To Defend These Rights

Valery Nikolayevich Chalidze was born in Moscow, U.S.S.R. on November 25, 1938. He studied physics at Moscow State University and in Tbilisi, Georgia. He was the head of a physics laboratory when he became a dissident. He founded an underground journal, Social Issues, and defended the rights of the Jews who had been denied emigration from the Soviet Union and gay people. In 1970, Chalidze, Andrei D. Sakharov, and Andrei Tverdokhlebov created the Committee on Human Rights in the U.S.S.R., one of the Soviet Union's first human rights organization.

In 1972, Chalidze left the Soviet Union to speak at American universities. Once in the United States, Soviet consular officials confiscated his passport thus forcing him to remain. He wrote several books including To Defend These Rights: Human Rights and the Soviet Union, Criminal Russia: A Study of Crime in the Soviet Union, and Stalin: Conquerer of Communism. Chalidze and Peter Reddaway were editors of the English-language Chronicle of Human Rights in the U.S.S.R., based on materials smuggled out of the Soviet Union. Chalidze died on January 3, 2018 at the age of 79.

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