Arrested in 1937, she designed barracks for prisoners and then, with her camp inmates, she built them. Among them were disproportionately large numbers of physicists, mathematicians, engineers and biologists, and almost no historians or philosophers. But the dissidents were only a handful, just a few hundred people in a country that then extended over one sixth of the planet. It is hard to say whether they had a distinctive philosophical view, but the clarity of their vision differed from that of millions of other people. This gave them the strength to reject lies and preserved their self-respect, without which there is no respect for others and for life in general, and which in the final analysis brings a sense of happiness.
People speak of conscience.
But it seems that conscience is the supreme existential value for only a very few people. I do not know the goals of Russia's government today. But in the decades after Sakharov, Russia's people have not increased their happiness, even though he did everything humanly possible to put the country on the path leading to that goal. And he himself lived a worthy and happy life. Hannah Arendt had the fortune to be born Jewish, which helped her to make the right choices in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s.