The physicist who held the Kremlin to the Helsinki human-rights promises it signed
At his closed trial in May 1978 he told the court: 'Trials like these cannot cure the ills and failings of society to which the documents of the Helsinki Group bear witness.'
A particle-accelerator physicist who became the founder of the Soviet Union's first human-rights monitoring group. In 1956 he called Stalin and Beria 'killers who held power' at a party meeting and was expelled and dismissed; twenty years later, in May 1976, he founded the Moscow Helsinki Group to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Final Act's human-rights provisions. It was an effort to turn the third-basket promises the Kremlin had itself signed back against it from within. Arrested in February 1977 and sentenced to seven years' camp plus five years' exile, he was stripped of citizenship and deported to the United States in 1986, ending as a professor of physics at Cornell.
Career Timeline
- 1952–56Physicist in the secret nuclear laboratory later ITEP
- 1956Denounces Stalin and Beria; expelled from the Party and dismissed
- 1956–72Yerevan Physics Institute; Doctor of Sciences in 1963
- 1968Corresponding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences
- 1973Founds the first Amnesty International group in the USSR
- 1976.5Founds and chairs the Moscow Helsinki Group
- 1977–86Arrested; sentenced to seven years' camp and five years' exile
- 1986Denationalized and deported; professor at Cornell