Academician Sakharov Avenue (, ''Prospekt Akademika Sakharova'') is a street in the center of

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

, in Krasnoselsky District. In the south, the street is limited by Turgenevskaya Square and the

Boulevard Ring The Boulevard Ring (; transliteration: ''Bulvarnoye Koltso'') is Moscow's second innermost ring road (the first is formed by the Central Squares of Moscow running along the former walls of Kitai-gorod). Boulevards form a semicircular chain along ...

. In the north, Academician Sakharov Prospect ends at the T-shape crossing with Kalanchyovskaya Street, close to Komsomolskaya Square. In the middle, it crosses the Garden Ring ( Sadovaya-Spasskaya Street). The avenue was named in 1990 and commemorates

Andrei Sakharov Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Soviet Physics, physicist and a List of Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world. Alt ...

, a physicist and a

Nobel Peace Prize The Nobel Peace Prize (Swedish language, Swedish and ) is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the Will and testament, will of Sweden, Swedish industrialist, inventor, and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel, along with the prizes in Nobe ...

winner.

History

The general plan of the development of Moscow released in 1935 suggested that a wide avenue should be built between Lubyanka Square in the center of Moscow and Komsomolskaya Square, which contains three of the main railway stations in Moscow. The entire blocks of historical buildings were to be demolished. It was decided that a number of administrative buildings, including ministries, would be built along the avenue. Some of the projects, including the building of People's Commissariat for Agriculture by Alexey Shchusev and Tsentrosoyuz building by

Le Corbusier Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , ; ), was a Swiss-French architectural designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture ...

were completed, however, the avenue was not built because of the war. The construction only resumed in the 1960s, with a number of

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

and post-modernist buildings. It was decided that after completion, the avenue will get the name of Novokirovsky Avenue (), however, the stretch to Turgenevskaya Square was only completed in the end of the 1980s, and the avenue got the name of Andrey Sakharov. The extension to Lubyanka Square has never been realized.

References

{{coord, 55.7708, N, 37.6444, E, source:wikidata, display=title Streets in Moscow