded Gorbachev."

It's interesting that before reading this book, I had never heard the guy's name, but he figures so prominently in the history of the fall of the Soviet Union that in the index of Remnick's book, there are 67 references to him. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, for what that's worth.

Remnick writes of Sakharov after his funeral, "I felt hollow that day and for days after. . . . Many people I knew in Moscow felt the same, and even more strongly for having lived their lives under the regime. In March, 1953, the bewitched people of the Soviet Union learned of Stalin's death and asked themselves, 'What now?' Now the spell was finally gone, but the question was the same. 'What now?' Sakharov was just better than the rest of us. His mind worked on an elevated plane of reason, morality and patience."

I would like to be like that.