Just five months before his death, Nobel Peace Prize-winning physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989) spoke out at the USSR’s First Congress of People’s Deputies, defying Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) to advocate for a multi-party system in a speech broadcast live to millions—yet silenced within the Congress hall itself.

Televised footage of the USSR’s first Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989. So many Soviet citizens tuned in to the live broadcast that production rates fell nationwide.