Andrei Sakharov Exiled to Gorky Without Trial

Nobel Peace Prize laureate and nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, the USSR's most prominent human rights dissident, was arrested in January 1980 and exiled without trial to the closed city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) after publicly condemning the invasion of Afghanistan. He remained there under KGB surveillance, cut off from foreign contact and repeatedly subjected to forced hospitalisation and force-feeding during hunger strikes, until Gorbachev personally telephoned him in December 1986 to end the exile.