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Yuri Orlov, Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group – obituary

Yuri Orlov -  Sipa/Shutterstock
Yuri Orlov - Sipa/Shutterstock

Yuri Orlov, who has died aged 96, was a Soviet nuclear scientist who founded the Moscow Helsinki Group, set up to monitor Moscow’s grudging acceptance of human rights under the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and was punished accordingly.

Orlov’s history of public criticism of the Soviet regime dated back to 1956 when, soon after the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, at which the Soviet first secretary Khrushchev famously denounced the personality cult of Stalin, he addressed a party meeting at the Institute of Physics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in which he called for those responsible for carrying out Stalin’s orders to be held to account.

As a result he was expelled from the party, lost his job at the institute and was forced to live in internal exile in Armenia for the next 15 years.

He returned to Moscow in 1972 but lost his job again a year later when he wrote to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, demanding the release from prison of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “You obviously understand that to imprison opponents in psychiatric hospitals and to cripple them there by injection … is like sterilising opponents in the Nazi Reich,” he wrote.

He then became a driving force in the Soviet human rights campaign, co-founding the Moscow branch of Amnesty International in 1973. He received worldwide attention in 1975 when he founded the Moscow Helsinki Group or, more precisely, the “Public Group of Assistance to Implementation of the Helsinki Agreements in the USSR”.

With his first wife Irina - The Denver Post via Getty Images
With his first wife Irina - The Denver Post via Getty Images

The Helsinki Group became the most authoritative of the independent associations in the Soviet Union, but Orlov’s hope that the group would pave the way for a dialogue with the authorities was misplaced. The group was disbanded in 1982 after persecution of its members left only three of them at liberty.

Orlov was arrested in February 1977 on charges of anti-Soviet slander, carrying a maximum sentence of three years in jail. But by the time his trial began in May 1978 the charges had changed to the more serious anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.

The judge in the case announced that no defence witnesses would be called, no cross-examination of prosecution witnesses would be allowed and no Western reporters or diplomats would be permitted to attend.

The courtroom was packed with communist stooges who interrupted Orlov’s testimony with cries of “spy” and “traitor”. Orlov’s supporters, including Andrei Sakharov, were barred from entering on the grounds that there was “no room”.

Orlov was accused by the prosecution of having lied about the use of psychiatry to silence dissidents and lied about Jews and Pentecostals forbidden to emigrate. No violations of the Helsinki Accords had ever taken place, the prosecution maintained.

After three days Orlov was found guilty and sentenced to a maximum term of seven years’ hard labour in a prison camp in the Urals and five years’ internal exile in the Siberian settlement of Kobyai.

In his labour camp Orlov, a diminutive redhead, was often held in solitary confinement and subjected to beatings. Although conditions improved marginally in Siberia, he lived in a wooden shack through long winters when temperatures dropped below minus-60C.

Yet he continued to campaign, smuggling out information about his condition. His cause, along with that of Sakharov and other dissidents, was championed by Western governments and human rights groups.

In 1986 he was released and shipped off to the US in an exchange deal. Orlov recalled the KGB tailor measuring him for the suit in which he was bundled on to a New York-bound Aeroflot plane. It fitted perfectly: “After having lived 62 years, I had finally discovered how to acquire decent clothing in the Soviet Union.”

Yuri Orlov arrives at JFK Airport, New York, October 5, 1986 - Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images
Yuri Orlov arrives at JFK Airport, New York, October 5, 1986 - Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov was born on August 13 1924 to Fyodor, who was unemployed at the time of his birth and Klavdiya, a teenage orphan. Times were hard and, though Fyodor eventually became a truck driver, the baby was sent to live with his grandmother in Gniloye, a rural village in south-west Russia.

His grandmother sold potatoes she grew, but lost her livelihood as Soviet collectivisation policy ruined village farms. Yet, as Orlov recalled in a 1991 memoir, Dangerous Thoughts, she refused to despair. “It’s possible to live,” she told him. “Just work, work, work. God will provide.”

Aged seven, Yuri moved to Moscow, where he lived in one room with his parents and two uncles. His father died of tuberculosis when he was nine.

His school career was interrupted by the outbreak of war, during which he worked as a lathe operator in a tank factory before serving in the Red Army during the closing months of the war. In 1947 he returned to his childhood village to find it wiped off the map. A local woman told him his grandmother had died during the first year of the war.

His mother, with whom he shared a tiny, damp former storeroom, urged him to join the militia, which could get them an apartment. “I truly killed her with my refusal,” Orlov wrote later. “She had neither healthy housing nor healthy food for the rest of her short life. That was the price of my education.”

Instead he enrolled at Moscow University, where he joined the Communist Party and graduated with a degree in Physics in 1952. He got a job at the Institute of Physics in Moscow, but by now was deeply disillusioned with Soviet communism.

He had wanted to be a theoretical physicist but, during his 15 years of internal exile in Armenia he became an expert on particle acceleration, obtained a doctorate at the University of Yerevan in 1963 and in 1968 was elected a corresponding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences.

Meanwhile his wife Irina, an artist, and their two sons stayed in Moscow to retain their rights to an apartment.

His subsequent prison term precluded further work in particle physics so Orlov shifted his interest into an uncharted (and controversial) field of physics that he called “wave logic” – a marriage of psychology and physics. The paper published in the West from Prison Camp 37-2, entitled “The Wave Logic of Consciousness: A Hypothesis”, explored, among other things, the physics behind the notion of free will.

Orlov was reunited with his wife on the Aeroflot flight to New York. But Irina, who retained her Soviet citizenship, soon returned to Moscow.

Yuri Orlov meeting Margaret Thatcher at 10, Downing Street in 1986 -  Shutterstock
Yuri Orlov meeting Margaret Thatcher at 10, Downing Street in 1986 - Shutterstock

After a few months of lobbying for human rights and meeting with the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Reagan and other world leaders, Orlov settled into a relatively anonymous and quiet life at Cornell University as a scientist and professor.

In 1990 President Gorbachev restored his Soviet citizenship and in 1993 Orlov took American citizenship. In 2005 he was named the first recipient of the Andrei Sakharov Prize, awarded biennially by the American Physical Society to honour scientists for promoting human rights.

He remarried, to Sidney Siskin, a Cornell lecturer who lived in his apartment and helped him to learn English.

Yuri Orlov, born August 13 1924, died September 27 2020