People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Dissident 1907–1987 ○ Stroke

Soviet major general who turned dissident to defend human rights and deported nations

"In the underground one can meet only rats" — his credo of open, public dissent, which became the title of his memoirs.

A Soviet major general (1959) turned dissident, Grigorenko led the Crimean Tatars' struggle for the right of return and co-founded both the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups. He openly condemned the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and endured two forced psychiatric incarcerations (1964–65, 1969–74), becoming the landmark case exposing Soviet political abuse of psychiatry.

Soviet Union Dissident 1924–2020 → Stripped of citizenship, deported 1986

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.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Dissident 1925–2026 ○ Natural causes

The Marxist historian who put Stalinism on trial

From Let History Judge: "I have never betrayed either my convictions or the ideals of my youth. In this I see my father's influence; he was able to instill in me his commitment to socialism, though my ideas about socialism have of course changed. I could not have written my books other than out of deep conviction."

Soviet Marxist historian and communist publicist. From the 1960s he participated actively in the dissident movement, editing the samizdat journal Political Diary. His magnum opus, Let History Judge (nearly two decades in the making), subjected Stalinism to a meticulous, source-based Marxist critique and led to his expulsion from the CPSU in 1969. He never abandoned his socialist convictions; reinstated in 1989, he served as a People's Deputy, Supreme Soviet member, and Central Committee member. He authored over 35 books, pioneering a tradition of self-critical Marxist historiography within the socialist movement.