Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet physicist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world.
The Moscow Metro is a metro system serving the Russian capital of Moscow as well as the neighbouring cities of Krasnogorsk, Reutov, Lyubertsy and Kotelniki in Moscow Oblast. Opened in 1935 with one 11-kilometre (6.8 mi) line and 13 stations, it was the first underground railway system in the Soviet Union.
Larisa Iosifovna Bogoraz was a dissident in the Soviet Union.
Avtozavodskaya is a station on the Zamoskvoretskaya line of the Moscow Metro. It is named for the nearby Zavod Imeni Likhacheva where ZIS and ZIL limousines were built. The train station was opened in 1943, a few months before Novokuznetskaya and Paveletskaya. The architect was Alexey Dushkin. From 1943 to 1969 when Kakhovskaya opened, it was the southern terminus of the line. The station has entrances to Avtozavodskaya and Masterkov streets.
Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov was a particle accelerator physicist, human rights activist, Soviet dissident, founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a founding member of the Soviet Amnesty International group,. He was declared a prisoner of conscience while serving nine years in prison and internal exile for monitoring the Helsinki human rights accords, he was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International as a founder of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. Following his release from exile, Orlov was allowed to emigrate to the U.S. and became a professor of physics at Cornell University.
Galina Vasilyevna Starovoitova was a Soviet dissident, Russian politician and ethnographer known for her work to protect ethnic minorities and promote democratic reforms in Russia. She was shot to death in her apartment building in 1998.
Yuli Markovich Daniel was a Russian writer and Soviet dissident known as a defendant in the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial in 1966.
Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term dissident was used in the Soviet Union (USSR) in the period from the mid-1960s until the Fall of Communism. It was used to refer to small groups of marginalized intellectuals whose challenges, from modest to radical to the Soviet regime, met protection and encouragement from correspondents, and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities. Following the etymology of the term, a dissident is considered to "sit apart" from the regime. As dissenters began self-identifying as dissidents, the term came to refer to an individual whose non-conformism was perceived to be for the good of a society. The most influential subset of the dissidents is known as the Soviet human rights movement.
The Moscow Helsinki Group was one of Russia's leading human rights organisations. It was originally set up in 1976 to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords and to report to the West on Soviet human rights abuses. It had been forced out of existence in the early 1980s, but was revived in 1989 and continued to operate in Russia.
Terrorism in Russia has a long history starting from the time of the Russian Empire. Terrorism, in the modern sense, means violence against civilians to achieve political or ideological objectives by creating extreme fear.
The February 2004 Moscow metro bombing occurred on 6 February 2004 when a male suicide bomber killed 41 people near Avtozavodskaya subway station on the Zamoskvoretskaya Line in Moscow. Up to 250 people were injured in the incident, some of the more common injuries being broken bones and smoke inhalation.
Alexander Pinkhosovich Podrabinek is a Soviet dissident, journalist and commentator. During the Soviet period he was a human rights activist, being exiled, then imprisoned in a corrective-labour colony, for publication of his book Punitive Medicine in Russian and in English.
Paruyr Arshaviri Hayrikyan is an Armenian politician and former Soviet dissident. He was an early member and leader of the National United Party (NUP), which sought Armenia's independence from the Soviet Union. He spent a total of about 18 years in Soviet correctional facilities for his dissident activities and was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in 1988, although he was allowed to return two years later. Since Armenia gained its independence in 1991, Hayrikyan has been active in Armenian politics as the leader of the Union for National Self-Determination, the successor party to the NUP, and took part in presidential elections in 1991 and 2013, surviving an assassination attempt during the latter. He is also a writer and accomplished composer, having authored several popular patriotic Armenian songs.
The 2010 Moscow Metro bombings were suicide bombings carried out by two female Islamic terrorists during the morning rush hour of March 29, 2010, at two stations of the Moscow Metro, with roughly 40 minutes in between. At least 40 people were killed, and over 100 injured.
The 1994 Baku Metro bombings was a series of terrorist incidents in Baku, Azerbaijan. The first attack was perpetrated at the "20 January" metro station, while the second one took place between the "28 May" and "Ganjlik" stations. As a result of the first attack, 14 people were killed and 49 wounded. The second attack resulted in 13 people killed and 42 injured.
The Neo-Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a clandestine far-left group, which existed in the Soviet Union between September 1974 and January 1985. NCPSU is seen by modern researchers as one of the first organizations of the New Left in the USSR. However, Austrian researcher Hans Azenbaum, who studied the ideology of NCPSU, tends to view this party as the one focusing on the "third way", i.e. neither capitalism, nor real socialism.
The 2011 Minsk Metro bombing took place on 11 April 2011 when 15 people were killed and 204 were injured when a bomb exploded within the Minsk Metro, Belarus. The explosion happened at the central Kastryčnickaja station at 17:55 local time.
In 1965 a human rights movement emerged in the USSR. Those actively involved did not share a single set of beliefs. Many wanted a variety of civil rights — freedom of expression, of religious belief, of national self-determination. To some it was crucial to provide a truthful record of what was happening in the country, not the heavily censored version provided in official media outlets. Others still were "reform Communists" who thought it possible to change the Soviet system for the better.
Sergei Ivanovich Grigoryants was a Soviet dissident and political prisoner, journalist, literary critic, chairman of the Glasnost Defense Foundation. He was imprisoned for ten years in Chistopol jail as a political prisoner for anti-Soviet activities, from 1975 to 1980 and then four more years starting in 1983 on similar charges.
Stepan Seghbosi Zatikyan was a Soviet dissident and one of the founders of the Armenian NUP.
