"Political emigrant" Berizovsky maintains Sakharov Museum

The cash-strapped Sakharov Museum accepted a $3 million grant from Boris Berezovsky, who has been living in self-imposed exile abroad after fleeing a criminal investigation he has called "politically motivated." The museum - which aims to promote the ideas of human rights and civil society, and is named after Nobel Peace Prize-winning Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov - has been plagued by grave funding problems and had been planning to close its doors last Friday. The donated sum is almost twice the museum's total budget over the four years of its existence, which was about $1.7 million. That money had come from foreign grants, the bulk of which were from the U.S. Agency on International Development, which stopped funding this fall, "The Russia Journal" reports. Berezovsky said in a statement he considered supporting the museum both "a great honor" and a necessary measure to prevent "authoritarian rule from depriving each and every person of rights.