Andrei Sakharov §

Andrei Sakharov was a Soviet physicist, dissident and moral authority whose support for Karabakh Armenians gave the movement unusual legitimacy inside late-Soviet public life. Known globally for nuclear weapons work, human-rights advocacy and confrontation with the Soviet state, he approached the Karabakh issue through the rights and security of a vulnerable population rather than through official Soviet nationality doctrine. His widely cited formulation that Karabakh was a matter of ambition for Azerbaijan and life and death for Armenians captured the asymmetry Armenians felt in 1988. The statement is also contested: Azerbaijanis read it as an influential Russian liberal endorsing Armenian separatism while ignoring Azerbaijani displacement. Sakharov\u2019s role matters because the Karabakh Movement was never only local nationalism; it intersected with perestroika, dissident politics and the moral collapse of Soviet legitimacy.