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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
Turning Helsinki monitoring into an international movement
On May 12, 1976, Orlov and fellow human-rights activists founded the Moscow Helsinki Group in Andrei Sakharov’s Moscow apartment; Orlov became its first chair. The group investigated whether the Soviet government was implementing the human-rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and documented violations for circulation to the states that had signed it. Beginning with 11 intellectuals, it used commitments made by the Soviet government itself as grounds for domestic monitoring and international scrutiny. The group came under KGB surveillance and harassment soon after its establishment.
The group appealed to other countries to establish monitoring bodies. In June 1976, U.S. Representative Millicent Fenwick responded by leading the creation of the U.S. Helsinki Commission. Helsinki groups in Lithuania, Ukraine and Georgia, and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, followed. Press conferences held by the Moscow group also provided a platform for other Soviet protest organizations to announce their formation, including a working commission investigating the political abuse of psychiatry. Arrests of Orlov and his colleagues began in February 1977; Orlov was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp and five years of exile. In response to the arrests, the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee was formed in 1978 to support the imprisoned monitors and demonstrate how a Helsinki monitoring group could operate in a free society.