Valery Chalidze

Who is Valery Chalidze?

Valery Chalidze is a Georgian-American author, publisher, and the former Soviet dissident and human rights activist.

Chalidze was born in Moscow. He was educated as a physicist at the universities of Moscow and Tbilisi. In the mid-1960s, he joined the Soviet human rights movement and published a samizdat magazine Obshchestvennye problemy. In 1970 Chalidze, along with Andrei Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, became one of the three founding members of the Moscow Human Rights Committee.

The Committee was the first non-governmental organization in the history of the Soviet Union, and eventually became affiliated with the United Nations. Its purpose was to offer free legal advice to persons whose human rights had been violated by the Soviet Government, and also to advise the Soviet Government on its legal obligations in regard to human rights under international and Soviet law. In 1972, he was invited to deliver a lecture in the United States and was promptly deprived of Soviet citizenship and prevented from returning to the Soviet Union. He promptly established Khronika Press in New York City, which published Russian-language books and important human-rights periodicals such as The Chronicle Of Current Events, detailing with scrupulous accuracy human rights violations in the Soviet Union.