📍48B Zemlyanoy Val (Chkalov Street), Moscow 109004, Russia
1921 – 1989“I was born in 1921 in Ulyanovsk and grew up in Moscow, the son of a physicist. I became the Soviet Union's most important nuclear weapons designer — the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb — and then the Soviet Union's most prominent dissident. The apartment on Chkalov Street in Moscow where I lived with my wife Yelena Bonner was watched by the KGB. I was exiled to Gorky in 1980 for protesting the invasion of Afghanistan and lived there under effective house arrest for nearly seven years. The Moscow apartment, the Gorky exile, the return to Moscow in 1986 when Gorbachev allowed us back — these were the geography of a life spent first building the weapons that could destroy the world and then working to prevent that destruction.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Sakharov, A. Memoirs (1990, translated Richard Lourie), Knopf; Bonner, Y. Alone Together (1986), Knopf