Officials in St. Petersburg unveiled a monument to Andrei D. Sakharov, the dissident Soviet-era physicist and human rights campaigner who won the Nobel Peace prize in 1975.
The statue, 12 feet tall, is the first monument built in Russia to honor Dr. Sakharov, who died in 1989.
His widow, Yelena Bonner, who has opposed the building of such monuments because of the state of human rights in Russia, reiterated her opposition but said she would not take any legal action.
"It is out of place to erect a monument to Sakharov in today's Russia," she said on Ekho Moskvy radio.