As we ponder the eternal mystery of to whom the President* of the United States might owe all that money, and whether or not it might be someone who once worked for the KGB and now owns an entire country, we should pause to pay tribute to a brilliant man who lost so much of his life to the faceless forces of authoritarian brutality simply because he tried to hold the state to an agreement it had signed. On Sunday, Yuri Federovich Orlov died. He was 96 years old. He was a brilliant nuclear physicist and a professor at Cornell. He also was a legend in the international human rights community. He was someone who stood up.
As far back as 1956, Orlov risked everything to stand up to Soviet totalitarianism. He stood up at a party meeting and, in discussing Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of the cult of personality surrounding the late Josef Stalin, called for "democracy based on socialism." This was enough to get him fired from his government job and expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was exiled to an institute in Armenia, where he became a world-recognized expert on particle accelerators. He returned to Moscow in 1972.
Three years later, the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Accords which, among other things, committed all its signatories to respect the human rights of all their citizens. By then, Orlov had stood up for dissident academic Andrei Sakharov and founded the first chapter of Amnesty International ever in the Soviet Union. In 1976, Orlov founded the Moscow Helsinki Group, which dedicated itself to monitoring how well the country was living up to the commitments it had made to the world in 1975. In 1977, he was convicted in a secret show trial and sent to a labor camp for seven years, which was to be followed by five years of "internal exile" in Siberia. His health declined badly. He wrote against the regime and his work was smuggled out of the various prison camps.
By 1984, he was living in a small Siberian town. International pressure, especially from Orlov's fellow scientists, landed on the new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, and he responded by trading Orlov—and imprisoned American journalist Nicholas Daniloff—for a Soviet diplomat who had been arrested here for buying U.S. jet propulsion secrets. In 1987, he took the job at Cornell. In 1993, he became an American citizen. In 2005, he became the first recipient of a prize named after Andrei Sakharov. He stood up, and that matters, especially today.
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