The article is basically saying, it's too bad Sakharov's ideas and ways didn't take hold. The name is a household word, I will read up more though on exactly what he did.
Collapse Of The Soviet Union: The 'Humanizing' Role Of Andrei Sakharov
The usual narrative of the unraveling of the Soviet Union moves from the promising reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev to the dashed hopes of Boris Yeltsin to the authoritarian counterrevolution of Vladimir Putin. But within that narrative, the story of Andrei Sakharov -- the physicist, human rights advocate, and 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died on December 14, 1989 -- is one of the tantalizing "might-have-beens."
"If [Sakharov's] ideas had been realized even by half, we would be living in a different country, a completely different state," Russian political analyst Valery Khomyakov told RFE/RL in May.
Speaking to U.S. television in February 1990, Soviet-era dissident and then-Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel said it was "a real tragedy for the Soviet Union that Sakharov died, because otherwise very soon he might have become president there."
"He was, as far as I can see, the only integrating personality in the present-day Soviet Union," Havel said.
Read More At: http://www.rferl.org/a/soviet-collapse-andrei-sakharov-humanizing-role/28191653.html
