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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.
Memorial is an international human rights organisation, founded in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union to study and examine the human rights violations and other crimes committed under Joseph Stalin's reign. Subsequently, it expanded the scope of its research to cover the entire Soviet period.
Natan Sharansky is a Soviet dissident and later Israeli politician, human rights activist and author who spent nine years in Soviet prisons as a refusenik during the 1970s and 1980s. He served as Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018. Sharansky currently serves as chairman for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), an American non-partisan organization.
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, and professor of physics at Cornell University. He was declared a prisoner of conscience while serving nine years in prison and internal exile for monitoring the Helsinki human rights accords as a founder of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union.
Yelena Georgiyevna Bonner was a human rights activist in the former Soviet Union and wife of the physicist Andrei Sakharov. During her decades as a dissident, Bonner was noted for her characteristic blunt honesty and courage.
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 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.
Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko was a Soviet dissident, author, and human rights campaigner, who became one of the first two recipients of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought of the European Parliament when it was awarded to him posthumously in 1988.
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Naum Natanovich Meiman was a Soviet mathematician, and dissident. He is known for his work in complex analysis, partial differential equations, and mathematical physics, as well as for his dissident activity, in particular, for being a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
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Omid Kokabee is an Iranian experimental laser physicist at the University of Texas at Austin who was arrested in Iran after returning from the United States to visit his family on January 30, 2011. He was initially charged with "gathering and colluding against national security." Still, later, after being acquitted of the primary charges, he was put on trial for “communicating with a hostile government (USA)” and “illegitimate/illegal earnings”. Even though he repeatedly denied all charges against himself, he was finally sentenced to ten years in prison.
Andrei Nikolayevich Tverdokhlebov was a Soviet physicist, dissident and human rights activist. In 1970, he founded - along with Valery Chalidze and Andrei Sakharov - the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR. In 1973, Tverdokhlebov - along with Valentin Turchin - founded the first chapter of Amnesty International in the Soviet Union. He also helped found Group 73, a human rights organization that helped political prisoners in the Soviet Union. He was the author/editor of several samizdat publications while in the Soviet Union, which were compiled in the book, "In Defense of Human Rights", published by Khronika Press, New York, in 1975.
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The Initiative or Action Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR was the first civic organization of the Soviet human rights movement. Founded in 1969 by 15 dissidents, the unsanctioned group functioned for over six years as a public platform for Soviet dissidents concerned with violations of human rights in the Soviet Union.
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.
Yuri Nikolayevich Babayev, k.N, was a Soviet physicist who spent a long career in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons, and known as one of the principles who designed the Tsar Bomba, the largest-ever nuclear weapon.
References
- 1 2 "Andrei Sakharov Prize". aps.org. American Physical Society. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
- ↑ "First Andrei Sakharov Prize for human rights goes to Cornell physicist and former Soviet gulag prisoner Yuri Orlov | Cornell Chronicle". news.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2023-10-07.
- ↑ "Seven days: 20–26 September 2013". Nature. 501 (7468): 466–467. 2013-09-01. doi:10.1038/501466a. ISSN 0028-0836.