Yuri Orlov

For the zoologist, see Yuri Alexandrovich Orlov.

Not to be confused with the fictional lead character in the film Lord of War.

Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov
Orlov, Summer 2008
Native name	Юрий Фёдорович Орлов
Born	(1924-08-13) 13 August 1924 Moscow, USSR
Citizenship	Soviet Union (1924–1986) Stateless (1986–1993) United States (1993–present)
Nationality	Russian
Fields	nuclear physics
Institutions	Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics Yerevan Physics Institute Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism and Propagation of Radio Waves Cornell University American Academy of Arts and Sciences subsidiary of Amnesty International in the Soviet Union Moscow Helsinki Group
Alma mater	Moscow State University, Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics
Known for	participation in Soviet atomic bomb project and for human rights activism with participation in dissident movement in the Soviet Union
Notable awards	Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize (1986), Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service (1995), Andrei Sakharov Prize (APS) (2006)
Spouse	Irina Lagunova Irina Valitova Sidney Orlov
Children	sons Dmitri, Aleksandr, Lev

Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov (Russian: Ю́рий Фёдорович Орло́в, born 13 August 1924, Moscow) is Professor of Physics and Government at Cornell University, a former Soviet dissident, Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist, a founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group and Soviet Amnesty International group.

Early career

Yuri Orlov was born into a working-class family on 13 August 1924 and grew up in a village near Moscow. His parents were Klavdiya Petrovna Lebedeva and Fyodor Pavlovich Orlov. In March 1933, his father died.

From 1944 to 1946, Orlov served as an officer in the Soviet army. In 1952, he graduated from the Moscow State University and began his postgraduate studies at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics where he later worked as a physicist.

In 1956, Orlov nearly lost his career of scientist due to his speech at the party meeting devoted to the discussion of the report On the Personality Cult and its Consequences by Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Then he publicly called Stalin and Beria "killers who were in power" and put forward the requirement of "democracy on the basis of socialism." For the pro-democracy speech he made in 1956, he was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and fired from his job.

"What is the meaning of life? That your soul may outlive your remains in something sacred and should escape decay... 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..." (Yuri Orlov, 1980)

Orlov obtained the Candidate of Sciences degree in 1958 and the Doctor of Sciences degree in 1963. He became an expert on particle acceleration. In 1968, he was elected a corresponding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences after he found work at the Yerevan Physics Institute. In 1972, he came back to Moscow and worked at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism.

Dissident

In September 1973, when Pravda published a statement by a group of prominent academicians denouncing Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov's anti-patriotic activity, Orlov decided to support him, while recollecting the well memorized spells of the 1930s, in which some academicians demanded the death penalty for others already arrested; later some of these academicians themselves were arrested; and then third academicians, still alive, publicly demanded the death penalty for them.

Defending academician Sakharov, Orlov on 16 September 1973 wrote "About the Reasons for the Intellectual Backwardness in the USSR and Proposals to Overcome It (Open Letter to L.I. Brezhnev)" which appeared in underground samizdat circulation. The Western press published the letter in 1974 but its publication in the Russian press took place only in 1991.

In the early 1970s, the article by Yuri Orlov "Is a Non-Totalitarian Type of Socialism Possible?" also appeared in underground samizdat circulation.

In 1973, he was fired after becoming a founding member of the first Amnesty International group in the Soviet Union.

In May 1976, he organised the Moscow Helsinki Group and became its chairman. He ignored orders to disband the Moscow Helsinki Group when the KGB told him the group was illegal. The KGB head Yuri Andropov determined, "The need has thus emerged to terminate the actions of Orlov, fellow Helsinki monitor Ginzburg and others once and for all, on the basis of existing law."

On 10 February 1977, Orlov was arrested. In March 1977, Orlov published the article about his arrest "The road to my arrest." In a closed trial, he was denied the right to examine evidence and to call witnesses. The courtroom was filled with some 50 individuals selected by authorities, while supporters and friends of Orlov, including Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, were barred from entering because there was no room. Orlov's summation was interrupted many times by the judge and the prosecutor and by spectators who shouted "spy" and "traitor." Orlov at the trial argued that he has a right to criticize the government and a right to circulate such criticism under the freedom of information provisions of the Helsinki Accords. Orlov also argued that he circulated such information for humanitarian, not subversive, reasons. On 15 May 1978, Orlov was sentenced to seven years of a labour camp and five years internal exile for his work with the Moscow Helsinki Group. US President Jimmy Carter expressed his concern over the severity of the sentence and the secrecy of the trial. Washington senator Henry M. Jackson said, "The Orlov trial, and the Ginzburg and Shcharansky incarcerations, are dramatic cases in point." The US National Academy of Sciences has officially protested against the trial of Orlov. In the summer of 1978, physicists at the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory created Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov and Shcharansky (SOS), an international movement to promote and protect the human rights of scientists. An initiator of SOS was American physicist Andrew Sessler, its chairman was Prof. Morris Pripstein.

Scientists at CERN have spoken out against the imprisonment of Orlov for "disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda". 43 physicists have called off Soviet trips to protest the jailing of Orlov.

For the first year and a half, Orlov was imprisoned in Lefortovo Prison, then Perm Camp 35 and 37. In Perm Camp 37, he has mounted three hunger strikes to make the prison authorities return his confiscated writings and notes. Two articles written by Orlov in the camp were smuggled and published abroad. On 5 July 1983, the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky sent the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov a letter asking for the release of Orlov to Austria, but it was intentionally left without an answer.

In 1984, Orlov was exiled to Kobyay in Siberia and was allowed to buy a house with a garden.

Emigration and US citizenship

On 30 September 1986, the KGB proposed to expel Orlov from the Soviet Union after depriving him of his Soviet citizenship and met with approval from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Orlov, 24 November 1986

On 10 December 1986, Orlov was awarded with the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize of $100,000.

Since 1987, Orlov has been working at Cornell University as a scientist.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Orlov studies particle accelerator design, beam interaction analysis and quantum mechanics. He has authored and coauthored numerous research papers, articles on human rights, and an autobiography, Dangerous Thoughts (1991).

On 18 July 1991, he and Elena Bonner wrote an open letter about the fact that Soviet army and special troops have been systematically deporting thousands of Armenians from Azerbaijan to Armenia.

In 1993, Orlov received American citizenship.

In 1995 the American Physical Society awarded him the Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service. In 2005 he was named the first recipient of the Andrei Sakharov Prize, awarded biennially by the American Physical Society to honor scientists for exceptional work in promoting human rights.

Orlov participated in two documentaries about the Soviet dissident movement, the 2005 one They Chose Freedom and in the 2014 one Parallels, Events, People.

He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Asia Advisory and Academic Freedom Committees, and member of the Honorary 25th Anniversary Committee, Global Rights.

Some pubications

• Orlov, Yuri. Letter to L.I. Brezhnev. Survey. Spring–Summer 1974;(14):241-245.
• Orlov, Yuri. The road to my arrest. The New Leader. March 1977;60(6).
• Orlov, Yuri. On prisoners in Soviet camps. Survey. Spring 1979;(24):67-91.
• Orlov, Yuri. A quantum model of doubt. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. October 1981;373:84–92. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1981.tb51134.x. Bibcode:1981NYASA.373...84O.
• Orlov, Yuri. The wave logic of consciousness: a hypothesis. International Journal of Theoretical Physics. January 1982;21(1):37-53. doi:10.1007/BF01880263. Bibcode:1982IJTP...21...37O.
• Orlov, Yuri; Bethell, Nicholas. Out of the Gulag and into exile. Encounter. May 1987;(26):48-52.
• Orlov, Yuri. Before and after glasnost. Commentary. 1 October 1988;86(4):24.
• Orlov, Yuri. The Soviet Union, human rights, and national security. In: Corillon, Carol (ed.). Science and human rights. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 1988. p. 62–67.
• Gottfried, Kurt; Orlov, Yuri. A man who would not be silenced: Sakharov: he saw scientific, political and moral realities as one equation, and he died still warning about 'tomorrow'. The Los Angeles Times. 19 December 1989.
• Bonner, Elena; Orlov, Yuri. Armenia: an open letter. The New York Review of Books. 18 July 1991.
• Orlov, Yuri [Юрий Орлов]. Перейти к полной свободе в сфере идей [Passing to full freedom in the area of ideas]. In: Aksyutin, Yuri; Medvedev, Roy [Юрий Аксютин, Рой Медведев] (eds.). Л.И. Брежнев: Материалы к биографии [L.I. Brezhnev: Materials to biography]. Moscow: Политиздат; 1991. Russian. ISBN 5-250-01721-5. p. 323-328.
• Birman, Joseph; Lizhi, Fang; Winick, Herman; Chudnovsky, Eugene; Orlov, Yuri. Science and human rights. Nature. August 1994;370(6491):592. doi:10.1038/370592a0. Bibcode:1994Natur.370..592B.

Further reading

• Yuri Orlov Cornell University Homepage

Video

• Юбилейный вечер Юрия Орлова [Anniversary evening of Yuri Orlov, 19 min, in Russian] on YouTube