Yuri Orlov

Who is Yuri Orlov?

Yuri Feodorovich Orlov is Professor of Physics and Government at Cornell University, a prominent nuclear physicist, a former Soviet dissident, and a human rights activist.

During his childhood, in the 1930s, Orlov witnessed the destruction of his home village by Stalinist collectivisation in the USSR.

After World War II he worked at the Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, from which he was fired in 1956 for his human rights activism. He was sent into "soft exile" in Armenia, where in the early 1970s he led Particle accelerator projects at the Yerevan Physics Institute.

Upon his return to Moscow in 1973 he worked at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism and Propagation of Radio Waves in suburban Troitsk, whilst at the same time publicly supporting Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In 1976, to the further displeasure of the authorities, he founded the Moscow Helsinki Group to monitor Soviet adherence to the 1975 Helsinki human rights accords.

In 1978, Orlov was sentenced and incarcerated for almost ten years. In July 1983, the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky sent a letter asking for the release of Orlov to Austria, but it was intentionally left without an answer .