Human-Rights Hero

Yuri Orlov, a man of resolute conscience and implacable courage, will soon be freed from the pain and isolation of his long captivity and internal exile in the Soviet Union. His release, along with permission to emigrate from his homeland, comes as part of the deal struck in the Nicholas Daniloff case. Orlov is a physicist and campaigner for human rights who has become a kind of forgotten man in the ranks of contemporary Russian dissidents, his fate overshadowed by the better-known stories of such figures as Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Shcharansky. The U.S. government, to its credit, did not forget him, and so, eight years after being imprisoned for “anti-Soviet” activities, Orlov is about to be be set free.

The ancient function of intellectuals is to speak truth to power--a sometimes unpopular vocation in even the best of countries, a dangerous and potentially fatal one in societies where the state’s authority is absolute. Orlov invited official wrath early on. In 1956, after Nikita S. Khrushchev denounced the crimes of the Stalin era to a Communist Party congress, Orlov proposed that others who were also implicated in those crimes be held to account. For that he lost his job and was forced to leave Moscow. Sixteen years later Orlov spoke out in defense of Sakharov’s right of free expression. Once again his livelihood was taken from him.

In 1976 Orlov founded the unofficial Russian committee to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki agreement on human rights, which in a short time issued 18 reports detailing Soviet violations of the accords. Orlov was arrested soon after, and was sentenced to seven years in a strict-regime labor camp, to be followed by five years of exile in a remote Siberian village. Two years of Orlov’s imprisonment were spent in solitary confinement in a punishment cell, sometimes on a diet barely adequate to sustain life.

There was a time when Yuri Orlov had the best that the Soviet system can offer--membership in the Communist Party, a position at a prestigious science institute, the respect of his peers. And, because he is a brave and above all a moral man, Orlov gave it all away, courting and then enduring an indecent penalty for speaking out as his conscience demanded. America will be honored should he choose now to live here.