Since the Beatles, ALL of the world's heroes have been Black....

[Igel]

79. Sakharov.

Solzhenitsyn.

Except that both were rather an embarrassment for a while. Even among university faculty, those who adored the other three, nobody liked them. This was for a number of reasons: Some didn't want to piss off the Soviet Union, because they needed access to the country or its researchers; others would say it was bad, but didn't want to fully embrace how evil the system was, with the GULags and KGB. Many didn't want to because it made them sound "right wing" or seemed to ally themselves with domestic political enemies. It also mattered less because the USSR wasn't outside or cross-racial oppression. Many faculty members who reluctantly taught Solzhenitsyn and a lot of anti-Soviet Russian literature abandoned it just as soon as they could, preferring instead to look at pre-Soviet or Modernist works, glossing over the entire Soviet "mess" and heading straight to post-Soviet belle lettres likes Tolstaya, Pelevin, Sorokin, and such.

Mandela stood up to a repressive racist government over 21 million.

MLK stood up against a government that was split and in transition in its treatment of African-Americans.

Gandhi led a movement against an Empire that was struggling with its empire anyway, and had no heart for continuing truly repressive acts.

All three had a lot of support. Sakharov had support at the end mostly because of abstractions--not for overthrow and defeat of a nasty regime, but freedom of conscience, freedom to emigrate. People breathed a sigh of relief at Gorbachev's "socialism with a human face." It resonated in ways that anti-colonialism did or disposing of neocolonialist governments did--not in the way disposing of the Soviet regime did.

The Russians were fairly alone in resisting a government over 180 million, with a kind of empire covering perhaps 100 million more.