Yuri Orlov, a former Soviet dissident and political prisoner who was imprisoned for seven years at a Gulag nearby, visits Perm 36, a new Gulag museum on June 26, 1998.Geoffrey York/The Globe and Mail
Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist and disillusioned former Communist who publicly held Moscow accountable for failing to protect the rights of dissidents and was imprisoned and exiled for his own apostasy, died Sept. 27 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Sidney Orlov.
Yuri Orlov was released from Siberia in 1986 in a prisoner exchange before his 12-year term in a labour camp and exile expired. He was banished from the Soviet Union and went to the United States, where he pursued his scientific research and human-rights advocacy and, beginning in 1987, taught physics and government at Cornell University in Ithaca. He became a citizen in 1993.
A credulous Communist Party member since college, Dr. Orlov began having doubts about the party based on a growing foreboding under Stalin over what he later described as “slavery without private property,” as well as the subsequent Soviet repression of civil-liberties movements in Hungary and what he called the “savage suppressions of workers' unrest” in Czechoslovakia.
He helped organize the Soviet branch of Amnesty International in 1973. In 1976 he founded, with Lyudmila Alexeyeva, what was considered his most enduring legacy: the Moscow Helsinki Group, which monitored Soviet compliance with the human-rights commitments that had been outlined in the 1975 Helsinki Accords, signed by some 35 countries.
Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch, said in an e-mail that the formation of the group “led to the development of the Helsinki movement in the Soviet bloc countries, and of human rights groups in Western countries that supported them.”
“He must be reckoned one of the most significant founders of the human-rights movement in Russia, and one of the most important figures of our last century,” said Scott Horton, director of the Moscow-based Andrei Sakharov Foundation, which was founded to promote the human-rights agenda of Mr. Sakharov, the celebrated Soviet dissident.
Natan Sharansky, another Soviet physicist and a Jewish “refusenik” who was arrested in the late 1970s and imprisoned for protesting the government’s refusal to grant him a visa to travel to Israel, recalled in The Times of Israel this week that what Dr. Orlov proposed was “unprecedented in its boldness”: a group that would monitor Moscow’s compliance with its commitments to the Helsinki Accords, document human-rights violations and transmit the information to the West through official channels.
“We lit a fire under the regime,” Mr. Sharansky wrote, “and it was Orlov’s bold vision that made our efforts so effective – and so intolerable from the Soviet point of view.”
Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov was born Aug. 13, 1924, in a village near Moscow to Fyodor Pavlovich Orlov, a truck driver who became an aviation engineer, and Klavdiya Petrovna Lebedeva. His father died when Yuri was 9.
He served in the Soviet Army from 1944 to 1946 as an artillery officer; finished high school in Moscow, where he worked as a stoker; and graduated in 1952 from the Physico-Technical Department of Moscow University. He earned two doctorates: from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Siberia.
In 1956, after publicly advocating democratic socialism, he was fired as a research physicist at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics and expelled from the Communist Party. In 1973, in a letter to Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the party, he denounced the stultifying effect of repression on scientific research and presciently proposed “glasnost,” or openness, long before that word was in common use.
The National Security Archive, a Washington research group, said in a statement that Dr. Orlov contributed “enormous intellectual capital to the international human rights movement and to social processes that culminated in the peaceful revolutions of 1989.”
Dr. Orlov was arrested in 1977 and, after a show trial, sentenced to seven years in a labour camp, followed by five years in Siberian exile, for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” During his imprisonment, he managed to smuggle out scientific and human-rights documents that were published in the West.
In 1986, halfway through his exile, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and deported as part of a swap that included the exchange of Nicholas S. Daniloff, an American journalist, for a Soviet spy, on the eve of a summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, between then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
He was 62, his curly red hair had turned gray, and his health had deteriorated. He arrived in the United States with his wife at the time, Irina, but left his three grown sons from an earlier marriage, Dmitry, Aleksander and Lev, in Moscow. He leaves them, along with his wife, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Three previous marriages ended in divorce.
Dr. Orlov later served as a consultant at Brookhaven National Laboratory and as senior scientist at the Laboratory for Elementary-Particle Physics at Cornell, where he taught physics and government until he retired in 2015 and began theoretical research in cosmology.
In 2005 he was named the first recipient of the Andrei Sakharov Prize by the American Physical Society. He was recently named a winner of the society’s Robert R. Wilson Prize.
His Russian citizenship was restored in 1990, but what he called his Dangerous Thoughts (the title of his 1991 memoir) about civil liberties continued even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under Vladimir Putin, he said in 2004, “Russia is flying backward in time.”
John Macdonald, a British lawyer working with Soviet dissidents, told The New Yorker in 1983 that Dr. Orlov was “neither a politician nor a professional agitator.”
“He and his former colleagues may be called dissidents,” Mr. Macdonald added, “but they are really what we would consider concerned citizens. Above all, Orlov is a scientist and human being interested in the truth.”
During his incarceration, Dr. Orlov had time to reflect.
“What is the meaning of life?” he wrote from prison in 1980. “That your soul may outlive your remains in something sacred and should escape decay. This month, with a clear head, I have again looked at, added up, corrected, and sized up what I have been doing during these last years and have seen that this is good.”