The Yuri Orlov File

Yuri Orlov

Human Rights Legend and Distinguished Physicist Turns 90

Founder of Moscow Helsinki Group Endured Gulag and Exile, Still Teaches at Cornell

Web Posting Includes KGB and Politburo Documents on Orlov's Dissident Career, Declassified U.S. Reports on the Human Rights Challenge Orlov Faced, Complete Orlov Physics Publications List, First Publication in English of Orlov's Historic 1956 Speech Criticizing the Communist Party, and Video of Orlov-Reagan White House Meeting from 1986

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 482 Posted August 13, 2014

Compiled and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom BlantonEditorial assistance by Anya Melyakova and Allison Brady. Special thanks to Sidney Orlov

For more information contact: 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

Washington, D.C., August 13, 2014 -- Marking the 90th birthday of the human rights legend and distinguished physicist Yuri Orlov, the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org) and the Memorial Society in Moscow (www.memo.ru) today posted online an extensive collection of formerly secret Soviet and U.S. documents on Orlov's career as a Soviet dissident, including the first English-language translation of his historic 1956 speech at his physics institute in Moscow, and his 1976 founding of the Moscow Helsinki Group.

The posting also includes Orlov's complete publications list as a still-active research physicist, his 2009 Vernon Hughes Memorial Lecture at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and never-before-published video of Orlov's White House meeting with President Ronald Reagan in 1986.

The documents include detailed KGB, Communist Party Central Committee and Politburo documents, together with parallel CIA and White House assessments, that suggest how courageous human rights activism by leading Soviet scientists like Orlov as early as 1956 fundamentally threatened the repressive Soviet system while setting the stage for the late 1980s perestroika/glasnost period that ended the Cold War.

The documents show that through organizing the Moscow Helsinki Group (with Lyudmila Alexeyeva) in May 1976, Orlov institutionalized human rights monitoring based on the principles in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, signed by the USSR and even published in Pravda. Multiple other Helsinki groups soon followed throughout Eastern and Western Europe, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, contributing enormous intellectual capital to the international human rights movement and to social processes that culminated in the peaceful revolutions of 1989. The Moscow Helsinki Group remains the oldest still-functioning human rights organization in Russia, and Orlov subsequently became honorary chairman of the International Helsinki Federation.


Check out today's posting at the National Security Archive's Website -http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB482/

Find us on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/NSArchive

Unredacted, the Archive blog - http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/

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THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.

 

 

© 2014

Soviet invasion Of Afghanistan a case Of mission creep, according to mew book and original Soviet documents

THE DEAD END PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH FOR THE FIRST TIME

Washington, DC, October 13, 2012 – Contrary to U.S. myths of a strategic Soviet offensive towards warm water ports on the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean, it was "mission creep" that led the Soviet Union into its ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, according to a new, richly documented account of early Soviet engagement in Afghanistan, published in English and in Russian today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org.

The groundbreaking book by two Russian authors - the historian and journalist Vladimir Snegirev and the veteran of Soviet foreign intelligence Valery Samunin - appears today in English under the title The Dead End: The Road to Afghanistan, together with 21 key documents from the National Security Archive's collection of Soviet and U.S. secret files on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and seven historic photographs from the period immediately before the invasion.

May 1 demonstration in Kabul, Babrak Karmal is in the center

The Archive's posting of the Russian original, Virus A: How We Got Infected by the Invasion of Afghanistan, appears on our Russian Page. It includes more than 150 original Russian-language documents from Soviet-era files gathered by the Archive - most of which are not available in Moscow archives today - and 42 photographs from the period that were obtained by the authors. This book, defined by the authors as a "political investigation," traces the process of the gradual Soviet engagement in the Afghan revolutionary process over the years 1978 and 1979, eventually culminating in the invasion of December 1979. The authors reconstruct the history of Soviet involvement on the basis of archival documents and extensive interviews with key participants ranging from top Afghan Communists to the late Ahmad Shah Masood to former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov and Soviet ambassador A.M. Puzanov.

During the glasnost years of the late 1980s, Vladimir Snegirev wrote the first investigative stories published in the Soviet Union (in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Rossiyskaya Gazeta) about the invasion of Afghanistan, and has been pursuing this hidden history for the past 25 years. Retired KGB colonel Valery Samunin served in Afghanistan for more than seven years as a foreign intelligence officer, and applied his knowledge and contacts to develop Snegirev's investigation into a panoramic history of the decisionmaking that led to the disastrous Soviet intervention in 1979. More

 

Belfer Center, Foreign Policy launch contest on Cuban Missile Crisis lessons

For the 50th anniversary of what historians agree was the most dangerous moment in human history, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Foreign Policy magazine today launched a contest for scholars and citizens to reflect on the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis and its lessons for current challenges.

The contest is straightforward: In no more than 300 words, entrants must present the most persuasive, original lesson flowing from the confrontation that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war over 13 days in October 1962. The rules of the contest and additional details are available here. Prizes will be awarded to the winner in each of three categories: general public; foreign policy scholars/practitioners; and students in grades 6-12. Entries will be accepted through October 10. Winners will be announced October 15. The three winners will each receive an iPad.

The Belfer Center has created a Cuban Missile Crisis website to mark the 50th anniversary. The site offers original documents, video clips and an interactive timeline. In addition, the “lessons” section provides tools for teachers, including draft lesson plans, to help engage students in thinking about the modern-day implications of the nuclear showdown half a century ago.

Foreign Policy magazine also has innovative content on the crisis, including an “On the Brink” Twitter feed by author and historian Michael Dobbs that provides daily Tweets echoing events 50 years ago as the standoff developed. More

 

Clinton admits the U.S government created and funded Al-Qaeda?

 

Not only do we need to remember history, we also need to think of the possible outcome of our actions before before we initiate them.

Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union? By Mikhail Gorbachev

 January 29, 2012 “The Nation” — Since the breakup of the Soviet Union twenty years ago, Western commentators have often celebrated it as though what disappeared from the world arena in December 1991 was the old Soviet Union, the USSR of Stalin and Brezhnev, rather than the reforming Soviet Union of perestroika. 

Moreover, discussion of its consequences has focused mostly on developments inside Russia. Equally important, however, have been the consequences for international relations, in particular lost alternatives for a truly new world order opened up by the end of the cold war.   

 

Following my election as general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, the Soviet leadership formulated a new foreign policy agenda. One of the key ideas of our reforms, or perestroika, was new political thinking, based on the recognition of the world’s interconnectedness and interdependence. The top priority was to avert the threat of nuclear war. Our immediate international goals included ending the nuclear arms race, reducing conventional armed forces, settling numerous regional conflicts involving the Soviet Union and the United States, and replacing the division of the European continent into hostile camps with what I called a common European home. More