Back at his apartment, Sakharov told his wife, Yelena Bonner, that he was going downstairs to his study. He wanted to take a nap and then get up to write another speech. He asked Bonner to come wake him at nine. He had a lot of work to do before morning. “Tomorrow,” he said, “there will be a battle.” When Bonner went downstairs to wake her husband, she found him in the hallway on the floor, dead. “The totalitarian system probably killed him,” Vitaly Korotich said later. “I’m only glad that before he died Sakharov dealt the system a mortal blow. If God sent Jesus to pay for the sins of
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