Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
• Calculus
• Geometry
• Topology
• Trignometry
• Combinatorics
• Logic
• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
• Operations research

Related Topics

• Electromagnetic Spectrum
• Linear Equations
• Applied Physics
• Nano Technology
• Engineering Sciences
• Mathematical Medicine
• Fluid dynamics
• Computational Mathematics
• Gamma Ray Optics
• Onfrared Optics
• Relative Velocity
• Iciam
• Intelligent Imaging Neuroscience
• Biomedical Engineering
• Neuroscience Research
• Quantum Cosmology
• Brain Research

• 2010 Odyssey Two
• Ain Saar
• Albert Lutuli
• Albert Schweitzer
• Aleksandr Zinovyev
• Alexander Ginzburg
• Alexander Nekrich
• Alexander Tarasov
• Alexandr Podrabinek
• Alexei Borovoi
• Alfred A. Knopf
• Alma mater
• Ampere
• Amstelveen
• Amsterdam
• Anatoly Koryagin
• Anatoly Kuznetsov
• Anatoly Marchenko
• Andrei Amalrik
• Andrei Sakharov
• Andrei Sinyavsky
• Andrei Tverdokhlebov
• Anna Barkova
• Anti-Stalinist left
• Antimatter
• Antonina W. Bouis
• Apparatchik
• Armenia
• Arrow of time
• Arthur C. Clarke
• Assen
• Asteroid
• Atheism
• Atomgrad
• Avon (publishers)
• Aşgabat
• Baptism
• Baryon asymmetry
• Batumi Stalin Museum
• Belarus
• Benjamin Fain
• Besarion Jughashvili
• Big Bang
• Black hole
• Boris Kagarlitsky
• Boris Korczak
• Boris Pasternak
• Brandeis University
• Brezhnev stagnation
• C-symmetry
• Central Committee
• Character encoding
• Civil liberties
• Cold War
• Cosmic ray
• Cosmology
• CP-violation
• CPT symmetry
• Dag Hammarskjöld
• Danylo Shumuk
• David Devdariani
• De-Stalinization
• Decossackization
• Density
• Dina Kaminskaya
• Dissident
• Dmitri Savitski
• Doan Viet Hoat
• Doctor of Philosophy
• Doctors' plot
• Dominique Pire
• Eastern Bloc
• Eddy current
• Eduard Kuznetsov
• Eduard Limonov
• Edward Teller
• Efraim Sevela
• Eisaku Satō
• Ekaterina Svanidze
• Electromagnetic coil
• Elena Bonner
• Eliyahu Essas
• Enn Tarto
• Ephraim Kholmyansky
• Era of Stagnation
• Ernst Rexer
• European Parliament
• Explosive material
• Forced feeding
• Fundamental science
• Gauss (unit)
• Gennady Gorelik
• Geodesic
• George Marshall
• Georgi Vins
• Georgi Vladimov
• Georgian Affair
• Georgy Flyorov
• Gernot Zippe
• Glasnost
• Gleb Yakunin
• Great Purge
• Greece
• Grigory Isayev
• Grigory Pomerants
• Gulag
• Guram Mamulia
• Harvard University
• Heinz Pose
• Hellevoetsluis
• Henry Kissinger
• Het Parool
• Holodomor
• Houghton Library
• Human rights
• Hunger strike
• Igor Kurchatov
• Igor Shafarevich
• Igor Tamm
• Ihor Kalynets
• Ilya Gabay
• Induced gravity
• Ion Moraru
• Irina Ratushinskaya
• Isaak Kikoin
• Israel
• Ivan Drach
• Ivan Kandyba
• January Events
• Jerusalem
• Joe 4
• Joseph Brodsky
• Joseph Stalin
• Jüri Kukk
• Karel van het Reve
• Katyń massacre
• Ketevan Geladze
• KGB
• Khrushchev Thaw
• Konstantin Kuzakov
• Kronid Lyubarsky
• Kurapaty
• Kurchatov Institute
• Larisa Bogoraz
• Lavrentiy Beria
• Le Duc Tho
• Leiden
• Lenin Prize
• Lenin's Testament
• Leningrad Affair
• Leonid Borodin
• Leonid Plyushch
• Les Tanyuk
• Lester B. Pearson
• Lev Artsimovich
• Lev Chernyi
• Lev Kopelev
• Lev Navrozov
• Levko Lukyanenko
• Lina Kostenko
• Linus Pauling
• Literaturnaya Gazeta
• Lydia Chukovskaya
• Lysenkoism
• Léon Jouhaux
• Magnetic field
• Main Page
• Manhattan Project
• Marcel Dekker
• Maria Rozanova
• Merab Kostava
• Michael Voslenski
• Michail J. Makarenko
• Mihai Dolgan
• Mikhail Gorbachev
• Mingrelian Affair
• Moscow
• Moscow Trials
• Moysey Fishbein
• Mykola Bakay
• Mykola Horbal
• Mykola Rudenko
• Myroslav Marynovych
• Nadezhda Alliluyeva
• Nadezhda Mandelstam
• Nadiya Svitlychna
• Natan Sharansky
• Naum Meiman
• Nazino affair
• Neo-Stalinism
• Netherlands
• Nikita Khrushchev
• Nikolaus Riehl
• Nikolay Dollezhal
• Nizhny Novgorod
• Nobel Peace Prize
• Norman Borlaug
• Norway
• Novaya Zemlya
• Novouralsk
• Nuclear fusion
• Nuclear Physics
• Nuclear physics
• Nuclear testing
• Nuremberg
• Oleksa Hirnyk
• Operation North
• Operation Priboi
• Orders of Lenin
• Osip Mandelstam
• Oslo
• P-symmetry
• Particle physics
• Paruyr Hayrikyan
• Pavel Fitin
• Pavel Litvinov
• Pavel Sudoplatov
• Perestroika
• Perseus (spy)
• Physicist
• Pianist
• Plasma (physics)
• Plasmoid
• Polish October
• Portal Communism
• Portal Soviet Union
• Pospelov Commission
• Posthumous awards
• Potsdam Conference
• Pressure
• Project-706
• Proton
• Purmerend
• Pyotr Grigorenko
• Quantum effects
• Quantum gravity
• RDS-1
• RDS-37
• René Cassin
• Rishon LeZion
• Romas Kalanta
• Rotterdam
• Roy Medvedev
• RSFSR
• Russian Alsos
• Russian language
• Ryutin Affair
• Sakharov Center
• Sakharov Gardens
• Sakharov Prize
• Samizdat
• Sarov
• Saville Sax
• Semey
• Semyon Gluzman
• Sergei Kovalev
• Sergei Soldatov
• Sergey Kirov
• Seán MacBride
• Shaped charge
• Shmuel Schneurson
• Shvernik Commission
• Slavophile
• Smiling Buddha
• Snezhinsk
• Socialism
• Socialist realism
• Sofia Kalistratova
• Sofiya Kalistratova
• Solenoid
• Soviet Census (1937)
• Soviet deportations
• Soviet dissidents
• Soviet Union
• Soviet war crimes
• Spacetime
• St. Petersburg
• Stalin Epigram
• Stalin Note
• Stalin Peace Prize
• Stalin Prize
• Stalin's ten blows
• Stalinism
• Star Trek
• Sukhoy Nos
• Sultan Galiev
• Superconductivity
• Svetlana Alliluyeva
• T-symmetry
• Tehran Conference
• Teller-Ulam design
• Teller–Ulam design
• Tesla (unit)
• The Hague
• The K Project
• The New York Times
• Thermonuclear fusion
• Third Idea
• Third world war
• Tito–Stalin split
• Tokamak
• Torus
• Tryokhgorny
• Tsar Bomba
• Tsarist Russia
• Turkmenistan
• Ulyanovsk
• UNICEF
• Universe
• USSR
• USSR Constitution
• Utrecht
• Vadim Delaunay
• Valeriy Marchenko
• Valery Chalidze
• Valery Tarsis
• Varlam Shalamov
• Vasile Bătrânac
• Vasile Odobescu
• Vasily Dzhugashvili
• Vasily Grossman
• Vasyl Stus
• Vasyl Symonenko
• Viacheslav Chornovil
• Victor Sokolov
• Vietnam
• Viktor Fainberg
• Viktor Muravin
• Viktor Nekipelov
• Vilnius
• Vinnytsia massacre
• Vitaliy Kalynychenko
• Vitaly Ginzburg
• Vladimir Bougrine
• Vladimir Bukovsky
• Vladimir Shelkov
• Vladimir Strelnikov
• Vladimir Voinovich
• Vyacheslav Molotov
• Washington, D.C.
• Wayback Machine
• White hole
• Wikipedia Link rot
• Wikipedia Persondata
• Willy Brandt
• Windows-1251
• Winter War
• World War II
• Wormhole
• Yakov Dzhugashvili
• Yakov Zeldovich
• Yalta Conference
• Yanks for Stalin
• Yaroslav Lesiv
• Yekaterina Peshkova
• Yelena Bonner
• Yerevan
• Yevgenia Ginzburg
• Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Yosef Mendelevitch
• Yosyf Zisels
• Yuli Daniel
• Yuliy Kim
• Yuri Bezmenov
• Yuri Galanskov
• Yuri Orlov
• Zhores Medvedev
• Zoya Krakhmalnikova
• Zviad Gamsakhurdia
• 
  

• 
  Amstelveen
   Amstelveen (help·info) is a suburban municipality in the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland. It is part of the metropolitan area of Amsterdam. The municipality of Amstelveen consists of the following villages and/or districts: Amstelveen, Bovenkerk, Westwijk, Bankras-Kostverloren, Groenelaan, Waardhuizen, Randwijk, Elsrijk, Keizer Karelpark, Nes aan de Amstel, Ouderkerk aan de Amstel (partly). The name Amstelveen comes from 'Amstel', a local river, and 'veen', meaning fen, peat, or moor.
  KLM has its headquarters in Amstelveen. In addition Amstelveen has the international headquarters of one of the Big Four auditors, KPMG.^{[citation needed]}
  During the French occupation between 1810 and 1814, it was the capital of a canton in the French department Zuyderzée, and until 1964 the municipality of Amstelveen was called Nieuwer-Amstel. It is 'technically a large dorp (village), because it was never walled. The symbol adopted for Amstelveen was based on the Amsterdam symbol of three crosses, with one additional cross for distinction. The Thijssepark (in full the Dr Jac. P. Thijssepark), was the first heempark in the Netherlands and is one of sixteen heemparks or heemgroen in Amstelveen. Designed by landscape architect C.P.Broerse; following the ideas of the great Dutch naturalist and conservationist Jac. P. Thijsse, it was developed between 1940 and 1972 and covers an area of 5 hectares, and is situated just south of the Amsterdamse Bos. Amstelveen was chosen as an unlikely host of a match in the 1999 Cricket World Cup, for which the Netherlands had not qualified. South Africa played Kenya in the match. Former Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende started his political career as member of the council for Amstelveen. As a result of the vicinity of Schiphol (Amsterdam Airport), and its links to Amsterdam, Amstelveen has grown and become a cosmopolitan mix of many cultures living in Amstelveen.
  
  wn.com/Amstelveen
• 
  Amsterdam
  Amsterdam (English /ˈæmstərdæm/; Dutch: [ˌɑmstərˈdɑm] ( listen)) is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The city's status as the capital of the nation is governed by the constitution. Amsterdam has a population of 790,654 within city limits, an urban population of 1,209,419 and a metropolitan population of 2,289,762. The city is located in the province of North Holland in the west of the country. It comprises the northern part of the Randstad, one of the larger conurbations in Europe, with a population of approximately 7 million.
  Amsterdam's name is derived from Amstelredamme, indicative of the city's origin: a dam in the river Amstel. Settled as a small fishing village in the late 12th century, Amsterdam became one of the most important ports in the world during the Dutch Golden Age, a result of its innovative developments in trade. During that time, the city was the leading center for finance and diamonds. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the city expanded, and many new neighborhoods and suburbs were formed. The 17th-century canals of Amsterdam (in Dutch: 'Grachtengordel'), located in the heart of Amsterdam, were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in July 2010.
  
  wn.com/Amsterdam
• 
  Armenia
  Armenia ⁱ/ɑrˈmiːniə/ (Armenian: Հայաստան Hayastan [hɑjɑsˈtɑn]), officially the Republic of Armenia (Հայաստանի Հանրապետություն, Hayastani Hanrapetut’yun, [hɑjɑstɑˈni hɑnɾɑpɛtuˈtʰjun]), is a landlocked, mountainous country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bordered by Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, the de facto independent Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and Azerbaijan to the east, and Iran and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan to the south.
  A former republic of the Soviet Union, Armenia is a unitary, multiparty, democratic nation-state with an ancient and historic cultural heritage. The Kingdom of Armenia became the first state in the world to adopt Christianity as its religion, in the early years of the 4th century (the traditional date is 301 AD). The modern Republic of Armenia recognizes the Armenian Apostolic Church, the world's oldest national church, as the country's primary religious establishment. Armenians have their own unique alphabet invented by Mesrob Mashtots in 406 AD.
  
  wn.com/Armenia
• 
  Assen
  Assen [ˈɑ.sə(n)] ( listen) is a municipality and a city in the northeastern Netherlands, and is the capital of the province of Drenthe. It received city rights in 1809. Assen's main claim to fame is the TT Circuit Assen the motorcycle racing circuit, where on the last Saturday in June the Dutch TT is run. Assen has a railway station: Assen railway station.
  Anreep, Assen, De Haar, Graswijk, Loon, Rhee, Schieven, Ter Aard, Ubbena, Witten, Zeijen, Zeijerveen, Zeijerveld.
  The history of the capital of Drenthe can be traced back to at least 1258, when a new location had to be found for the Maria in Campis monastery, which was originally built near Coevorden as a penalty for the slaughter in 1227 of the army of the Bishop of Utrecht at the hands of Drenthe's peasants, in what has come to be known as the Battle of Ane. A battle, incidentally, in which the Bishop was killed. His successor ordered the monastery to be built as a penalty. As this monastery was located in a barren peat area, which also happened to flood from time to time, a better location had to be found. A better and especially dryer spot for the Cistercian monastery was found in an area known as Witten, where at the time only a few farms were located. Around it were village communities like Deurze, Witten en Peelo. The latter has a history which goes back to the times from when Dolmens were built, but is presently situated between two new districts of Assen. The "relocated" monastery probably was erected in the 1260s, and over the centuries Assen developed around it.
  
  wn.com/Assen
• 
  Aşgabat
  Ashgabat (Turkmen: Aşgabat, Persian: اشک آباد‎, Russian: Ашхабад, also Ashkhabad in transliteration from Russian formerly Poltoratsk between 1919–1927) is the capital and largest city of Turkmenistan, a country in Central Asia. It has a population of 695,300 (2001 census estimate), 2009 estimates around 1 million people in Ashgabat, and is situated between the Kara Kum desert and the Kopet Dag mountain range. Ashgabat has a primarily Turkmen population, with ethnic minorities of Russians, Armenians, and Azeris. It is 250 km from the second largest city in Iran, Mashhad.
  Ashgabat is Aşgabat in Turkmen, Ашхабад (Ashkhabad) in Russian, and اشک آباد (UniPers: Ešq-âbâd) in Persian. From 1919 until 1927, the city was renamed Poltoratsk after a local revolutionary. Before 1991, the city was usually spelled Ashkabad in English, a transliteration of the Russian form, which was itself from the original Persian form. It has also been variously spelled Ashkhabat and Ashgabad.
  Root of the name of the city goes back to Arshacid Empire era, and derived from the name of the founder of the Parthian Empire,Arsaces I of Parthia. So it seems the original form of the name was Ashk-Abad, and because of Turkish pronunciation of the name it became like it is today.
  
  wn.com/Aşgabat
• 
  Belarus
  Belarus (ⁱ/bɛləˈruːs/ bel-ə-ROOSS; Belarusian: Беларусь, Russian pronunciation: [bʲɛlaˈrusʲ] Russian: Беларусь, Белоруссия, Belarus', Belorussiya), officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno (Hrodna), Gomel (Homiel), Mogilev (Mahilyow) and Vitebsk (Vitsebsk). Over forty percent of its 207,600 square kilometres (80,200 sq mi) is forested, and its strongest economic sectors are agriculture and manufacturing.
  Until the 20th century, the lands of modern-day Belarus belonged to several countries, including the Principality of Polotsk, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russian Empire. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Belarus became a founding constituent republic of the Soviet Union and was renamed as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). The borders of Belarus took their modern shape in 1939 when some lands of the Second Polish Republic were incorporated into it after the Soviet invasion of Poland. The nation and its territory were devastated in World War II, during which Belarus lost about a third of its population and more than half of its economic resources. The republic was redeveloped in the post-war years. In 1945 the Belorussian SSR became a founding member of the United Nations, along with the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian SSR.
  
  wn.com/Belarus
• 
  Brandeis University
  Brandeis University ( /ˈbrændaɪs/) is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles (14 km) west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it was ranked by the U.S. News and World Report as the number 31 national university in the United States.Forbes listed Brandeis University as number 57 among all national universities and liberal arts colleges combined in 2010.
  Brandeis was founded in 1948 as a nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored coeducational institution on the site of the former Middlesex University. The university is named for Louis Brandeis (1856–1941), the first Jewish Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
  Names associated with the conception of Brandeis include Israel Goldstein, George Alpert, C. Ruggles Smith, Albert Einstein, and Abram L. Sachar.
  C. Ruggles Smith was the son of Dr. John Hall Smith, founder of Middlesex University, who had died in 1944. In 1946, the university was on the brink of financial collapse. At the time, it was one of the few medical schools in the U. S. that did not impose a Jewish quota; but it had never been able to secure AMA accreditation—in part, its founder believed, due to institutional antisemitism in the AMA—and, as a result, Massachusetts had all but shut it down.
  
  wn.com/Brandeis_University
• 
  European Parliament
  The European Parliament (abbreviated as Europarl or the EP) is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union (EU). Together with the Council of the European Union (the Council) and the European Commission, it exercises the legislative function of the EU and it has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world. The Parliament is currently composed of 754 Members of the European Parliament, who represent the second largest democratic electorate in the world (after the Parliament of India) and the largest trans-national democratic electorate in the world (375 million eligible voters in 2009).
  It has been directly elected every five years by universal suffrage since 1979. However, turnout at European Parliament elections has fallen consecutively at each election since that date, and has been under 50% since 1999. Turnout in 2009 stood at 43% of all European voters, ranging from 90% in Luxembourg and Belgium (where compulsory voting is used) to 20% in Slovakia. Turnout was under 50% in 18 out of 27 member states.
  
  wn.com/European_Parliament
• 
  Greece
  Greece ⁱ/ˈɡriːs/ (Greek: Ελλάδα, Ellada, IPA: [eˈlaða] ( listen) historically in Katharevousa and Ancient Greek: Ἑλλάς, Hellas, IPA: [eˈlas] and [helːás] respectively), officially the Hellenic Republic (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, Elliniki Dimokratia, IPA: [eliniˈci ðimokraˈtia]), is a country in Southern Europe, politically considered part of Western Europe.Athens is the capital and the largest city in the country (its urban area also including Piraeus). The population of the country is around 11 million.
  Greece has land borders with Albania, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of mainland Greece, the Ionian Sea to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the 11th longest coastline in the world at 13,676 km (8,498 mi) in length, featuring a vast number of islands (approximately 1,400, of which 227 are inhabited), including Crete, the Dodecanese, the Cyclades, and the Ionian Islands among others. Eighty percent of Greece consists of mountains, of which Mount Olympus is the highest at 2,917 m (9,570 ft).
  
  wn.com/Greece
• 
  Harvard University
  Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
  Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.
  
  wn.com/Harvard_University
• 
  Hellevoetsluis
  Hellevoetsluis ([ˌɦɛləvutˈslœy̆s] ( listen)) (population: 39,559 in November 2011, source CBS (Dutch)) is a small city and municipality on Voorne-Putten Island in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. The municipality covers an area of 46.14 km² (17.81 mile²) of which 14.57 km² (5.63 mile²) is water and it includes the population centres Nieuw-Helvoet, and Nieuwenhoorn, both former municipalities.
  Hellevoetsluis is located on the Haringvliet with the sea, beach and dunes close by, on the extreme southern edge of the Rijnmond and Europoort areas, close to the broad Zeeland landscape. The name translates as "lock at the foot of the Helle". The Helle was a small local river which disappeared over time.
  The history of Hellevoetsluis has always been connected with water. During the time of the United Provinces Hellevoetsluis was the naval port of the Admiralty of de Maze (Rotterdam) and could accommodate an entire fleet within a special land-enclosed fortress with harbour and dockyard facilities, accessible through a canal. Thanks to its strategic situation the town grew from the beginning of the 17th century to be the homeport for the Dutch war fleet. In later years the port was fortified more and more and Hellevoetsluis therefore became a unique combination of fortified town and naval port. The Admirals Maarten Tromp, Michiel de Ruyter and Piet Heyn had their home base here and in 1688 during the Glorious Revolution William III of Orange's invasion fleet departed from the port.
  
  wn.com/Hellevoetsluis
• 
  Houghton Library
  Houghton Library is the primary repository for rare books and manuscripts at Harvard University. It is part of the Harvard College Library within the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Houghton is located on the south side of Harvard Yard, next to Widener Library.
  Harvard's first special collections library was the Treasure Room of Widener Library. In March 1938, looking to supply Harvard's most valuable collections with more space and improved storage conditions, Harvard College Librarian Keyes DeWitt Metcalf presented the Harvard Corporation with a set of proposals which would eventually lead to the creation of Houghton Library, Lamont Library, and the New England Deposit Library. Funding for Houghton was raised privately, with the largest portion coming from Arthur A. Houghton Jr., in the form of shares of stock in Corning Glass Works. Construction was largely completed by the fall of 1941, and the library opened on February 28, 1942.
  Houghton holds collections of papers of Samuel Johnson, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, John Keats, Gore Vidal, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott, along with the papers of other notable transcendentalists, Theodore Roosevelt, T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Henry James, William James, James Joyce, John Updike and many others.
  
  wn.com/Houghton_Library
• 
  Israel
  Coordinates: 31°N 35°E / 31°N 35°E / 31; 35
  Israel, officially the State of Israel ( /ˈɪzriːəl/ or  /ˈɪzreɪəl/; Hebrew: מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל‎, Medīnat Yisrā'el, IPA: [me̞diˈnät jisʁäˈʔe̞l] ( listen); Arabic: دَوْلَة إِسْرَائِيل‎, Dawlat Isrāʼīl, IPA: [dawlat ʔisraːˈʔiːl]), is a parliamentary republic in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan and the West Bank in the east, Egypt and the Gaza Strip on the southwest, and the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the south, and it contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area. Israel is defined as a Jewish and Democratic State in its Basic Laws and is the world's only Jewish-majority state.
  Following the adoption of a resolution by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 November 1947 recommending the adoption and implementation of the United Nations plan to partition Palestine, on 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, a state independent from the British Mandate for Palestine. Neighboring Arab states invaded the next day in support of the Palestinian Arabs. Israel has since fought several wars with neighboring Arab states, in the course of which it has occupied the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Portions of these territories, including east Jerusalem, have been annexed by Israel, but the border with the neighboring West Bank has not yet been permanently defined.^{[neutrality is disputed]} Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have so far not resulted in peace.
  
  wn.com/Israel
• 
  Jerusalem
  Jerusalem ( /dʒəˈruːsələm/; Hebrew: יְרוּשָׁלַיִם‎‎ Yerushaláyim   ; Arabic: القُدس‎ al-Quds    and/or أورشليم Ûrshalîm) is the capital of Israel, though not internationally recognized as such, and one of the oldest cities in the world. It is located in the Judean Mountains, between the Mediterranean Sea and the northern edge of the Dead Sea. If the area and population of East Jerusalem is included, it is Israel's largest city in both population and area, with a population of 801,000 residents over an area of 125.1 km² (48.3 sq mi). Jerusalem is also a holy city to the three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
  During its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times. The oldest part of the city was settled in the 4th millennium BCE. In 1538, walls were built around Jerusalem under Suleiman the Magnificent. Today those walls define the Old City, which has been traditionally divided into four quarters—known since the early 19th century as the Armenian, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Quarters. The Old City became a World Heritage site in 1981, and is on the List of World Heritage in Danger. Modern Jerusalem has grown far beyond its boundaries.
  
  wn.com/Jerusalem
• 
  Katyń massacre
  The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre (Polish: zbrodnia katyńska, mord katyński, 'Katyń crime'; Russian: Катынский расстрел Katynskij ra'sstrel 'Katyn shooting'), was a mass execution of Polish nationals carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police, in April and May 1940. The massacre was prompted by Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps, dated 5 March 1940. This official document was approved and signed by the Soviet Politburo, including its leader, Joseph Stalin. The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000, with 21,768 being a lower bound. The victims were murdered in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, with the rest being Polish intelligentsia arrested for allegedly being "intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests."
  
  wn.com/Katyń_massacre
• 
  Kurapaty
  Kurapaty (Belarusian: Курапаты) is a wooded area on the outskirts of Minsk, Belarus, in which a vast number of people were executed between 1937 and 1941 by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.
  The exact count of victims is uncertain, NKVD archives are classified in Belarus. According to various sources the number of people to have been perished in Kurapaty is estimated to be the following: up to 7,000 people (according to attorney general of Belarus Bozhelko), at least 30,000 people (according to attorney general of BSSR Tarnaŭski), up to 100,000 people (according to “Belarus” reference book), from 102,000 to 250,000 people (according to the article by Zianon Pazniak in “Litaratura i mastactva” newspaper), 250,000 people (according to Polish historian and professor of University of Wrocław Zdzisław Julian Winnicki), and more (according to the British historian Norman Davies).
  The discovery by historian Zyanon Paznyak and exhumation of the remains in 1988 gave an added momentum to the pro-democracy and pro-independence movement in Belarus in the last years of the Soviet Union before it dissolved. There have been investigations by both the Soviet, and Belarusian governments, which have been inconclusive as to the perpetrators who are believed to be either the Soviet NKVD, or the invading German forces in 1941.In the Book 'Kurapaty The Road of Death' it is claimed after heavy research that the German army never entered the site and therefore never killed there. This is based on the eyewitness testimonies of villagers, from villages such as Cna.
  
  wn.com/Kurapaty
• 
  Kurchatov Institute
  The Kurchatov Institute (Russian: Роcсийский научный центр "Курчатовский Институт" — Russian Scientific Centre "Kurchatov Institute") is Russia's leading research and development institution in the field of nuclear energy. In the Soviet Union it was known as I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy (Russian: Институт Атомной Энергии им. И.В. Курчатова), abbreviated KIAE (Russian: КИАЭ). It is named after Igor Kurchatov.
  Until 1955 known under a secret name "Laboratory No. 2 of the USSR Academy of Sciences", the Kurchatov Institute was founded in 1943 with the initial purpose of developing nuclear weapons. The majority of Soviet nuclear reactors were designed in the Institute. Since 1955 it was also the host for major scientific experimental work in the fields of thermonuclear fusion and plasma physics. In particular, the first tokamak systems were developed there, the most successful of them being T-3 and its larger version T-4. T-4 was tested in 1968 in Novosibirsk, conducting the first quasistationary thermonuclear fusion reaction ever. Until 1991, the Ministry of Atomic Energy oversaw the Kurchatov Institute's administration. After the transformation into the State Scientific Center in November 1991, the Institute became subordinated directly to the Russian Government. According to the Institute's Charter, the Institute's president is appointed by the prime minister based on recommendations from Rosatom. In February 2005 Mikhail Kovalchuk was appointed director of the institute.
  
  wn.com/Kurchatov_Institute
• 
  Leiden
  Leiden (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈlɛi̯.də(n)] ( listen); in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the Dutch province of South Holland. The municipality of Leiden has a population of about 120,000, but the city forms one densely connected urban area with its suburbs Oegstgeest, Leiderdorp, Voorschoten, Valkenburg, Rijnsburg and Katwijk, which have about 254,000 inhabitants combined. The larger Leiden agglomeration counts 332,000 inhabitants which makes it the sixth major agglomeration in the Netherlands. Leiden is located on the Old Rhine, at a distance of some 20 kilometers from The Hague to its south and some 40 kilometers from Amsterdam to its north. The recreational area of the Kaag Lakes (Kagerplassen) lies just to the northeast of Leiden.
  A university city since 1575, Leiden houses Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Centre. It is twinned with Oxford, the location of England's oldest university.
  It is true that Leiden is an old city, its connection with Roman Lugdunum Batavorum is true though it is actually near the close-by town of Katwijk, whereas the Roman settlement near modern Leiden was called Matilo. However, there was a Roman fortress in Leiden in the 4th century.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Leiden
• 
  Moscow
  Moscow ( /ˈmɒskaʊ/ or /ˈmɒskoʊ/; Russian: Москва́, tr. Moskva; IPA: [mɐˈskva] ( listen)) is the capital and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural and scientific center of Russia and the continent. Moscow is the northernmost megacity on Earth, the most populous city in Europe, and the 6th largest city proper in the world. Its population, according to the results of the 2010 Census, is 11,503,501. Based on Forbes 2011, Moscow has the largest community of billionaires in the world.
  Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia. In the course of its history the city has served as the capital of a progression of states, from the medieval Grand Duchy of Moscow and the subsequent Tsardom of Russia to the Soviet Union. Moscow is the site of the Moscow Kremlin, an ancient fortress that is today the residence of the Russian President and of the executive branch of the Government of Russia. The Kremlin is also one of several World Heritage Sites in the city. Both chambers of the Russian parliament (the State Duma and the Federation Council) also sit in Moscow.
  
  wn.com/Moscow
• 
  Nazino affair
  The Nazino affair was the mass deportation of 6,000 people, 4,000 of whom died, on Nazino Island (Russian: Остров Назино) in the Soviet Union in 1933. The small, isolated Western Siberian island is located about 800 km north of Tomsk, in Alexandrovsky District, Tomsk Oblast near the confluence of the Ob and Nazina Rivers. It is called "Death Island" (Russian: Остров Смерти, Ostrov Smerti) or "Cannibal Island" because about 4,000 out of 6,000 Soviet "special settlers" died there during the summer of 1933, after being abandoned with only flour for food, few tools and little clothing or shelter.
  A report on the events was sent to Joseph Stalin by Vassilii Arsenievich Velichko. The report was distributed by Lazar Kaganovich to members of the Politburo, and was preserved in an archive in Novosibirsk. It states that 6,114 "outdated elements" (also known as "déclassé and socially harmful elements" or classless people) arrived on the island in late May 1933. They had been transported from Moscow and Leningrad, first by train to Tomsk, then by river barge to Nazino. At least 27 people died during the river transport. There was no shelter on the island, it snowed the first night, and no food was distributed for four days. On the first day 295 people were buried.
  
  wn.com/Nazino_affair
• 
  Netherlands
  The Netherlands (ⁱ/ˈnɛðərləndz/; Dutch: Nederland [ˈneːdə(r)lɑnt] or [ˈneɪ̯də(r)lɑnt] ( listen); West Frisian: Nederlân; Papiamento: Hulanda) is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with some islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders with Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. It is a parliamentary democracy organised as a unitary state. The country capital is Amsterdam and the seat of government is The Hague. The Netherlands in its entirety is often referred to as Holland, although North and South Holland are actually only two of its twelve provinces (a case of pars pro toto; see terminology of "the Netherlands").
  
  wn.com/Netherlands
• 
  Nizhny Novgorod
  Nizhny Novgorod (Russian: Нижний Новгород; IPA: [ˈnʲiʐnʲɪj ˈnovɡərət]), colloquially shortened to Nizhny, is, with the population of 1,250,615, the fifth largest city in Russia.
  From 1932 to 1990, the city was known as Gorky (Горький, IPA: [ˈɡorʲkʲɪj]), after the writer Maxim Gorky who was born there.
  The city is an important economic, transport and cultural center of the Russian Federation. It is the economic and cultural center of the vast Volga-Vyatka economic region, and also the administrative center of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast and Volga Federal District.
  After the destruction of the Mordvin Inäzor Obram, a hillfort named Obran Osh (Ashli) at the site of future stone Kremlin in 1220, a small Russian wooden hillfort was founded by Grand Duke Yury II in 1221. Located at the confluence of two most important rivers of his principality, the Volga (Mordvin "Rav" or "Rava"), and the Oka, and Obran Osh was renamed Nizhny Novgorod. Its name literally means Lower Newtown, to distinguish it from the older Veliky Novgorod. Its independent existence was threatened by the continuous Mordvin attacks against it. The major attempt made by Inäzor Purgaz from Arzamas in January 1229 was repulsed, but after the death of Yuri II on March 4, 1238 at the Battle of Sit River the Mongols occupied the fortress and the remnants of small Nizhny Novgorod settlement which surrendered without any resistance in order to preserve what had been developed since Purgaz's attack nine years earlier. Later a major stronghold for border protection, Nizhny Novgorod fortress took advantage of a natural moat formed by the two rivers.
  
  wn.com/Nizhny_Novgorod
• 
  Nobel Peace Prize
  The Nobel Peace Prize (Norwegian and Swedish: Nobels fredspris) is one of the five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel, along with the prizes in Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature. It is awarded to those who have "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
  Per Alfred Nobel's will, the recipient is selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a 5-member committee appointed by the Parliament of Norway. Since 1990, the prize is awarded in Oslo City Hall on 10 December each year. The prize was formerly awarded in the Atrium of the University of Oslo Faculty of Law (1947–89), the Norwegian Nobel Institute (1905–46) and the Parliament (1901–04).
  According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
  
  wn.com/Nobel_Peace_Prize
• 
  Norway
  Norway ⁱ/ˈnɔrweɪ/ (Norwegian:  Norge (Bokmål) or  Noreg (Nynorsk)), officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and the subantarctic Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of 385,252 square kilometres (148,747 sq mi) and a population of about 5 million. It is the second least densely populated country in Europe. The majority of the country shares a border to the east with Sweden; its northernmost region is bordered by Finland to the south and Russia to the east; in its south Norway borders the Skagerrak Strait across from Denmark. The capital city of Norway is Oslo. Norway's extensive coastline, facing the North Atlantic Ocean and the Barents Sea, is home to its famous fjords.
  
  wn.com/Norway
• 
  Novouralsk
  Novouralsk (Russian: Новоура́льск) is a closed town in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia. Population: 85,519 (2010 Census preliminary results); 95,414 (2002 Census).
  The town, formerly known as Sverdlovsk-44, is situated on the eastern side of the Ural mountain range, about 70 kilometers (43 mi) north of Yekaterinburg. Although it came into being during World War II, and was named Novouralsk in 1954, it was kept secret until 1994, and has since had closed town status.
  The town is laid out in a grid format, divided north/south by the central street on which the main administrative building is located. It is subdivided into five residential districts, each covering 10,000 hectares. The town's economy is dominated by the nuclear, automobile and construction industries.
  The Ural Electro Chemical Plant (UECP/УЭХК)'s main activities are uranium enrichment and the development of centrifuge technology, as well as the manufacture of instruments and industrial systems for the nuclear industry. The plant began operating in 1949 and was the site of the Soviet Union's first gaseous diffusion enrichment plant. In 1950, certain technical difficulties were resolved and UECP began producing tens of kilograms of 90 percent enriched uranium. The original plant, called D-1, was extended to include plant D-3 in 1951, and plants D-4 and D-5 in 1953. Officials from the Ministry of Atomic Industry once said that Sverdlovsk-44 was the only plant ever used to produce weapons-grade highly-enriched uranium.
  
  wn.com/Novouralsk
• 
  Oslo
  Oslo (English pronunciation: /ˈɒzloʊ/, OZ-loh,Norwegian pronunciation: [²ʊʃlʊ] ( listen) or [²ʊslʊ]) is the capital of and most populous city in Norway. Founded around 1048 by King Harald III, the city was elevated to a bishopric in 1070 and a capital under Haakon V around 1300. Personal unions with Denmark from 1397 to 1523 and again from 1536 to 1814 and with Sweden from 1814 to 1905 reduced its influence. After being destroyed by a fire in 1624, the city was moved closer to Akershus Castle during the reign of King Christian IV and renamed Christiania in his honour. It was established as a municipality (formannskapsdistrikt) on 1 January 1838. Following a spelling reform, it was known as Kristiania from 1877 to 1925, when its original Norwegian name was restored.
  Oslo is the economic and governmental centre of Norway. The city is also a hub of Norwegian trade, banking, industry and shipping. It is an important centre for maritime industries and maritime trade in Europe. The city is home to many companies within the maritime sector, some of which are amongst the world's largest shipping companies, shipbrokers and maritime insurance brokers. Oslo is a pilot city of the Council of Europe and the European Commission intercultural cities programme.
  
  wn.com/Oslo
• 
  Purmerend
  Purmerend ( pronunciation (help·info)) is a municipality and a city in the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland.
  The city is surrounded by polders, such as the Purmer, Beemster and the Wormer. The city became the trade center of the region but the population grew relatively slowly. Only after 1960 did the population start to grow from around 10.000 to the current 78.307 people (1 November 2007). From the 1960s onwards, Purmerend has seen major expansions and still continues to do so until the present date. These expansions have turned Purmerend into a commuter town; many inhabitants of Purmerend work, go to school or spend their leisure time in Amsterdam. Purmerend is part of the Randstad, one of the largest conurbations in Europe.
  Purmerend was created out of the small fishing village Purmer, which lay on the land between the Purmermeer (Purmer Lake), the Beemstermeer (Beemster Lake) and the Wormermeer (Wormer Lake). On the south bank of the river de Weere, which used to connect the former Purmer Lake and Beemster Lake.
  
  wn.com/Purmerend
• 
  RDS-1
  Coordinates: 50°26′15″N 77°48′51″E / 50.4375°N 77.81417°E / 50.4375; 77.81417
  The RDS-1 (Russian: РДС-1), also known as Izdeliye 501 (article 501) and First Lightning (Первая молния, Pervaya molniya), was used in the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon test, the United States assigned it the code-name Joe-1, in reference to Joseph Stalin. It was exploded on 29 August 1949, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakh SSR, after a top-secret R&D project. The weapon was designed at the Kurchatov Institute—at the time officially known as "Laboratory № 2," but designated as the "office" or "base" in internal documents—starting in April 1946. A uranium-235 plant was built near Chelyabinsk in 1948.
  The RDS-1 explosion yielded 22 kilotons of TNT, similar to the American Gadget and Fat Man bombs. At Lavrenty Beria's insistence, the RDS-1 bomb was designed as an implosion weapon similar to the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan; it was an implosion type weapon with a solid plutonium core. The bomb designers had developed a more sophisticated design (tested later as RDS-2), but rejected it due to the known reliability of the Fat Man type design; the USSR having received extensive intelligence on the design of the "Fat Man" bomb during World War Two.
  
  wn.com/RDS-1
• 
  Rishon LeZion
  Rishon LeZion (Hebrew: רִאשׁוֹן לְצִיּוֹן‎‎  (audio) (help·info), lit. First to Zion), is the fourth-largest city in Israel, located along the central Israeli coastal plain 12 kilometers south of Tel Aviv. It is part of the Gush Dan metropolitan area.
  The city had a population of 228,200 at the end of 2009. Founded in 1882 by European Jewish immigrants, it was the second Jewish farm colony established in Land of Israel in the 19th century, after Petah Tikva.
  The name Rishon LeZion is derived from a biblical verse: "First to Zion are they, and I shall give herald to Jerusalem" (Hebrew: ראשון לציון הנה הינם, ולירושלים מבשר אתן‎) (Isaiah 41:27) and literally translates as "First to Zion".
  Rishon LeZion was founded on July 31, 1882 by ten Hovevei Zion pioneers from Kharkov, Ukraine (then the Russian Empire) headed by Zalman David Levontin. Reuven Yudalevich was also a member of the group. The pioneers purchased 835 acres (337.91 ha) of land southeast of present-day Tel Aviv, part of the townland of the Arab village of Ayun Kara (literally ' fountain of the crier'). Ayun Kara was the scene of a bloody battle between Turkish and New Zealand troops on November 14, 1917. A stone cenotaph was erected by the people of Rishon LeZion to the memory of the New Zealanders who fell that day, but it has since been destroyed.
  
  wn.com/Rishon_LeZion
• 
  Rotterdam
  Rotterdam ( /ˈrɒtərdæm/; Dutch [ˌrɔ.tər.ˈdɑm] ( listen)) is the second-largest city in the Netherlands and one of the largest ports in the world. Starting as a dam constructed in 1270 on the Rotte River, Rotterdam has grown into a major international commercial centre. Its strategic location at the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta on the North Sea and at the heart of a massive rail, road, air and inland waterway distribution system extending throughout Europe is the reason that Rotterdam is often called the "Gateway to Europe".
  Located in the Province of South Holland, Rotterdam is found in the west of the Netherlands and at the south end of the Randstad. The population of the city proper was 616,250 on February 1st 2012. The population of the greater Rotterdam area, called "Rotterdam-Rijnmond" or just "Rijnmond", is around 1.3 million people. Rotterdam is one of Europe's most vibrant, multicultural cities. The city is known for its university (Erasmus), its cutting-edge architecture, its lively cultural life, its striking riverside setting, its maritime heritage and the Rotterdam Blitz.
  
  wn.com/Rotterdam
• 
  Sakharov Gardens
  The Sakharov Gardens (Hebrew: גנות סחרוב‎, Ginot Sakharov) is a traffic junction on the highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Ginot Sakharov was named for Andrei Sakharov.
  Coordinates: 31°47′42.97″N 35°11′17.67″E / 31.7952694°N 35.1882417°E / 31.7952694; 35.1882417
  
  
  
  wn.com/Sakharov_Gardens
• 
  Sarov
  Sarov (Russian: Саро́в) is a closed town in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia. Until 1995 it was known as Kremlyov (Кремлёв), while from 1946 to 1991 it was called Arzamas-16 (Арзама́с-16).^{[citation needed]} The town is closed as it is the Russian center for nuclear research. Population: 92,073 (2010 Census preliminary results); 87,652 (2002 Census).
  The history of the town can be divided into two different periods. In the earlier history of Russia it was known as one of the holy places of the Russian Orthodox Church, because of its monastery, that gave Russia one of its greatest saints, St. Seraphim. Since the 1940s, it has gradually become the center for research and production of Soviet and later Russian nuclear weapons.
  The history of human settlement in the area around Sarov goes back at least to the 12th–13th centuries, when a large Mordvin settlement was founded on its spot. In 1298, the town was taken over by Tatars.
  The modern town took its name from being the site of the Sarova Monastery next to the Sarovka River. In 1664, an Orthodox monk Theodosius first settled on the Sarov Hill. The first Church of Sarov tenement was founded in 1706. Saint Seraphim was living in Sarov from 1778 to 1833. In 1903, the monastery was visited by Tsar Nicholas II and other members of the royal family. At that time the monastery had nine churches, including one underground. Around 320 monks lived in the monastery.
  
  wn.com/Sarov
• 
  Semey
  Semey (Kazakh: Семей / Semey), formerly known as Semipalatinsk (Russian: Семипала́тинск, until 2007) and Alash-kala (Kazakh: Алаш-қала / Alaş-qala, 1917–1920), is a city in Kazakhstan, in the northeastern province of East Kazakhstan, near the border with Siberia, around 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) north of Almaty, and 700 kilometres (430 mi) southeast of the Russian city of Omsk, along the Irtysh River.
  The first settlement was in 1718, when the Russians built a fort beside the river Irtysh, near a ruined Buddhist monastery. The monastery's seven buildings lent the fort (and later the city) the name Semipalatinsk (Russian for Seven-Chambered City).^{[clarification needed]} The fort suffered frequently from flooding caused by the snowmelt swelling the Irtysh, and in 1778 the fort was relocated 18 km upstream to less flood-prone ground. The small city grew around the fort, largely servicing the river trade between the nomadic peoples of Central Asia and the growing Russian Empire. The construction of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway added to the city's importance, making it a major point of transit between Central Asia and Siberia.
  
  wn.com/Semey
• 
  Snezhinsk
  Snezhinsk (Russian: Сне́жинск) is a closed town in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. Population: 48,896 (2010 Census preliminary results); 50,451 (2002 Census).
  It was founded in 1957, and was known as Chelyabinsk-70 until 1991.^{[citation needed]} Town status was granted to it in 1993.^{[citation needed]}
  Administratively, along with two rural localities, it is incorporated as the Town of Snezhinsk—an administrative unit with the status equal to that of the districts.Municipally, the Town of Snezhinsk is incorporated as Snezhinsky Urban Okrug.
  Snezhinsk is one of two centers of the Russian nuclear program (the other one is Sarov) and is built around a major scientific research institute—"All-Russian Scientific Research Center of Technical Physics—Federal Nuclear Center".
  Snezhinsk is a sister city of Livermore, California, United States.
  
  wn.com/Snezhinsk
• 
  Soviet Union
  The Soviet Union (Russian: Советский Союз, tr. Sovetsky Soyuz), officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; Russian: Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик, tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik; IPA: [sɐˈjus sɐˈvʲetskʲɪx sətsɨəlʲɪˈstʲitɕɪskʲɪx rʲɪsˈpublʲɪk] ( listen); abbreviated СССР, SSSR), was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991.
  The Soviet Union was a single-party state ruled by the Communist Party from its foundation until 1990. A union of 15 subnational Soviet republics, the Soviet state was structured under a highly centralized government and economy.
  The Russian Revolution of 1917 caused the downfall of the Russian Empire. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a struggle for power between the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the anti-communist White movement. In December 1922, the Bolsheviks won the civil war, and the Soviet Union was formed with the merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
  
  wn.com/Soviet_Union
• 
  St. Petersburg
  Saint Petersburg (Russian: Санкт-Петербург, tr. Sankt-Peterburg; IPA: [sankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk] ( listen)) is a city and a federal subject (a federal city) of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. In 1914 the name of the city was changed to Petrograd (Russian: Петроград; IPA: [pʲɪtrɐˈgrat]), in 1924 to Leningrad (Russian: Ленинград; IPA: [lʲɪnʲɪnˈgrat]) and in 1991 back to Saint Petersburg.
  In Russian literature, informal documents, and discourse, the "Saint" (Санкт-) is usually omitted, leaving Petersburg (Петербург, Peterburg). In common parlance Russians may drop "-burg" (-бург) as well, leaving only Peter (Питер, Russian: [ˈpʲitʲɪr]).
  Saint Petersburg was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on May 27 [O.S. 16] 1703. From 1713 to 1728 and from 1732 to 1918, Saint Petersburg was the Imperial capital of Russia. In 1918 the central government bodies moved from Saint Petersburg (then named Petrograd) to Moscow. It is Russia's second largest city after Moscow with almost 5 million inhabitants. Saint Petersburg is a major European cultural center, and also an important Russian port on the Baltic Sea.
  
  wn.com/St._Petersburg
• 
  The Hague
  The Hague (Dutch: Den Haag pronounced [dɛnˈɦaˑχ] ( listen), officially 's-Gravenhage pronounced [ˈsχraˑvə(n)ˌɦaˑɣə] ( listen)) is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of 500,000 inhabitants (as of 1 September 2011), and more than one million inhabitants including the suburbs, it is the third largest city of the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Located in the west of the Netherlands, The Hague is in the centre of the Haaglanden conurbation and lies at the southwest corner of the larger Randstad conurbation.
  The Hague is the seat of the Dutch government and parliament, the Supreme Court, and the Council of State, but the city is not the capital of the Netherlands which constitutionally is Amsterdam. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands lives at Huis ten Bosch and works at Noordeinde Palace in The Hague. Most foreign embassies in the Netherlands and 150 international organisations are located in the city, including the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, which makes The Hague one of the major cities hosting the United Nations, along with New York, Vienna and Geneva.
  
  wn.com/The_Hague
• 
  Tryokhgorny
  Tryokhgorny (Russian: Трёхго́рный, lit. (a town of) three mountains) is a closed town in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, located in the western part of the oblast 200 kilometers (120 mi) from Chelyabinsk. Population: 33,678 (2010 Census preliminary results); 34,290 (2002 Census).
  It was founded in 1952, and was earlier known under the name Zlatoust-36 (Златоуст-36).^{[citation needed]}
  Administratively, it is incorporated as the Town of Tryokhgorny—an administrative unit with the status equal to that of the districts.Municipally, the Town of Tryokhgorny is incorporated as Tryokhgorny Urban Okrug.
  The town is closed because a plant producing parts of atomic reactors is located there.
  
  wn.com/Tryokhgorny
• 
  Tsar Bomba
  Coordinates: 73°48′26″N 54°58′54″E / 73.80722°N 54.98167°E / 73.80722; 54.98167
  Tsar Bomba (Russian: Царь-бомба) is the nickname for the AN602 hydrogen bomb, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. It was also referred to as Kuz'kina Mat' (Russian: Кузькина мать, Kuzka's mother), potentially referring to Nikita Khruschev's promise to show the U.S. a "Kuz'kina Mat'" at the 1960 UN General Assembly. The famous Russian idiom, which has been problematic for translators, equates roughly with the English “We’ll show you!” in this usage meaning "something that has not been seen before". Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb was originally designed to have a yield of about 100 megatons of TNT (420 PJ), but the yield was reduced to 50 megatons in order to reduce nuclear fallout (and also to prevent the blast from destroying the drop aircraft). This attempt was successful, as it was one of the cleanest (relative to its yield) nuclear bombs ever detonated. Only one bomb of this type was ever built and it was tested on October 30, 1961, in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago.
  
  wn.com/Tsar_Bomba
• 
  Tsarist Russia
  The Tsardom of Russia (also known as Tsardom of Muscovy; officially Русское царство (Tsardom of Rus') or, in hellenized form, Российское царство) was the name of the centralized Russian state from Ivan IV's assumption of the title of Tsar in 1547 until Peter the Great's foundation of the Russian Empire in 1721.
  From 1550 to 1700, Russia grew 35,000 km² (Holland's size) a year. The period includes the upheavals of the transition from the Rurik to the Romanov dynasties, drawn-out military conflict with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as the Russian conquest of Siberia, leading up to the 42-year reign of Peter the Great, who ascended in 1682 and transformed the Tsardom into a major European power, after a military victory over Sweden and Poland implemented substantial reforms and proclaimed the Russian Empire (Российская Империя) in 1721 making it a recognized European power.
  While Ivan assumed the title of "Tsar and Grand Duke of the entire Rus'" (Царь и Великий князь всея Руси), officially renaming the Grand Duchy of Moscow to Tsardom of Russia, the state remained partly referred to as Muscovy (Moscovia) throughout Europe, predominantly in its Catholic part. The two names "Russia" and "Muscovy" appear to have co-existed as interchangeable during the later 16th and throughout the 17th century with different maps and sources using different names.
  
  wn.com/Tsarist_Russia
• 
  Turkmenistan
  Turkmenistan (ⁱ/tɜrkˈmɛnɨstæn/ or ⁱ/tɜrkmɛnɨˈstɑːn/; Turkmen: Türkmenistan), formerly also known as Turkmenia (Russian: Туркмения), is one of the Turkic states in Central Asia. Until 1991, it was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic (Turkmen SSR). Turkmenistan is one of the six independent Turkic states. It is bordered by Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the south and southwest, Uzbekistan to the east and northeast, Kazakhstan to the north and northwest and the Caspian Sea to the west.
  Turkmenistan's GDP growth rate of 11% in 2010^[update] ranks 4th in the world, but these figures are subject to wide margins of error. It possesses the world's fourth largest reserves of natural gas resources. Although it is wealthy in natural resources in certain areas, most of the country is covered by the Karakum (Black Sand) Desert.
  The Turkmen government operates as a single-party system. Turkmenistan was ruled by President for Life Saparmurat Niyazov (called "Türkmenbaşy" — "leader of the Turkmens") until his sudden death on 21 December 2006. Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov was elected the new president on 11 February 2007.
  
  wn.com/Turkmenistan
• 
  Ulyanovsk
  Ulyanovsk (Russian: Улья́новск; IPA: [ʊlʲˈjænəfsk]), formerly Simbirsk (Симби́рск), is a city and the administrative center of Ulyanovsk Oblast, Russia, located on the Volga River 893 kilometers (555 mi) east from Moscow. Population: 613,793 (2010 Census preliminary results); 635,947 (2002 Census); 625,155 (1989 Census).
  The city is the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin (originally named Ulyanov), for whom it is named.
  Simbirsk was founded in 1648 by the boyar Bogdan Khitrovo.^{[citation needed]} The fort of "Simbirsk" (alternatively "Sinbirsk") was strategically placed on a hill on the Western bank of the Volga River. The fort was meant to protect the eastern frontier of the Russian Empire from the nomadic tribes and to establish a permanent Imperial presence in the area.
  In 1668, Simbirsk withstood a month-long siege by a 20,000-strong army led by rebel Cossack commander Stenka Razin. Also in Simbirsk another country rebel, Yemelyan Pugachev, was imprisoned before execution. At the time Simbirsk possessed a wooden kremlin, which was destroyed by a fire during the 18th century.
  
  wn.com/Ulyanovsk
• 
  USSR
  The Soviet Union (Russian: Советский Союз, tr. Sovetsky Soyuz), officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; Russian: Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик, tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik; IPA: [sɐˈjus sɐˈvʲetskʲɪx sətsɨəlʲɪˈstʲitɕɪskʲɪx rʲɪsˈpublʲɪk] ( listen); abbreviated СССР, SSSR), was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991.
  The Soviet Union was a single-party state ruled by the Communist Party from its foundation until 1990. A union of 15 subnational Soviet republics, the Soviet state was structured under a highly centralized government and economy.
  The Russian Revolution of 1917 caused the downfall of the Russian Empire. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a struggle for power between the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the anti-communist White movement. In December 1922, the Bolsheviks won the civil war, and the Soviet Union was formed with the merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
  
  wn.com/USSR
• 
  Utrecht
  Utrecht (/ˈjuːtrɛkt/; Dutch pronunciation: [ˈytrɛxt] ( listen)) city and municipality is the capital and most populous city of the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, and is the fourth largest city of the Netherlands with a population of 316,448 on 1 February 2012.
  Utrecht's ancient city centre features many buildings and structures from the Early Middle Ages. It has been the religious centre of the Netherlands since the eighth century. Currently it is the see of the Archbishop of Utrecht, the most important Dutch Roman Catholic leader. Utrecht is also the see of the archbishop of the Old Catholic church, titular head of the Union of Utrecht (Old Catholic), and the location of the offices of the main Protestant church. Until the Dutch Golden Age Utrecht was the city of most importance of the Netherlands until Amsterdam became its cultural and most populous centre.
  Utrecht is host to Utrecht University, the largest university of the Netherlands, as well as several other institutes for higher education. Due to its central position within the country, it is an important transport hub for both rail and road transport. It has the second highest number of cultural events in the Netherlands, after Amsterdam.
  
  wn.com/Utrecht
• 
  Vietnam
  Vietnam ( listen), formally the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Cộng hòa xã hội chủ nghĩa Việt Nam;  listen), is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. With an estimated 91.5 million inhabitants as of 2012, it is the world's 13th-most-populous country, and the eighth-most-populous Asian country. The name Vietnam translates as "South Viet", and was officially adopted in 1945. The country is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea to the east.
  The Vietnamese became independent from Imperial China in 938 AD, following the Battle of Bạch Đằng River. Successive Vietnamese royal dynasties flourished as the nation expanded geographically and politically into Southeast Asia, until the Indochina Peninsula was colonized by the French in the mid-19th century. The First Indochina War eventually led to the expulsion of the French in 1954, leaving Vietnam divided politically into two states, North and South Vietnam. Conflict between the two sides intensified, with heavy foreign intervention, during the Vietnam War, which ended with a North Vietnamese victory in 1975.
  
  wn.com/Vietnam
• 
  Vilnius
  Vilnius ([ˈvʲɪlʲnʲʊs] ( listen); see also other names) is the capital of Lithuania, and its largest city, with a population of 554,060 (838, 852 together with Vilnius County) as of 2011. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the capital of Vilnius County. The first known written record of Vilnius as the Lithuanian capital is known from Gediminas' letters in 1323. Vilnius is classified as a Gamma global city according to GaWC studies.
  The name of the city originated from the Vilnia River. The city has also been known by many derivate spellings in various languages throughout its history. The most notable non-Lithuanian names for the city include: Polish: Wilno, Belarusian: Вiльнюс, Вiльня, German: Wilna, Latvian: Viļņa, Russian: Вильнюс, Yiddish: ווילנע (Vilne). An older Russian name was Вильна / Вильно (Vilna/Vilno), although Вильнюс (Vilnius) is now used. The names Wilno, Wilna and Vilna have also been used in older English, German, French and Italian language publications. The name Vilna is still used in Finnish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Hebrew.
  
  wn.com/Vilnius
• 
  Washington, D.C.
  Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a federal district to become the national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution. The District is therefore not a part of any U.S. state. It was formed from land along the Potomac River donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia; however, the Virginia portion was returned by Congress in 1846.
  A new capital city named after George Washington was founded in 1791 to the east of the preexisting port of Georgetown. Congress consolidated the City of Washington, Georgetown, and the remaining unincorporated area within the District under a single municipal government in 1871. The city shares its name with the U.S. state of Washington, located on the country's Pacific coast.
  Washington, D.C., had an estimated population of 617,996 in 2011. The city was the 24th most populous place in the United States as of 2010. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the city's population to over one million during the workweek. The Washington Metropolitan Area, of which the District is a part, has a population of nearly 5.6 million, the seventh-largest metropolitan area in the country.
  
  wn.com/Washington,_D.C.
• 
  Yalta Conference
  The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945 , was the wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin, respectively, for the purpose of discussing Europe's post-war reorganization. The conference convened in the Livadia Palace near Yalta, in the Crimea.
  The meeting was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. Within a few years, with the Cold War dividing the continent, Yalta became a subject of intense controversy. To some extent, it has remained controversial.
  Yalta was the second of three wartime conferences among the Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin). It had been preceded by the Tehran Conference in 1943, and it was followed by the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, which was attended by Harry S Truman, who replaced the late Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, who was replaced mid-point by the newly elected British Prime Minister Clement Attlee.
  
  wn.com/Yalta_Conference
• 
  Yerevan
  Coordinates: 40°11′00″N 44°31′00″E / 40.183333°N 44.516667°E / 40.183333; 44.516667
  Yerevan (Armenian: Երևան, Armenian pronunciation: [jɛɾɛˈvɑn]) is the capital and largest city of Armenia and one of the world's oldest continuously-inhabited cities. Situated along the Hrazdan River, Yerevan is the administrative, cultural, and industrial center of the country. It has been the capital since 1918, the thirteenth in the history of Armenia.
  The history of Yerevan dates back to the 8th century BC, with the founding of the fortress of Erebuni in 782 BC by king Argishti I at the western extreme of the Ararat plain. After World War I, Yerevan became the capital of the Democratic Republic of Armenia as thousands of survivors of the Armenian Genocide settled in the area. The city expanded rapidly during the 20th century as Armenia became one of the fifteen republics in the Soviet Union. In fifty years, Yerevan was transformed from a town of a few thousand residents within the Russian Empire, to Armenia's principal cultural, artistic, and industrial center, as well as becoming the seat of national government.
  
  wn.com/Yerevan

• 1979 Sakharov
  1979 Sakharov (2006 P-L) is a main-belt asteroid discovered on September 24, 1960 by Cornelis Johannes van Houten, Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld and Tom Gehrels at Palomar Observatory. It is named in honour of a distinguished Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov.
  
  
  
  
  
  wn.com/1979_Sakharov
• 
  Ain Saar
  Ain Saar (1968) is a Võro punk rocker, and freedom fighter, the leader of the group Vaba-Sõltumatu Noorte Kolonn Nr.1 (Free Independent Youth Column No. 1) of December 20, 1987, which struggled against the Soviet rule. He was exiled in 1988 by the authorities of Estonian SSR to Sweden where he lived in Skarpnäck, Stockholm.
  In 2006, he campaigned for the removal of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn.
  
  wn.com/Ain_Saar
• 
  Albert Lutuli
  Albert John Lutuli (commonly spelled Luthuli; c. 1898 – 21 July 1967), also known by his Zulu name Mvumbi, was a South African teacher and politician. Lutuli was elected president of the African National Congress (ANC), at the time an umbrella organisation that led opposition to the white minority government in South Africa. He was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the non-violent struggle against apartheid. He was the first African, and the first person from outside Europe and the Americas, to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
  The third son of Seventh-day Adventist missionary John Bunyan Lutuli and Mtonya Gumede, Albert Lutuli was born near Bulawayo in what was then called Rhodesia, around 1898. His father died, and he and his mother returned to her ancestral home of Groutville in KwaDukuza (Stanger), Natal, South Africa. He stayed with his uncle, Martin Lutuli, who was at that time the elected chief of the Christian Zulus inhabiting the Umzinyathi District Municipality mission Reserve.
  
  wn.com/Albert_Lutuli
• 
  Albert Schweitzer
  Albert Schweitzer OM (14 January 1875 – 4 September 1965) was a German and then French theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary. He was born in Kaysersberg in the province of Alsace-Lorraine, at that time part of the German Empire. Schweitzer, a Lutheran, challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by historical-critical methodology current at his time in certain academic circles, as well as the traditional Christian view. He depicted Jesus as one who literally believed the end of the world was coming in his own lifetime and believed himself to be a world savior. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life", expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, now in Gabon, west central Africa (then French Equatorial Africa). As a music scholar and organist, he studied the music of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach and influenced the Organ reform movement (Orgelbewegung).
  
  wn.com/Albert_Schweitzer
• 
  Aleksandr Zinovyev
  Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zinovyev (October 29, 1922 – May 10, 2006) was a prominent Russian logician and dissident writer of social critique.
  Born to a poor provincial family, he distinguished himself in the Second World War and later in the scholarship of logic. In the 1970s he arose with criticum of the Soviet political system, sacrificing his high academical station in Moscow. Eventually Zinoviev faced exile in 1978, after his novels Yawning Heights and The Radiant Future were published in Europe. He continued to develop his socio-philosophical ideas in subsequent publications, at times employing his original genre of the sociological novel.
  Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zinovyev was born in the village of Pakhtino, Chukhlomsky District, Kostroma Oblast as the sixth child to Aleksandr Yakovlevich and Appolinariya Vasilyevna. A few years later they moved to Moscow, seeking better quality of life.
  Zinovyev excelled at school, and in 1939 entered the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. He was soon expelled for a negative attitude to forced collectivisation, and forbidden to enroll with any other institute. He alleged that he was involved in a plot to assassinate Joseph Stalin during a school parade, but that the plan was called off; also, that he got arrested, but evaded prosecution. He joined the Red Army in 1940 and fought in the Great Patriotic War, even as fighter pilot, receiving honours and awards for a distinguished service.
  
  wn.com/Aleksandr_Zinovyev
• 
  Alexander Ginzburg
  Alexander (Alik) Ilyich Ginzburg (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ильи́ч Ги́нзбург; IPA: [ɐlʲɪˈksandr ɪlʲˈjit͡ɕ ˈɡʲinzbʊrk] ( listen); November 21, 1936 Moscow – July 19, 2002 Paris), was a Russian journalist, poet, human rights activist and dissident.
  During the Soviet period, Ginzburg edited the samizdat poetry almanac Sintaksis. Between 1961 and 1969 he was sentenced three times to labor camps. In 1979, Ginzburg was released and expelled to the United States, along with four other political prisoners (Eduard Kuznetsov, Mark Dymshits, Valentin Moroz, and Georgy Vins) and their families, as part of a prisoner exchange.
  Throughout his career, Ginzburg advocated nonviolent resistance. He believed in exposing human rights abuses by the Soviet Union and pressuring the government to follow its own laws. He made an effort to smuggle his writings abroad in order to increase external pressure on the Soviets.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Alexander_Ginzburg
• 
  Alexander Nekrich
  Aleksandr Moiseyevich Nekrich (Russian: Александр Моисеевич Некрич) (1920–1993) was a Soviet Russian historian, since 1976 in emigration to the United States, known for his works on the history of the Soviet Union, especially under Joseph Stalin’s rule.
  Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, Nekrich fought in the Red Army ranks during World War II and subsequently graduated from the Moscow University with a degree in history. In 1950, he joined the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of General History as a senior researcher and a secretary of that institute’s party cell.
  Nekrich gained fame for his sensational work June 22, 1941; Soviet Historians and the German Invasion, a study of the Soviet-German confrontation during World War II, which was critical of Stalin and the Soviet leadership over their failure to prepare the country for an anticipated German onslaught. The book was harshly criticized and quickly banned, while Nekrich was excluded from the Communist party. He was allowed, though, to leave the Soviet Union in 1976. Nekrich settled in the U.S. and lectured at Harvard. In emigration, Nekrich published his memoirs (1979), wrote The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (1978), and coauthored, with Mikhail Heller, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (1982).
  
  wn.com/Alexander_Nekrich
• 
  Alexander Tarasov
  Alexander Nikolaevich Tarasov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Тара́сов, born March 8, 1958 in Moscow) is a Soviet and Russian left-wing sociologist, politologist, culturologist, publicist, writer and philosopher. Up until the beginning of the 21st century he referred to himself as a Post-Marxist alongside István Mészáros and a number of Yugoslav Marxist philosophers who belonged to Praxis School and emigrated to London. Since in the 21st century the term Post-Marxism has been appropriated by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and their followers, Alexander Tarasov (together with the above mentioned István Mészáros and Yugoslav philosophers) stopped referring to himself as a Post-Marxist.
  
  wn.com/Alexander_Tarasov
• 
  Alexandr Podrabinek
  Alexandr Podrabinek (Russian: Александр Пинхосович Подрабинек; born August 5, 1953) is a Russian journalist, human rights activist and editor-in-chief of Prima information agency. He is a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.
  After graduating from a medical technical school, Podrabinek worked as a nurse in a medical emergency team. He was engaged in the human right movement in the Soviet Union since the beginning of the 1970s. He wrote a book about the psychiatric repressions in the country in 1977. The book appeared in English translation in the USA under the title "Punitive medicine". He was also editor of the first Soviet underground samizdat journal Chronicle of Current Events and a member of Moscow Helsinki Group. He appears in documentary They Chose Freedom.
  He was arrested and convicted in 1978 and sentenced to five years of involuntary settlement in Siberia for criticizing the Soviet system. He was convicted a second time and sentenced to three and a half years of labor camp in 1980 for distributing samizdat (underground) literature and publication of the English version of his book. After serving the time, he was allowed to work in a medical emergency team again.
  
  wn.com/Alexandr_Podrabinek
• 
  Alexei Borovoi
  Alexei Alexeyevich Borovoi (1875–1935) was a Russian individualist anarchist writer, orator, teacher and propagandist.
  Borovoi was born on October 30, 1875 in Moscow. Starting from 1906, Borovoi lectured on anarchism in different Russian cities.
  He moved to France in late 1910 to escape state persecution for anti-state propaganda. After returning to Russia "Borovoi got a job teaching political economy and history at the Russian Popular University and at the Free College of Social Sciences, the latter of which was founded by French anarchists". From their influence Borovoi became interested on French syndicalism. "In his lectures Borovoi has now claimed support for revolutionary syndicalism which denied parliamentarism and aimed for the reconstruction of the society via social revolution. He publishes the book Revolutionary Creativity and Parliament in 1917.
  On April 1917 Borovoi co-organised the syndicalist Federation of Unions of Workers of Intellectual Labour which united teachers, doctors etc, and also edited their paper Klich (The call). On 1918 he publishes Anarchism and on it for him "the chief importance is given not to Anarchism as the aim but to Anarchy as the continuous quest for the aim". He manifests there that "No social ideal, from the point of view of anarchism, could be referred to as absolute in a sense that supposes it’s the crown of human wisdom, the end of social and ethical quest of man."
  
  wn.com/Alexei_Borovoi
• 
  Anatoly Kuznetsov
  Anatoly Vasilievich Kuznetsov (Russian: Анато́лий Васи́льевич Кузнецо́в; August 18, 1929, Kiev – June 13, 1979, London) was a Russian language Soviet writer who described his experiences in German-occupied Kiev during WWII in his internationally acclaimed novel Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel. The book was originally published in a censored form in 1966 in the Russian language.
  Kuznetsov was born to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, his passport stated that he was Russian. He grew up in the Kiev district of Kurenivka, in his own words "a stone's throw from a vast ravine, whose name, Babi Yar, was once known only to locals." At the age fourteen, Kuznetsov began recording in a notebook everything he saw as a witness and heard about the Babi Yar massacre. Once his mother discovered and read his notes. She cried and advised him to save them for a book he might write someday.
  Before becoming a writer, Kuznetsov "studied ballet and acting, tried painting and music, worked as a carpenter, road builder, concrete worker, helped build the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant on the Dniper river, and worked on the Irkutsk and Bratsk hydroelectric power plants in Siberia." In 1955, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Eventually, he began "studying to become a writer" and enrolled at the Moscow Gorky Literary Institute.
  
  wn.com/Anatoly_Kuznetsov
• 
  Anatoly Marchenko
  Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko (also Anatoli Marchenko, Anatolii Marchenko, etc.) (January 23, 1938 – December 8, 1986) was an influential and well-known Soviet dissident, author, and human rights campaigner. He was the first recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought of the European Parliament, awarded to him posthumously in 1988.
  Initially a worker on a drilling gang, and not of intellectual background or upbringing, he became radicalized, and turned to writing and politics, after being imprisoned as a young man on trumped-up charges. During his time in the labour camps and prisons he studied, and began to associate with dissidents.
  He first became widely known through his book My Testimony, an autobiographical account of his then-recent sentence in Soviet labour camps and prison, which caused a sensation when it was released in the West in 1969, after limited circulation inside the Soviet Union as samizdat. It brought home to readers around the world, including the USSR itself, that the Soviet gulag had not ended with Joseph Stalin.
  
  wn.com/Anatoly_Marchenko
• 
  Andrei Amalrik
  Andrei Alekseevich Amalrik (Russian:Андрей Алексеевич Амальрик; May 12, 1938 - November 12, 1980), alternatively spelled Andrei or Andrey, was a Russian writer and dissident.
  Amalrik was best known in the Western world for his essay, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?
  Amalrik was born in Moscow, during the time of Joseph Stalin's purges.
  When the Soviet revolution broke out, Andrei's father, then a young man, volunteered for the Red Army. After the war he went into the film industry. Andrei's father fought in World War II in the Northern Fleet. He was overheard uttering negative views about Stalin's qualities as a military leader, which led to his arrest and imprisonment; he feared for his life, but shortly afterward was released to rejoin the army. In 1942 he was wounded at Stalingrad and invalided out of the service. Andrei's father's hardships explain Andrei's decision to become a historian. For his father, after climbing the educational ladder, was after the war refused permission to study at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of History on account of what authorities felt was his own compromised political past^{[citation needed]}. But as Historian John Keep wrote: "Andrei has gone one better by not only writing history but by securing a place in it."
  
  wn.com/Andrei_Amalrik
• 
  Andrei Sakharov
  Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (Russian: Андре́й Дми́триевич Са́харов; May 21, 1921 – December 14, 1989) was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist.
  He gained renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The Sakharov Prize, which is awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms, is named in his honor.
  Sakharov was born in Moscow on May 21, 1921. His father was Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, a private school physics teacher and an amateur pianist. His father later taught at the Second Moscow State University. Dmitri's grandfather Ivan had been a prominent lawyer in Tsarist Russia who had displayed respect for social awareness and humanitarian principles (including advocating the abolition of capital punishment) that would later influence his grandson. Sakharov's mother was Yekaterina Alekseyevna Sakharova (née Sofianos and of Greek ancestry). His parents and his paternal grandmother, Maria Petrovna, largely shaped Sakharov's personality. Although his paternal great-grandfather had been a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, and his pious mother did have him baptised, his father was an atheist and religion did not play an important role in his life, though he did believe that a non-scientific "guiding principle" governed the universe and human life.
  
  wn.com/Andrei_Sakharov
• 
  Arthur C. Clarke
  Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS, Sri Lankabhimanya, (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.
  Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar instructor and technician from 1941–1946. He proposed a satellite communication system in 1945 which won him the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Gold Medal in 1963. He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1947–1950 and again in 1953.
  Clarke emigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956 largely to pursue his interest in scuba diving; that year, he discovered the underwater ruins of the ancient Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee. He lived in Sri Lanka until his death. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998, and was awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_C._Clarke
• 
  Benjamin Fain
  Benjamin Fain (Russian: Вениамин Моисеевич Файн, Hebrew: בינימין פיין‎) (February 17, 1930) is a known physicist, professor-emeritus, former refusenik.
  Fain was born on 17 February 1930 in a Jewish family in Kiev. His father was a mathematician, he instilled in the child a love to science as well as a strong national sentiment.
  Benjamin Fain was named after his grandfather, murdered in Proskurov pogrom. During the Second World War the family was evacuated and changed several places. After the end of the war the family stayed in Dushanbe, where Fain graduated from school. He became a student in Moscow Institute of Energetics. During the first year in Moscow he visited synagogue and attempted to learn Hebrew and Yiddish languages. Fain was strongly impressed by historical visit of the first Israeli ambassador in USSR Golda Meir. Fain managed to pass in 1950 to a Phaculty of Physics in Gorky University. He graduated there with summa cum laude, his instructor was a future Nobel prize winner Vitaly Ginzburg.
  
  wn.com/Benjamin_Fain
• 
  Besarion Jughashvili
  Besarion Vanovis Jughashvili (Georgian: ბესარიონ ჯუღაშვილი; Russian: Виссарион Вановис Джугашвили;) (1849 or 1850 - 1909) was Joseph Stalin's father. His surname means son of Juga, and is derived from either the Ossetian йуга Juga (that means 'herd') or the old Georgian ჯუღა djuga - 'steel'.
  Besarion Jughashvili was the grandson of Zaza Jughashvili from the village of Geri, north of Gori. In the mid-19th century, Zaza took part in a peasant uprising in Ananuri, a small county seat near Ger on the Aragvi River. The uprising was crushed by Imperial soldiers, and Zaza was captured with nine other rebels. Zaza escaped and hid in Gori, where he was recaptured and remanded as a serf to Prince Eristavi. He became involved in another uprising on the Eristavi estate. It is unknown who his wife was, or the exact number of children he sired. Vano Djughashvili, Besarion's father, tended the vineyards of Georgian Prince Badur Machabeli in the village of Didi-Lilo. Besarion was born into an Orthodox Christian serf family from the village of Didi Lilo in Georgia, most likely in 1850. Besarion had a brother called Giorgi who was murdered by bandits.
  
  wn.com/Besarion_Jughashvili
• 
  Boris Kagarlitsky
  Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky (Russian: Бори́с Ю́льевич Кагарли́цкий; born 29 August 1958 in Moscow) is a Russian Marxist theoretician and sociologist who has been a political dissident in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia. He is coordinator of the Transnational Institute Global Crisis project and Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO) in Moscow.
  In the 1970s, he studied theatre criticism at the State Institute of Theatrical Art (GITIS), before being expelled for dissident activities in 1980. His editorship of the samizdat journal Levy Povorot from 1978 to 1982, and contributions to the samizdat journal Varianty during the same period, led to his two year imprisonment for 'anti-Soviet' activities in 1982. After his release, he published his first book, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State From 1917 to the Present, which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988.
  In 1988, after the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika, he was permitted to resume his studies at the GITIS, graduating in the same year, and became coordinator of the Moscow People's Front. In 1990, he was elected to the Moscow City Soviet and to the Executive of the Socialist Party of Russia. He co-founded the Party of Labour in October 1992. In October 1993, he was arrested, with two other members of his party, for his opposition to President Boris Yeltsin during the September—October constitutional crisis, but was released the next day after international protests. Later that year, his job and the Moscow City Soviet were abolished under Yeltsin's new constitution. The events and his experiences during this momentous period are documented in his book, Square Wheels: How Russian Democracy Got Derailed.
  
  wn.com/Boris_Kagarlitsky
• 
  Boris Pasternak
  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Russian: Бори́с Леони́дович Пастерна́к; IPA: [bɐˈrʲis lʲeɐˈnʲidəvʲɪt͡ɕ pəstʲɪrˈnak]; 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister, Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Furthermore, Pasternak's theatrical translations of Goethe, Schiller, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and William Shakespeare remain deeply popular with Russian audiences.
  Outside Russia, Pasternak is best known as the author of Doctor Zhivago, a novel which spans the last years of Czarist Russia and the earliest days of the Soviet Union. Banned in the USSR, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Milan and published in 1957. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the midst of a massive campaign against him by both the KGB^{[citation needed]} and the Union of Soviet Writers, Pasternak reluctantly agreed to decline the Prize. In his resignation letter to the Nobel Committee, Pasternak stated the reaction of the Soviet State was the only reason for his decision.
  
  wn.com/Boris_Pasternak
• 
  Dag Hammarskjöld
  Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld ( [dɑːg ˈhamːarɧœld] (help·info)) (29 July 1905 – 18 September 1961) was a Swedish diplomat, economist, and author. The second Secretary-General of the United Nations, he served from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. He is one of four people to have been awarded a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize. Hammarskjöld remains the only U.N. Secretary-General to die in office, and his death occurred en route to cease-fire negotiations. American President John F. Kennedy called Hammarskjöld “the greatest statesman of our century".
  Dag Hammarskjöld was born in Jönköping, Sweden, but spent most of his childhood in Uppsala. The fourth and youngest son of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, Prime Minister of Sweden from 1914 to 1917, and Agnes Hammarskjöld (née Almquist), Hammarskjöld's ancestors served the Monarchy of Sweden since the 17th century. He studied first at Katedralskolan and then at Uppsala University where he graduated with a Bachelor of Laws and a Master's degree in Political economy. During this time he served for a year as the first Curator at Uplands Nation later moving to Stockholm.
  
  wn.com/Dag_Hammarskjöld
• 
  Danylo Shumuk
  Danylo Lavrentiyovych Shumuk (Ukrainian: Данило Лаврентійович Шумук, last name pronounced shoo-mook, b. December 30, 1914 in village Boremschyna, Russian Empire, now in Volyn Oblast, Ukraine - d. 21 May 2004 in Krasnoarmiisk, Ukraine) was a Ukrainian political activist who served a total of 42 years imprisoned by three different states, Second Polish Republic, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union.
  In 1918 in what now is western Ukraine, the Ukrainian forces fought in the Polish-Ukrainian War, but the Ukrainians in Galicia were alienated after what they saw as a compromise in the Paris Peace Conference with Poland. The Ukrainian People's Republic delegation could not gain recognition at the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the World War. The representatives of the exiled government of the Ukrainian People's Republic fared poorly during Polish-Soviet War where they formed a late alliance with Poland and supported the latter's unsuccessful Kiev Offensive. According to the Peace of Riga which ended the war, the combined territories of the Ukrainian and West Ukrainian People's Republics ended up split again between the Ukrainian SSR in the east, and Poland in the west (Galicia and part of Volhynia).
  
  wn.com/Danylo_Shumuk
• 
  David Devdariani
  David Devdariani (Georgian: დავით დევდარიანი) (November 17, 1927–June 13, 2006) was a Professor of Jurisprudence and Head of Law Faculty at Georgian Technical University. He was the son of the famous Georgian revolutionary Gaioz Devdariani who was executed during the Great Purge in 1938 by orders of Joseph Stalin. David was born in Tbilisi, Georgia and attended the Russian gymnasium in Ukraine. In 1950, just before applying for university studies in Tbilisi, he was arrested by MVD (former NKVD) for being “the son of the enemy of the people” (Russian: "сын врага народа") and charged with Article 58 of counter-revolutionary activities. In KGB operated jail Devdariani suffered a great ordeal of which effects lasted throughout his life.
  
  wn.com/David_Devdariani
• 
  Dmitri Savitski
  Dmitry Petrovich Savitsky (Russian: Дмитрий Петрович Савицкий, (born January 25, 1944), (Russian: Дми́трий Петро́вич Сави́цкий) is a Russian writer and poet.
  In English was translated only a novel Waltz for K. (cinematized in 2008 by Roman Balayan). Published in Evergreen magazine, Grove-Press, N-Y. 1986. No. 98. Translated by Kingsley Shorter. Broadcast in BBC in 1986.
  His first two books Savitski created in Russian, but it was never published in original, because, as the author explains, it was addressed to Western audience. This two novels were edited under pen names — Alexandre Dimov and Dimitri Savitski-Dimov:
  Next books are published both in Russian and French:
  
  wn.com/Dmitri_Savitski
• 
  Dominique Pire
  Dominique Pire (Georges Charles Clement Ghislain Pire) (Dinant, February 10, 1910 – Leuven, January 30, 1969) was a Belgian Dominican friar whose work helping refugees in post-World War II Europe saw him receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1958. He was the eldest child of Georges Pire, Sr., a civic official, and Berthe (Ravet) Pire.
  Georges Pire studied classics and philosophy at the Collège de Bellevue and at the age of eighteen entered the Dominican priory of La Sarte in Huy. He took his final vows on 23 September 1932, adopting the name Dominique, after the Order's founder. He then studied theology and social science at the Pontifical International Institute Angelicum in Rome, where he obtained his doctorate in theology in 1936 with a thesis entitled L’Apatheia ou insensibilité irréalisable et destructrice (Apatheia or unrealisable and destructive insensitivity). He returned to the priory at La Sarte, in Huy, Belgium where he dedicated himself to helping poor families live according to their dignity. During the second world war, Pire served as chaplain to the Belgian resistance, actively participating in its activities, such as helping smuggle Allied pilots out of the country. He received several medals for this service after the war.
  
  wn.com/Dominique_Pire
• 
  Eduard Kuznetsov
  Eduard Kuznetsov (Russian language: Эдуард Кузнецов; born in Moscow, 1939) is a Soviet dissident, human rights activist, and writer.
  In 1961, Kuznetsov was arrested for the first time and served seven years in Soviet prisons for making overtly political speeches in poetry readings at Mayakovsky Square in the centre of Moscow and for publishing samizdat (publishing yourself what the Soviet printing presses were forbidden from publishing. An illegal activity in USSR.)
  After his release, he was one of the organizers of the Dymshits-Kuznetsov hijacking affair in May 1970 and was arrested for "high treason", punishable by the death sentence. His capital punishment sentence was appealed and after international protests his sentence was replaced with fifteen years of incarceration. This affair "opened the doors of emigration to thousands of Soviet Jews." In 1970 Kuznetsov shared a prison cell with Danylo Shumuk for five years.
  In 1979 he and four other dissidents were exchanged for two Soviet spies arrested in the US. Kuznetsov then emigrated to Israel. From 1983 to 1990 he was chief of the news department of "Radio Liberty". In 1992 he cofounded the Israeli Russian-language newspaper, "Vesti" ("The News"), which he edited until 1999.
  
  wn.com/Eduard_Kuznetsov
• 
  Edward Teller
  Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", even though he claimed he did not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Fermi's theory of beta decay (in the form of the so-called Gamow–Teller transitions) provided an important stepping stone in the applications of this theory. The Jahn–Teller effect and the BET theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, along with Nicholas Metropolis and Marshall Rosenbluth, Teller co-authored a paper which is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Teller
• 
  Efraim Sevela
  Efraim Sevela (Russian: Эфраим Севела, pen-name of Efim Evelevich Drabkin – Russian: Ефим Евелевич Драбкин; March 8, 1928, Babruysk, Mahilyow Voblast, Belarus – August 18, 2010) was a Russian writer, screenwriter, director, producer, who after his emigration from the Soviet Union lived in Israel, USA and Russia.
  Efraim Sevela was born to Jewish parents. His father was an officer. He was evacuated from the frontline in 1941. After the school Sevela was admitted into the Belarusian State University and became a screenwriter for many Soviet patriotic films. At the end of the 1960s, Sevela joined the Jewish Soviet dissidents and took part in the capture of the main office of the head of the Soviet government in 1971. Sevela was expatriated to Israel.Aссording his words 45 years old Sevella participated in the Yom Kippur War being wounded. In 1977 he left Israel for the USA. Efraim Sevela worked and lived in many cities such as London, Paris, and West Berlin.
  In 1990 Efraim Sevela came back to the USSR and started filming very successful movies based on his works.
  
  wn.com/Efraim_Sevela
• 
  Ekaterina Svanidze
  Ekaterina "Kato" Svanidze (Georgian: ეკატერინე "კატო" სვანიძე; April 2, 1885 – December 5, 1907) was the Georgian first wife of Joseph Stalin. They were married in 1906.
  She was a daughter of Semon Svanadze and Sephora (née Dvali). Ekaterina, nicknamed Kato, was a tailor who worked for the ladies of the Russian army
  She had two sisters, Alexandra (nicknamed "Sashiko") and Maria ("Mariko"). She had at least one brother, but some sources claim she had more than one. Because her only known brother Alexander Svanidze spoke German and French and studied in Germany, it is unlikely that her family was poor. Alexander Svanidze was married to Maria Korona, a singer at the Tiflis Opera.
  Kato Svanidze married Joseph Stalin in St. David's church at Tiflis in 1906. They had a son, Yakov Dzhugashvili. She died of typhus in 1907. Much of her family (including her sister Mariko and brother Alexander) would later be executed during her husband's Great Terror.
  It is stated that Ekaterina died of tuberculosis in Stalin's arms.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Ekaterina_Svanidze
• 
  Elena Bonner
  Yelena Bonner (Russian: Елена Георгиевна Боннэр; 15 February 1923 – 18 June 2011) was a human rights activist in the former Soviet Union and wife of the noted physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. During her decades as a dissident, Bonner was noted for her characteristic blunt honesty and courage.
  Bonner was born Lusik Georgievna Alikhanova in Merv, Turkmen SSR, USSR (now Mary, Turkmenistan). Her father, Georgy Alikhanov (Armenian name Gevork Alikhanyan), was an Armenian who founded the Soviet Armenian Communist Party, and was a highly placed member of the Comintern; her mother, Ruf, (Ruth Bonner), was a Jewish Communist activist. She had a younger brother, Igor, who became a career naval officer.
  In 1937, Bonner's father was arrested by the NKVD and executed as part of Stalin's Great Purge; her mother was arrested a few days later, and served eight years in a forced labor camp near Karaganda, Kazakhstan, followed by nine years of internal exile. Bonner's 41-year-old maternal uncle, Matvei Bonner, was also executed during the purge, and his wife internally exiled. All four were exonerated (rehabilitated) following Stalin's death in 1953. Serving as a nurse during World War II, Bonner was wounded twice, and in 1946 was honorably discharged as a disabled veteran. After the war she earned a degree in pediatrics from the First Leningrad Medical Institute.
  
  wn.com/Elena_Bonner
• 
  Eliyahu Essas
  Rabbi Eliyahu Essas (Russian: Илья Эссас; born 1946) is a notable former leader of Soviet Jewry and one of the founders of Baal Teshuva movement in the Soviet Union. Currently he lives in Jerusalem, Israel.
  In 1973 he applied to the Soviet Authorities to make Aliyah to Israel. He was refused on the grounds of his wife's having a security sensitive job.
  While living in Moscow, Essas spent his time building an Orthodox Jewish Community. He created a network of Torah studies, children underground education, and summer camps.
  In January 1986, after political deals between Edgar Bronfman, Chairman of the World Jewish Congress, and Soviet Authorities, Essas' family moved to Israel.
  In 1988 Rabbi Essas was running to Knesset with Degel HaTorah party.
  Rabbi Essas currently works for Aish Hatorah in Jerusalem, Israel and is a founder of Jewish Russian website evrey.com
  
  
  
  wn.com/Eliyahu_Essas
• 
  Enn Tarto
  Enn Tarto (born on 25 September 1938 in Tartu) is an Estonian politician who was a leading dissident during the Soviet occupation of Estonia. He was imprisoned from 1956 to 1960, 1962 to 1967, and again from 1983 to 1988 for anti-Soviet activity.
  Tarto was involved in nationalist activities since his youth. On November 4, 1956 Enn Tarto and other members of the Estonian Youth Brigade (Eesti Noorte Malev) distributed leaflets in support of Hungarian Revolution, 1956. The message reached the West and via Western broadcasts, the students of Moscow State University. Some of these students plus lecturers were expelled for approving the Hungarians. Later, Tarto met some of these in a prison in Mordovia. For his action, Enn Tarto has been awarded of the Officer Cross of the Merit Order of the Hungarian Republic. After being imprisoned twice, Enn Tarto studied from 1969 to 1971 in Tartu University Estonian philology. As Tarto was accepted to the university, a KGB man dealing with Tarto told him: 'We've already used stick, let's try now carrot as well'. Tarto was exmatriculated in 1971 in connection with his patriotic thinking and actions.
  
  wn.com/Enn_Tarto
• 
  Ephraim Kholmyansky
  Ephraim (Alexander) Kholmyansky (born 1950, in Moscow) – refusenik, activist in the Jewish revival movement in Russia, teacher of Hebrew, Prisoner of Zion.
  
  wn.com/Ephraim_Kholmyansky
• Ernst Rexer
  Ernst Rexer (2 April 1902 in Stuttgart – 14 May 1983 in Dresden) was a German nuclear physicist. He worked on the German nuclear energy program during World War II. After the war, he was sent to Laboratory V, in Obninsk, to work on the Soviet atomic bomb project. In 1956, he was sent to East Germany, where he was a professor and director of the Institute for the Application of Radioactive Isotopes at the Technische Hochschule Dresden.
  In 1923, Rexer began studies in chemistry and physics at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. In 1926 he completed the Chemikerverbandsexamen (Chemist Federation exam). From 1926 to 1929, he worked in the Osram Werke (Osram Works), in Weisswasser and Berlin. In 1929, he received his doctorate from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (today, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).
  After receipt of his doctorate in 1929, Rexer became an associate assistant (außerplanmäßiger Assistant) at the Institut für Theoretische Physik (Institute for Theoretical Physics) at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. In 1936, he completed his Habilitation there, with an Habilitationsschrift on the physics of crystals. In 1937, he joined the faculty at Halle as a Dozent (lecturer).
  
  wn.com/Ernst_Rexer
• Gennady Gorelik
  Gennady Gorelik is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University. A physicist by education and historian by occupation, he published ten books and many articles on popular science and history of science, including in-depth biographies of 20th century Russian physicists, Matvei Bronstein, Andrei Sakharov, and Lev Landau.
  In his biography of Sakharov, he provides the documentary explanation of Sakharov's metamorphosis from a secret father of the Soviet H-bomb to most prominent advocate of human rights in the Soviet Union.
  In 1995, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Gennady_Gorelik
• 
  George Marshall
  George Catlett Marshall (December 31, 1880 – October 16, 1959) was an American military leader, Chief of Staff of the Army, Secretary of State, and the third Secretary of Defense. Once noted as the "organizer of victory" by Winston Churchill for his leadership of the Allied victory in World War II, Marshall served as the United States Army Chief of Staff during the war and as the chief military adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As Secretary of State, his name was given to the Marshall Plan, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.
  George Catlett Marshall was born into a middle-class family in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of George Catlett Marshall, Sr. and Laura Emily (Bradford) Marshall. Marshall was a scion of an old Virginia family, as well as a distant relative of former Chief Justice John Marshall. Marshall graduated from the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), where he was initiated into the Kappa Alpha Order, in 1901.
  Following graduation from VMI, Marshall was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Until World War I, he was posted to various positions in the US and the Philippines. He served as an infantry platoon leader and company commander in the Phillipines during the Phillipine-American War and several other guerilla uprisings. He was schooled and trained in modern warfare. His pre-war service included a tour at Fort Leavenworth, KS from 1906 to 1910 as both a student and an instructor.
  
  wn.com/George_Marshall
• 
  Georgi Vins
  Georgi Petrovich Vins (Russian: Георгий Петрович Винс; August 4, 1928 Blagoveshchensk, Russian SFSR – January 11, 1998 Elkhart, Indiana) was a Russian Baptist pastor persecuted by the Soviet authorities for his involvement in a network of independent Baptist churches. Following an agreement between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Vins and his family were expelled from the Soviet Union in 1979 with a group of other dissidents, Alexander Ginzburg, Eduard Kuznetsov, Mark Dymshits and Valentin Moroz in exchange for two convicted spies, Rudolf Chernyaev and Valdik Enger.
  Georgi Vins was born in the Russian Far East to Peter Vins, an American citizen of Russian origin who had traveled to Siberia just two years before as a missionary and Lydia (Zharikova) Vins. Peter was arrested in 1930, freed three years later but re-arrested in 1935 and executed in 1936. The family was only later informed of his murder. Peter Vins was the son of Mennonite Brethren leader Jacob J. Wiens born in Borden, Saskatchewan.
  
  wn.com/Georgi_Vins
• 
  Georgi Vladimov
  Georgi Nikolaevich Vladimov (Russian: Гео́ргий Никола́евич Влади́мов), real family name Volosevich (Russian: Волосевич) (February 19, 1931 Kharkiv, Ukraine – October 19, 2003 Frankfurt, Germany) was a Russian dissident writer.
  In 1977 he became the leader of the Moscow section of Amnesty International, forbidden in the USSR. In 1983, he emigrated to West Germany.
  Vladimov's most famous novel was Faithful Ruslan (English translation: 1979, ISBN 0-671-24633-X), the tale of Ruslan, a guard dog in a Soviet Gulag labor camp, told by the dog. It circulated in the Soviet Union as a samizdat publication, before being published in West Germany in 1975.
  His novel General i yego armiya (“The General and His Army”), on General Chibisov (Kobrissov) and General Vlasov, was awarded the Russian Booker Prize in 1995 and Sakharov Prize in 2000.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Georgi_Vladimov
• Gernot Zippe
  Gernot Zippe (November 1917 – 7 May 2008; PhD), was a Austrian-German mechanical engineer who is widely credited with leading the team which developed the Zippe-type centrifuge, a centrifuge machine for the collection of ²³⁵Uranium-235.
  Zippe was born in Varnsdorf, Austria-Hungary (nowadays Czech Republic) in 1917. Zippe studied and graduated with B.Sc. Physics at the University of Vienna in the '1938, and served in the German Luftwaffe as a flight instructor and a researcher on radar and airplane propellers. In 1941, Zippe received his B.S. in Mechanical engineering, and M.Sc. in 1943 in same respected same discipline. While doing his post doctoral research at the University of Vienna, Zippe participated in Germany's nuclear weapons project in 1940s. He was the junior research team member of the Isotope separation project led by Klaus Clusius at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1945, he was awarded a PhD in Mechanical engineering with emphasizing on thermal column and its applicant physics. By the time, Zippe fully joined the project as the team leader, the Soviet Union's Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del (NKVD) apprehended him, as with other technically skilled scientists and engineers, to a special camp where he led a team that worked on centrifuge research for the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union Zippe worked at the Physics Institute of Sukhumi on a centrifuge project, led by German director Manfred von Ardenne, and directly by another German scientist Max Steenbeck, whose theoretical achievements Zippe used. He was allowed to leave in 1956, and returned to Vienna.
  
  wn.com/Gernot_Zippe
• 
  Gleb Yakunin
  Gleb Pavlovich Yakunin (Russian: Глеб Павлович Якунин; born March 4, 1934) is Russian priest and dissident who fought for the freedom of conscience in the Soviet Union. He was member of Moscow Helsinki Group, and he was elected to Russian Parliaments from 1990 to 1999.
  Gleb Yakunin was born into the family of a musician. He studied Biology at Irkutsk Agricultural Institute. He became a Christian at the end of the 1950s when he met Alexander Men. Yakunin graduated from the Moscow Theological Seminary of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1959. In August 1962 he was ordained a priest and was appointed to the parish church in the city of Dimitrov near Moscow.
  In 1965, Yakunin wrote, together with priest Nikolai Eschliman, an open letter to the Patriarch of Moscow, Alexius I, where he argued that the Church must be liberated from the total control of the Soviet state. The letter was published samizdat ("self-published", i.e., underground press). In May 1966 he was forbidden to continue his priestly ministry in the parish. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn supported Gleb Yakunin and Nikolai Eschliman in his letter to Patriarch Alexius.
  
  wn.com/Gleb_Yakunin
• 
  Grigory Isayev
  Grigory Zinovyevich Isayev (Russian: Григорий Зиновьевич Исаев; born 1943) is a Russian politician and labor activist. He is the leader of the Samara Stachkom (Strike Committee) and the Party of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Isayev was arrested and sentenced to a prison camp in 1981 for his role in organizing workers' strike and an underground communist organization in the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev rule. He was arrested twice under Boris Yeltsin in 1998 for leading the successful two-month long strike of the 5,000 ZIM (Zavod imeni Maslennikova) factory's workers and the blockade of the main street of Samara which paralyzed the center of the city.
  
  wn.com/Grigory_Isayev
• 
  Guram Mamulia
  Guram Mamulia (Georgian: გურამ მამულია) (May 9, 1937 — January 1, 2003) was a Georgian historian, politician and campaigner for Meskhetian rights. A month after Mamulia was born, his father was imprisoned by Joseph Stalin. He was raised by his aunt. He graduated with a degree in history from Tbilisi State University in 1960. He began teaching at Tbilisi University in 1973.
  In 1981 he was expelled from the Communist party after protesting on behalf of dissidents. In 1983 he was removed from his position at the University for publishing an article condemning the Treaty of Georgievsk of 1783 whereby Russia established protectorate over Georgia. In 1988 he was a co-founder of the Ilia Chavchavadze Society. The next year he helped found the Georgian Memorial Society which was devoted to memorializing victims of the Soviets. He was s supporter of Eduard Shevardnadze and was elected to Georgia's parliament in 1992 where he was involved in inter-ethnic relations. He help found the independent Association for the Repatriation and Integration of Meskhetians which supported the repatriation of Meskhetian as a condition to enter the Council of Europe and he was involved with the International Black Sea University a UN supported program for cooperation between Georgian and Turkish academics.
  
  wn.com/Guram_Mamulia
• Heinz Pose
  Rudolf Heinz Pose (10 April 1905 in Königsberg – 13 November 1975 in Dresden) was a German nuclear physicist.
  He did pioneering work which contributed to the understanding nuclear energy levels. He worked on the German nuclear energy project Uranverein. After World War II, the Soviet Union sent him to establish and head Laboratory V in Obninsk. From 1957, he was at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. He settled in East Germany in 1959, and he held teaching posts and directed nuclear physics institutes at the Technische Hochschule Dresden.
  Pose studied physics, mathematics, and chemistry at the University of Königsberg, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Georg-August University of Göttingen, and the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. He received his doctorate at Halle, in 1928, under the Nobel laureate in Physics Gustav Hertz.
  From 1928 Pose was an unsalaried assistant and from 1930 a regular assistant to the physicist Gerhard Hoffmann, who was doing research in nuclear reaction measurements. In 1929, Pose studied the nuclear reactions of aluminum nuclei bombarded with alpha particles. His experiments showed the existence of discrete energy levels in the nucleus. His pioneering work described for the first time the effect of resonance transformation in a nuclear process. On the basis of these works and his Habilitation, Pose was awarded a teaching contract for atomic physics in 1934. He continued to study these nuclear reactions in other light (low atomic number) nuclei through the 1930s. In 1939, he was awarded an unscheduled/adjunct (außerplanmäßige) professorship at Halle.
  
  wn.com/Heinz_Pose
• 
  Henry Kissinger
  Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger ( /ˈkɪsɪndʒər/; born May 27, 1923) is a German-born American writer, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. After his term, his opinion was still sought by many subsequent presidents and many world leaders.
  A proponent of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a dominant role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. During this period, he pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrated the opening of relations with the People's Republic of China, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, ending American involvement in the Vietnam War. Various American policies of that era, including the bombing of Cambodia, remain controversial to many.
  Kissinger is still a controversial figure today. He is the founder and chairman of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm.
  
  wn.com/Henry_Kissinger
• 
  Igor Kurchatov
  Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov (Russian: И́горь Васи́льевич Курча́тов; 12 January 1903 – 7 February 1960), was a Soviet nuclear physicist who is widely known as the director of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Along with Georgy Flyorov and Andrei Sakharov, Kurchatov is widely remembered and dubbed as the "father of the Soviet atomic bomb" for his directorial role in the development of the Soviet nuclear program, in a clandestine program during World War II formed in the wake of the USSR's discovery of the Western Allied efforts to develop nuclear weapons. After nine years of covert development, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear weapon, codenamed First Lightning at the Semipalatinsk Test Range in 1949. In 1954 he was awarded the USSR State Prize in physics.
  From 1940 onward, Kurchatov worked and contributed advancing the nuclear weapons program, and later advocated for the peaceful development of nuclear technology. In 1950, Kurchatov contributed in the development of the Hydrogen bomb with Andrei Sakharov who originated this development as Sakharov's Third Idea. Other projects completed under Kurchatov included the installation and development of Soviet Union's first particle accelerator, the Cyclotron, inauguration and established of Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, the first commercial nuclear power plant in Obninsk, and the completion and launching of the Lenin, the first nuclear-power vessel, under his leadership, in 1959.
  
  wn.com/Igor_Kurchatov
• 
  Igor Shafarevich
  Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich (Russian: И́горь Ростисла́вович Шафаре́вич, born June 3, 1923) is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, founder of a school of algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry in the USSR, and a political writer. He was also an important dissident figure under the Soviet regime, a public supporter of Andrei Sakharov's Human Rights Committee from 1970. He supported the criticisms of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of both Soviet communism and liberal proposals for the future of Russia.
  
  wn.com/Igor_Shafarevich
• 
  Igor Tamm
  Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm (Russian И́горь Евге́ньевич Тамм; 8 July 1895 – 12 April 1971) was a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Frank, for their 1934 discovery of Cherenkov radiation.
  According to Russian sources, Tamm was born in Vladivostok, Russian Empire (now Russia) into a noble family of German extraction. His grandfather Theodor Tamm emigrated from Thuringia), and other sources describe him as Jewish. He studied at a gymnasium in Elisavetgrad (now Kirovohrad, Ukraine). In 1913-1914 he studied at the University of Edinburgh together with his school-friend Boris Hessen.
  At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he joined the army as a volunteer field medic. In 1917 he joined the Revolutionary movement and became an active anti-War campaigner, serving on revolutionary committies after the March Revolution. He returned to the Moscow State University from which he graduated in 1918.
  Tamm married Nataliya Shuyskaya in September of 1917. She belonged to an old princely family of Rurikid descent . Their daughter Irina eventually became a noted chemist.
  
  wn.com/Igor_Tamm
• 
  Ihor Kalynets
  Ihor Mironovych Kalynets (Ukrainian: Ігор Миронович Калинець) (b 1939 in Khodoriv, Lviv Oblast) is a Ukrainian poet and Soviet dissident.
  Kalynets was born in Khodoriv. He was the son of an agronomist. his parents upheld Ukrainian cultural traditions. As a child, Kalynets read banned literature in the Ukrainian language, and watched the mass deportations of Ukrainians by the communists. Kalynets graduated from Lviv University in 1961. He began writing in the 1950s, and his first book of poetry was published in 1966. Because of censorship, the rest of his works were published in the west in the Ukrainian language. He was friends with the poets Ivan Drach and Ivan Dziuba.
  One of the main themes of Kalyntes' poetry is cultural glorification. Much of his writing uses a vocabulary full of cultural allusions. His work reflects his pride in Ukrainian culture and the country's ancient pagan and early Christian heritage. In his most famous work, Kupalo's Fire (1966), Kalynets connects the country's folklore and ancient traditions to modern, Soviet life. Most of his works do not contain glaring political criticisms, rather unexpressed denunciation. Kalynets drew strong influence from Bohdan Ihor Antonych, and dedicated one of his poems to him. He also dedicated poems to various Ukrainian cultural icons, including Taras Shevchenko, filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, and composer Stanislav Liudkevych among others. He refused to dedicate any poems to the Soviet leaders, breaking from the custom which was typical among poets in that time.
  
  wn.com/Ihor_Kalynets
• 
  Ivan Drach
  Ivan Drach (Ukrainian: Іван Федорович Драч) (born 17 October 1936) is a Ukrainian poet, screenwriter, literary critic, politician dissident, and political activist.
  Drach played an important role in the founding of Rukh – the People's Movement of Ukraine – and led the organisation from 1989 to 1992. Drach has promoted the use of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine and whilst serving as the Ukraine's minister of communication proposed wide-ranging measures including setting quotas for Ukrainian-language broadcasts and tax breaks for Ukrainian publishing. Drach's other positions have included the chairmanship of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia Congress and heading the Writers' Union. In 2006 Drach was awarded the title Hero of Ukraine.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Ivan_Drach
• 
  Ivan Kandyba
  Ivan Kandyba (Ukrainian: Іван Кандиба) (June 7, 1930 - Nov. 8, 2002), was a Ukrainian lawyer, who achieved most fame by being a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
  Ivan Kandyba was born into a Ukrainian peasant family in Poland. In 1945, his family was resettled in Ukraine. Kandyba attended law school in Lviv, graduating in 1953. Between 1953 and 1961, he served in the town of Hlynyany, Lviv oblast, as notary, lawyer, and judge.
  In February 1960, Kandyba met Levko Lukyanenko, who was also working as a lawyer. The two became friends, and Kandyba supported an idea on which Lukyanenko was working - the creation of an illegal Ukrainian Worker's and Peasant's Union (UWPU) (Ukrainian: Українська Робітничо-Селянська Спілка). This organization was discovered, and Kandyba was arrested.
  In 1962 and again in 1967, Kandyba served a three year and one year term respectively as a political prisoner. Upon his release in 1976, Kandyba was not allowed to work in Lviv.
  Kandyba was one of the founders of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) which was announced in November 1976 by Mykola Rudenko.
  
  wn.com/Ivan_Kandyba
• 
  Joseph Brodsky
  Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (Russian: Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский, IPA: [ˈjɵsʲɪf ˈbrotskʲɪj] ( listen); 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996), was a Russian poet and essayist.
  In 1964, 23-year-old Brodsky was arrested and charged with the crime of "social parasitism" He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan.
  Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed American Poet Laureate in 1991.
  Brodsky was born into a Jewish family in Leningrad. His father, Aleksandr Brodsky, was a professional photographer in the Soviet Navy and his mother, Maria Volpert Brodsky, was a professional interpreter whose work often helped to support the family. They lived in communal apartments, in poverty, marginalized by their Jewish status. In early childhood Brodsky survived the Siege of Leningrad where he and his parents nearly died of starvation; an aunt of his did die of hunger. He later suffered from various health problems caused by the siege. Brodsky commented that many of his teachers were anti-Semitic and that he felt like a dissident from an early age. He noted "I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice ... but because of his omnipresent images."
  
  wn.com/Joseph_Brodsky
• 
  Joseph Stalin
  Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин; born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and later held the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. While the office of the General Secretary was officially elective and not initially regarded as the top position in the Soviet state, Stalin managed to use it to consolidate more and more power in his hands after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 and gradually put down all opposition groups within the Communist Party. This included Leon Trotsky, a socialist theorist and the principal critic of Stalin among the early Soviet leaders, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Whereas Trotsky was an exponent of permanent revolution, it was Stalin's concept of socialism in one country that became the primary focus of Soviet politics.
  
  wn.com/Joseph_Stalin
• 
  Jüri Kukk
  Jüri Kukk (May 1, 1940, Pärnu, Estonia — March 27, 1981, Vologda , Russia) was an Estonian professor of chemistry, a Soviet dissident, who died in a Soviet labor camp after several months of hunger strike and psychiatric treatments.
  He resigned from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1978 and was subsequently fired from the post of the Associate Professor of chemistry at Tartu University. He was also refused permission to emigrate.
  Jüri Kukk was arrested in February 1980 "for distribution of anti-Soviet Propaganda".
  
  
  
  wn.com/Jüri_Kukk
• Karel van het Reve
  Karel van het Reve (19 May 1921, Amsterdam – 4 March 1999, Amsterdam) was a Dutch writer, translator and literary historian, teaching and writing on Russian literature.
  He was born in Amsterdam and was raised as a communist. He lost his 'faith' in his twenties and became an active critic and opponent of the Soviet regime. With his help, work of dissident Andrei Sakharov was smuggled to the west, and his Alexander Herzen Foundation published dissident Soviet literature.
  He is considered to be one of the finest Dutch essayists, his interests ranging from the fallacies of Marxism to nude beach etiquette. His works include a history of Russian literature, 2 novels and several collections of essays. In 1978 Karel van het Reve delivered the Huizinga Lecture, under the title: Literatuurwetenschap: het raadsel der onleesbaarheid (Literary studies. The enigma of unreadability).
  His brother, Gerard Reve, was one of the great Dutch post-war prose writers.
  
  wn.com/Karel_van_het_Reve
• 
  Ketevan Geladze
  Ketevan Geladze ("Ekaterina" in Russian, and familiarly known as "Keke") (Georgian: ქეთევან გელაძე; February 5, 1858 – June 4, 1937) was the mother of Joseph Stalin. She was born to a family of Georgian Orthodox Christian serfs in Gambareuli, Imperial Russia (now in Georgia), in 1858. Her father, Glakh Geladze, was a potter belonging to Prince Amilakhvari. He died young and the family was always poor, but somehow her mother Melania (née Homezurashvili) ensured that Keke learned to read and write.
  At 14, Keke met and married Besarion Jughashvili. Her first two children died shortly after birth—Mikhail in 1876 and Georgy the following year from measles. Her third son (and last child), Joseph, was born on December 18, 1878 and survived. Nicknamed "Soso", Joseph grew up in a violent home: his father ("Beso") was incessantly drunk and beat his mother and him frequently. Once Joseph was beaten so hard there was blood in his urine for just over a week. When Stalin's father beat Keke, Keke occasionally fought back. Once, a blood soaked Joseph ran to the Gori police chief Davrichewy crying: "Help! Come quickly! He's killing my mother!" Joseph even threw a knife at his father while defending his mother. Before Joseph was 10, Beso left the family home (some sources say he was thrown out by his wife). To support herself and her son, Keke took on any menial job available; mainly housework, sewing and laundering.^{[citation needed]} They had 9 homes in the next decade, she returned once when Beso promised to improve, she soon left to live with Father Charkviani, one of Stalin's rumoured fathers.
  
  wn.com/Ketevan_Geladze
• 
  Konstantin Kuzakov
  Konstantin Stepanovich Kuzakov (1911-1996) (Russian: Константин Степанович Кузаков) was possibly the illegitimate second child of Joseph Stalin. Konstantin's mother was Maria Kuzakova, who was Stalin's landlady during his 1911 exile in Solvychegodsk, with whom he had an affair. His mother was still pregnant when Stalin left his exile.
  Konstantin was enrolled into Leningrad University, possibly with the discreet help of his father. In 1932, the NKVD forced him to sign a statement promising never to reveal the truth of his parentage.
  For a while, he taught philosophy at the Leningrad Military Mechanical Institute. Afterward, he got a job in the Central Committee's apparat in Moscow. He served as a colonel during World War II. In 1947, while working for Andrei Zhdanov, a very close ally of Stalin, he and his deputy were accused of being American spies. While he was never officially introduced to his possible father, Konstantin claimed that on one occasion while working in the Kremlin he said, "Stalin stopped and looked at me and I felt he wanted to tell me something. I wanted to rush to him, but something stopped me. He waved his pipe and moved on." Although Stalin prevented his arrest, he was nonetheless dismissed from the Communist Party.
  
  wn.com/Konstantin_Kuzakov
• 
  Kronid Lyubarsky
  Kronid Arkadyevich Lyubarsky (Russian: Крони́д Арка́дьевич Люба́рский; April 4, 1934 — May 23, 1996) was a Russian journalist, dissident, human rights activist and political prisoner.
  Born in the city of Pskov, Russia, on April 4, 1934, Lyubarsky graduated from Moscow University in 1956 and worked as an astrophysicist at the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His academic work included studies on meteors and space biology. He was also working in the Soviet program of interplanetary exploration of Mars. He authored several books on astrobiology and translated scientific works into Russian, including books by Fred Hoyle.
  In the mid-1960s, he became active in the civil rights movement and became an important publisher of samizdat publications, including the famous Chronicle of Current Events.
  On January 14, 1972, his apartment was searched by the police and more than 600 documents, manuscripts and books were confiscated. The search was followed by his arrest on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda three days later. Following his conviction on October 30, 1972, Lyubarsky spent the next five years in various labor camps and prisons in Mordovia, as well as Vladimir Central Prison.
  
  wn.com/Kronid_Lyubarsky
• 
  Lavrentiy Beria
  Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (Georgian: ლავრენტი პავლეს ძე ბერია, Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria; Russian: Лавре́нтий Па́влович Бе́рия; 29 March 1899 – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician, Marshal of the Soviet Union and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years (1946–1953).
  Beria was the longest lived and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after World War II. He simultaneously administered vast sections of the Soviet state and served as de facto Marshal of the Soviet Union in command of the NKVD field units responsible for anti-partisan operations on the Eastern Front during World War II, as well as for acting as barrier troops and the apprehension of thousands of "turncoats, deserters, cowards and suspected malingerers". Beria administered the vast expansion of the Gulag labor camps and was primarily responsible for overseeing the secret defense institutions known as sharashkas, critical to the war effort. He also played the decisive role in coordinating the Soviet partisans, developing an impressive intelligence and sabotage network behind German lines. He attended the Yalta Conference with Stalin, who introduced him to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as "our Himmler". After the war, he organized the communist takeover of the countries of Central Europe and Eastern Europe. Beria's uncompromising ruthlessness in his duties and skill at producing results culminated in his success in overseeing the Soviet atomic bomb project. Stalin gave it absolute priority and the project was completed in under five years in no small part due to Soviet espionage against the West organized by Beria's NKVD.
  
  wn.com/Lavrentiy_Beria
• Le Duc Tho
  Lê Đức Thọ ( listen; October 14, 1911 – October 13, 1990), born Phan Đình Khải in Ha Nam province, was a Vietnamese revolutionary, general, diplomat, and politician, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1973, although he declined it.
  In 1930, Tho helped found the Indochinese Communist Party. French colonial authorities imprisoned him from 1930 to 1936 and again from 1939 to 1944. After his release in 1945, he helped lead the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese independence movement, against the French, until the Geneva Accords were signed in 1954. He then joined the Lao Dong Politburo of the Vietnam Workers' Party in 1955, now the Communist Party of Vietnam. Tho oversaw the Communist insurgency that began in 1956 against the South Vietnamese government.
  From 1978 to 1982 Tho was named by Hanoi to act as chief advisor to the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (FUNSK) and later to the nascent People's Republic of Kampuchea. Lê Đức Thọ's mission was to ensure that Khmer nationalism would not override Vietnam's interests in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge was overthrown.
  
  wn.com/Le_Duc_Tho
• 
  Leonid Borodin
  Leonid Ivanovich Borodin (Russian: Леони́д Ива́нович Бороди́н) (14 April 1938 – 25 November 2011) was a Russian novelist and journalist.
  Born in Irkutsk, Borodin was a Christian and a Soviet dissident. In the 1960s he belonged to the anti-Communist All-Russian Social-Christian Union. He was arrested and imprisoned in the 'strict regime' Camp 17 in 1967, and went on hunger strike there with Yuli Daniel and Aleksandr Ginzburg in 1969. After his release in 1973, Borodin’s works were smuggled out of the Soviet Union. The publication in English translation of The Story of a Strange Time led to his arrest in 1982 on charges of 'anti-Soviet propaganda'. He was sentenced to 10 years' hard labour in Perm-36 Maximum Security Camp (ITK-6), as well as five years' internal exile. Released after four years, in the perestroika era, Borodin was allowed to visit the west with his wife.
  Borodin was the subject and first-person narrator of the 2001 film Leonid Borodin: Looking through the Years by Viacheslav Novikov.
  
  wn.com/Leonid_Borodin
• 
  Les Tanyuk
  Leonid (Les) Stepanovych Tanyuk (Ukrainian: Леонід (Лесь) Танюк, b. August 7, 1938, Zhukyn, Kiev Oblast) is a Ukrainian theatre and film director and formerly a dissident and the head of the Club of Creative Youth.
  Tanyuk was born in Zhukyn, Kiev Oblast, the son of Stephen Samiylovych, a teacher of Ukrainian language and literatures. His mother was Natalya Mykolayivna, also a teacher of languages. After spending some of his childhood in a Nazi concentration camp, he and his family returned to Ukraine, but they were not allowed to live in Kiev. They returned to his fathers hometown of Lutsk.
  He studied at the National University of Theatre, Film and TV in Kiev.
  In 1959, Tanyuk was one of the founders of the Club of Creative Youth (Клуб творчої молоді) in Kiev. He was elected the clubs first president. Under his leadership, the group was active in promoting Ukrainian culture and protesting Soviet totalitarianism. He and other members were made demands to the Soviet authorities to preserve Churches and other monuments that faced destruction. In 1962, he and fellow members Vasyl Symonenko and Alla Horska were sent to investigate information about mass graves in Bykivnia from the 1930s terror implemented by Joseph Stalin. After questioning the locals, they wrote a letter to the authorities demanding an investigation into the executions and the burials. It was at this point that the Soviets began to exert strong pressure on the club, and Tanyuk was removed as president, though he effectively continued to lead the organization until it was closed in 1964.
  
  wn.com/Les_Tanyuk
• 
  Lester B. Pearson
  Lester Bowles "Mike" Pearson, PC, OM, CC, OBE (23 April 1897 – 27 December 1972) was a Canadian professor, historian, civil servant, statesman, diplomat, and politician, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for organizing the United Nations Emergency Force to resolve the Suez Canal Crisis. He was the 14th Prime Minister of Canada from 22 April 1963 to 20 April 1968, as the head of two back-to-back minority governments following elections in 1963 and 1965.
  During Pearson's time as Prime Minister, his minority government introduced universal health care, student loans, the Canada Pension Plan, the Order of Canada, and the current Canadian flag. During his tenure, Prime Minister Pearson also convened the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. With these accomplishments, together with his ground-breaking work at the United Nations and in international diplomacy, Pearson is generally considered among the most influential Canadians of the 20th century.
  Pearson was born in the town of Newtonbrook (now part of Toronto), the son of Annie Sarah (née Bowles) and Edwin Arthur Pearson, a Methodist (later United Church of Canada) minister. He was brother to Vaughan Whitier Pearson and Marmaduke Pearson. He graduated from Hamilton Collegiate Institute in Hamilton, Ontario in 1913 at the age of 16. Later that same year, he entered Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where he lived in residence in Gate House and shared a room with his brother Duke. While at the University of Toronto, he joined the Delta Upsilon Fraternity. He was subsequently elected to the Pi Gamma Mu social science honour society's chapter at the University of Toronto for his outstanding scholastic performance in history and sociology.
  
  wn.com/Lester_B._Pearson
• 
  Lev Artsimovich
  Lev Andreevich Artsimovich (Арцимович, Лев Андреевич in Russian; also transliterated Arzimowitsch) (February 25, 1909 (NS) – March 1, 1973) was a Soviet physicist, academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1953), member of the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (since 1957), and Hero of Socialist Labor (1969).
  Artsimovich worked on the field of nuclear fusion and plasma physics.
  From 1930 to 1944 he worked at the Ioffe Institute, and in 1944 he joined the "Laboratory number 2" (currently Kurchatov Institute) for work on the Soviet atomic bomb project. From 1951 to his death in 1973, he was the head of the Soviet fusion power program.
  He was known as "the father of the Tokamak", a special concept for a fusion reactor. Once Arzimowitsch was asked when the first thermonuclear reactor would start its work. His replied: "When the mankind's need it, maybe a short time before that."
  Under his guidance a thermonuclear fusion reaction was produced in the laboratory for the first time.
  From 1963 to 1973 he was the vice-chairman of the Soviet Pugwash Committee and the chairman of the National Committee of Soviet Physicists.
  
  wn.com/Lev_Artsimovich
• 
  Lev Chernyi
  Pável Dimítrievich Turchanínov (Russian: Павел Дмитриевич Турчанинов [] ( listen)) (died September 21, 1921), known by the pseudonym Lev Chernyi (Лев Чёрный [] ( listen)), was a Russian anarchist theorist, activist and poet, and a leading figure of the Third Russian Revolution. His early thought was individualist, rejecting anarcho-communism as a threat to individual liberty. In 1917, Chernyi was released from his political imprisonment by the Imperial Russian regime, and swiftly became one of the leading figures in Russian anarchism. After strongly denouncing the new Bolshevik government in various anarchist publications and joining several underground resistance movements, Chernyi was arrested by the Cheka on a charge of counterfeiting and in 1921 was executed without trial.
  Chernyi was born Pável Dimítrievich Turchanínov to an army colonel father. A "déclassé intellectual" whom anarchist historian Paul Avrich compares with Volin, Chernyi advocated a Nietzschean overthrow of the values of bourgeois Russian society, and rejected the voluntary communes of anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin as a threat to the freedom of the individual. Chernyi advocated the "free association of independent individuals" in a book titled Associational Anarchism and published in 1907. Scholars including Avrich and Allan Antliff have interpreted this vision of society to have been greatly influenced by the individualist anarchists Max Stirner, and Benjamin Tucker. Subsequent to the book's publication, Chernyi was imprisoned in Siberia under the Russian Czarist regime for his revolutionary activities.
  
  wn.com/Lev_Chernyi
• 
  Lev Kopelev
  Lev Zalmanovich Kopelev (also Lev Zinovevich Kopelev; Russian: Лев Залма́нович Ко́пелев or Лев Зино́вьевич Ко́пелев, German spelling Lew Kopelew: April 9, 1912 – June 18, 1997) was a Soviet author and a dissident.
  Kopelev was born in Kiev, Ukraine, to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1926, his family moved to Kharkov. While a student at Kharkov State University in the philosophy faculty, Kopelev began writing in the Russian and Ukrainian languages; some of his articles were published in the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
  An idealist Communist and active Bolshevik, he was first arrested in March 1929 for "consorting with the Bukharinist and Trotskyist opposition," and spent ten days in prison.
  Later, he worked as an editor of radio news broadcasts at a locomotive factory. In 1932, as a correspondent, Kopelev witnessed the NKVD's forced grain requisitioning and the dekulakization. Later, he described the Holodomor in his memoirs The Education of a True Believer. Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow later quoted him directly. (see also Collectivisation in the USSR).
  
  wn.com/Lev_Kopelev
• 
  Lev Navrozov
  Lev Navrozov (born 1928 in Moscow) is a Russian author, historian and polemicist and father of poet Andrei Navrozov. A leading translator of Russian texts into English under the Soviet regime, Navrozov emigrated to the United States in 1972, where he published a best-selling memoir, The Education of Lev Navrozov, and became a prominent Russian dissident.
  Navrozov was born to playwright Andrei Navrozov (after whom his son was named), a founding member of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who volunteered in World War II and was killed in action in 1941. After completing the course at Moscow Power Engineering Institute, did not take the degree, switching to the exclusive Referent Faculty of the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, a faculty created by Joseph Stalin's personal order to produce a new generation of experts with a superior knowledge of Western languages and cultures. On graduation in 1953 was offered a "promising position" at the Soviet Embassy in London, with the attendant obligation to join the Communist Party. Declined both offers, and thenceforth refused all government posts or academic affiliations as a matter of principle. Regarded as a unique expert on the English-speaking countries, but only ever worked as a freelance.
  
  wn.com/Lev_Navrozov
• 
  Levko Lukyanenko
  Levko Lukyanenko (Ukrainian: Лук'яненко Левко Григорович); (sometimes written as Levko Lukianenko) is a Ukrainian politician, and Soviet dissident and Hero of Ukraine.
  Lukyanenko was born on 24 August 1928 in the Khrypivka village of Chernihiv Oblast, in the USSR. Following graduation from the Law Department of Moscow State University and after serving in the Russian army, he worked in district party committees in Lviv Oblast.
  In 1959 in the time of the Khrushchev Thaw, he organized a dissident movement called the Ukrainian Workers and Peasants Union; he defended the right of secession of Ukraine from the rest of Soviet Union, a right theoretically granted by the 1936 Soviet Constitution. In 1961 he was arrested, tried, and was given the capital punishment, which was later commuted to 15 years in a prison camp. In 1976 he became a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. In 1977 he was arrested again and was sentenced to 10 years in a camp and 5 years of internal exile.
  Lukyanenko was released in the wave of Gorbachev's perestroika, and was elected a member of Ukrainian parliament in 1990. He was the co-author of Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine and the author of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine adopted in 1991.
  
  wn.com/Levko_Lukyanenko
• 
  Lina Kostenko
  Lina Kostenko (Ukrainian: Ліна Василівна Костенко, born on March 19, 1930 in Rzhyshchiv, Kiev Oblast, in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union) is a Ukrainian poet and writer, recipient of the Shevchenko Award (1987).
  Kostenko is a leading representative of Ukrainian poets of the sixties known as Shestydesiantnyky (dissidents). This group started publishing during the 1950s and reached its apex during the early 1960s. It was during the 1950s in which Kostenko published her first poems in major Ukrainian periodicals.
  Kostenko was born in a family of teachers. In 1936, she moved from Rzhyshchiv to Kiev, where she finished her secondary education.
  Lina graduated with distinction from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow in 1956. Following her graduation she published three collections of poetry in 1957, 1958, and 1961. These books became immensely popular among her Ukrainian readers, however they also forced her into publication silence as she was unwilling to submit to Soviet authorities.
  
  wn.com/Lina_Kostenko
• 
  Linus Pauling
  Linus Carl Pauling (February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century. Pauling was among the first scientists to work in the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology.
  Pauling is one of only four individuals to have won more than one Nobel Prize. He is one of only two people awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields (the Chemistry and Peace prizes), the other being Marie Curie (the Chemistry and Physics prizes), and the only person awarded two unshared prizes.
  Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon, as the first-born child of Herman Henry William Pauling (1876–1910) and Lucy Isabelle "Belle" Darling (1881–1926). He was named "Linus Carl," in honor of Lucy's father, Linus, and Herman's father, Carl. Herman and Lucy – then 23 and 18 years old, respectively – had met at a dinner party in Condon. Six months later, the two were married.
  
  wn.com/Linus_Pauling
• 
  Lydia Chukovskaya
  Lydia Korneievna Chukovskaya (Russian: Ли́дия Корне́евна Чуко́вская; IPA: [ˈlʲidʲɪjə kɐrˈnʲejɪvnə t͡ɕʊˈkofskəjə] ( listen); 24 March [O.S. 11 March] 1907 – February 8, 1996) was a Soviet writer and poet. Her deeply personal writings reflect the human cost of Soviet totalitarianism, and she devoted much of her career to defending dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. She was herself the daughter of the celebrated children's writer Korney Chukovsky, wife of the scientist Matvei Bronstein, and close associate and chronicler of the poet Anna Akhmatova.
  Chukovskaya was born in 1907 in Helsingfors (present-day Helsinki) in the Grand Duchy of Finland, then a part of the Russian Empire. Her father was Korney Chukovsky, a poet who is regarded today as perhaps the best-loved children's writer in Russian literature.
  She grew up in St. Petersburg, the former capital of the empire torn by war and revolution. Chukovsky recorded that his daughter would muse on the problem of social justice while she was still a little girl. But Lydia's greatest passion was literature, especially poetry. It could hardly have been otherwise, given her pedigree and circumstances — their house was frequently visited by leading members of the Russian literati, such as Alexander Blok, Nikolay Gumilyov and Akhmatova. The city was also home to the country's finest artists — Lydia saw Chaliapin perform at the opera, for instance, and also met the painter Ilya Repin.
  
  wn.com/Lydia_Chukovskaya
• 
  Léon Jouhaux
  Léon Jouhaux (July 1, 1879, Pantin, Seine-Saint-Denis – April 28, 1954) was a French trade union leader who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951.
  Jouhaux's father worked in a match factory in Aubervilliers. His secondary schooling ended when his father's earnings were stopped by a strike. He gained employment at the factory at age sixteen and immediately became an important part of the union. In 1900, Jouhaux joined a strike against the use of the white phosphorus that blinded his father, was dismissed, and worked at a succession of jobs until union influence saw him reinstated.
  In 1906, he was elected by the local union as a representative to the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), where his abilities saw him quickly rise through the ranks of organized labour. By 1909 he became interim treasurer, and shortly afterwards became secretary-general of the organization, which he held until 1947. His goals as a trade unionist were the familiar ones of the early labour movement — the eight hour day, the right to union representation and collective bargaining, and paid holidays. During the Popular Front, the 1936 Matignon Agreement, to which he was a signatory, awarded many of these rights to French workers.
  
  wn.com/Léon_Jouhaux
• Marcel Dekker
  Marcel Dekker was a well-known journal and encyclopedia publishing company with editorial boards found in New York, New York. Dekker encyclopedias are now published by CRC Press, part of the Taylor and Francis publishing group.
  Initially a textbook publisher, they added journal publishing in the 1970s, and encyclopedia publishing in the early 1980s. They were purchased by Taylor and Francis in 2003. At that time, they published 78 journals and 300 new books annually. As of 2008, they have a total of 26 encyclopedias available. These encyclopedias deal with scientific issues such as agricultural engineering, chemistry, agronomy, and library science.
  
  wn.com/Marcel_Dekker
• 
  Merab Kostava
  Merab Kostava (Georgian: მერაბ კოსტავა) (May 26, 1939–October 13, 1989) was a Georgian dissident, musician and poet; one of the leaders of the National-Liberation movement in Georgia. He was born in 1939 in Tbilisi, of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR (the current capital of Georgia).
  In 1954, Kostava and Zviad Gamsakhurdia founded the Georgian youth underground organization "Gorgasliani". Between 1956 and 1958 Kostava, together with Gamsakhurdia and several other members of this organization were jailed by the KGB for "anti-Soviet activity." The charges against Kostava and Gamsakhurdia included the dissemination of anti-communist literature and proclamations.
  Kostava graduated from the Tbilisi State Conservatoire in 1962. From 1962-1977 he was a teacher at a local music school in Tbilisi.
  In 1973, Kostava and Gamsakhurdia established the Initiative Group for defence of Human Rights. In 1976 Kostava co-founded the Georgian Helsinki Group (later renamed the Georgian Helsinki Union in 1989). From 1976-1977 and 1987-1989 Kostava was a member of the Governing Board of the abovementioned human rights organization. After 1975 Kostava was a member of Amnesty International.
  
  wn.com/Merab_Kostava
• 
  Mikhail Gorbachev
  Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Russian: Михаи́л Серге́евич Горбачёв, tr. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov; IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈil sʲɪrˈɡʲejəvʲɪtɕ ɡərbɐˈtɕof] ( listen); born 2 March 1931) is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the Soviet Union, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991. He was the only general secretary in the history of the Soviet Union to have been born during the Communist rule.
  Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant Ukrainian–Russian family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While he was at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and soon became very active within it. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the deaths of Soviet Leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level.
  
  wn.com/Mikhail_Gorbachev
• 
  Moysey Fishbein
  Moysey (Moses) Fishbeyn (Ukrainian: Мойсей Абрамович Фішбейн) is an influential Ukrainian poet and translator of Jewish origin. He was born in 1946 in Chernivtsi, in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union (in present-day Ukraine).
  Moysey Fishbeyn graduated in philology in 1976 from Kiev Pedagogical Institute. He later was an editor at the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia. The early works of the young poet were noted and supported by famous Ukrainian author Mykola Bazhan, who played a significant role in promoting Fishbeyn's first publications.
  In 1979 Fishbeyn was forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel, for his part in the dissident movement. The limited opportunities for a Ukrainian poet in Israel forced him to emigrate again, to Germany. There Fishbein worked as a journalist at the Ukrainian diaspora magazine "Suchasnist" ("Our times"), Ukrainian and Russian services of Radio Liberty.
  After the collapse of the USSR, the poet returned to Ukraine.
  Moysey Fishbeyn considers himself to be a Ukrainian nationalist and takes active part in the social and political life of Ukraine. His speech on the requiem-meeting about Holodomor tragedy in 2006 was often cited among the Ukrainians. In March, 2008, the poet received special award from Head of Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church for "zeal for God’s Glory and his great contribution in informing the public of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi’s and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church clergy’s sacrificial efforts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust."
  
  wn.com/Moysey_Fishbein
• 
  Mykola Horbal
  Mykola Andriyovych Horbal (Ukrainian: Микола Андрійович Горбаль; born September 10, 1940) is a well-known Ukrainian dissident, human right activists, member of parliament of Ukraine, poet, and member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group
  Mykola Horbal was born on September 10, 1940, in the village of Volovets in Ukrainian region of Lemkivshchyna (Gorlice municipality, Krakow woiwodship - now Poland). In 1947, his family was moved to Ukraine, and they settled in the village of Letyache (Ternopil oblast).
  From 1963 to 1970, Horbal worked as a music teacher. During this period, he first started creating poetry.
  On November 24, 1970, Horbal was arrested by the KGB and charged with Anti Soviet Agitation and Propaganda. He was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment and 2 years exile in Siberia.
  On release from prison and return to Ukraine, Horbal settled in Kiev, where he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group which had formed in 1976. All of the members of the group were arrested, and on October 23, 1979, Horbal was arrested and sentenced to 5 years hard labour.
  
  wn.com/Mykola_Horbal
• 
  Mykola Rudenko
  Mykola Danylovych Rudenko (Ukrainian: Микола Данилович Руденко; 12 December 1920, Yurivka, Luhansk oblast – 1 April 2004, Kiev) was a Ukrainian poet, writer, philosopher, Soviet dissident and human rights activist. He was the founder of the Ukrainian Helsinki group, and was twice arrested for his dissident activities.
  Rudenko was seven years old when his father died in a mining accident. With his mother and two siblings, he worked on the family farm until they were forced to give their land during the process of collectivization. He was traumatized by the Holodomor, and remarked that it remained with him his entire life. He began to write as a child, and had some of his poems published by the local newspapers. His writing earned him a scholarship to Kiev State University in 1939. He only studied for two months until he was called in to the Red Army.
  During the war Rudenko sustained serious injuries. On 4 October 1941 near Leningrad he was wounded by an exploding bullet, which shattered bones of the pelvis and entered his spine. He spent over a year in the hospital. However, he was able to walk again. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star, of the Great Patriotic War 1st class, and six other medals.
  
  wn.com/Mykola_Rudenko
• 
  Myroslav Marynovych
  Myroslav Frankovych Marynovych (Ukrainian: Мирослав Франкович Маринович), b. January 4, 1949, is the vice-rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, founder of Amnesty International Ukraine, and a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group
  Marynovych was born on January 4, 1949, in the village of Komarovychi, in the Lviv Oblast (at the time, it was Drohobych Oblast.
  His grandfather was a priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and his family was very religious. He attended the Lviv Polytechnical Institute, where he spoke out against the Soviet regime which did not uphold the ideals of Communism. Afterwards he was conscripted into Soviet Army where he served 1973-1974.
  In 1976, Manynovych met Mykola Matusevych, and became a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Because of his membership, Marynovych was arrested on April 23, 1977, for Anti Soviet Agitation and Propaganda. The trial and sentencing lasted 11 months, and he was finally convicted and sentenced to the maximum term - 7 years of hard labour and 5 years in exile.
  
  wn.com/Myroslav_Marynovych
• 
  Nadezhda Mandelstam
  Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (Russian: Наде́жда Я́ковлевна Мандельшта́м, née Khazina; 30 October [O.S. 18 October] 1899 – 29 December 1980) was a Russian writer and educator, and the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in a transit camp to the gulag of Siberia. She wrote two memoirs about their lives together and the repressive Stalinist regime: Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), both first published in the West in English, translated by Max Hayward.
  Of these books the critic Clive James has written:
  "Hope Against Hope puts her at the centre of the liberal resistance under the Soviet Union. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of biographical narrative and social analysis it is mainly the story of the terrible last years of persecution and torment before the poet [her husband Osip] was murdered. The sequel, Hope Abandoned, is about the author's personal fate, and is in some ways even more terrible, because, as the title implies, it is more about horror as a way of life than as an interruption to normal expectancy. [The two books] were key chapters in the new bible that the twentieth century had written for us."
  
  wn.com/Nadezhda_Mandelstam
• 
  Nadiya Svitlychna
  Nadiya Oleksiyivna Svitlychna (Ukrainian: Світлична Надія Олексіївна, born November 8, 1939 in the village of Polovynkyno, Starobilsk district, Luhansk region — died August 8, 2006 in Irvington, New Jersey, USA) was a Ukrainian dissident and human rights activist, and an active member of the Ukrainian Helsinki group. She was a writer and editor and for a time was a political prisoner of the Soviet regime.
  Svitlychna was praised by Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko, who stated that "her views, the way she lived her life and passed along values to the next generation, have left footsteps to follow for millions of contemporary Ukrainian patriots."
  After emigrating to the United States in November 1978 she became a member, along with General Petro Grigorenko and Leonid Plyushch (and later others) of the External Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and continued her work in advocating human and national rights in Ukraine and protesting Soviet violations of the Helsinki Accords.
  
  wn.com/Nadiya_Svitlychna
• 
  Natan Sharansky
  Natan Sharansky (born 20 January 1948) (Hebrew: נתן שרנסקי‎, (Ukrainian: Натан Щаранський, Russian: Натан Щаранский) is a former Soviet refusenik and prisoner, Israeli politician, human rights activist and author.
  Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky (Ukrainian: Анатолій Борисович Щаранський, Russian: Анатолий Борисович Щаранский) (later Natan Sharansky) was born in Stalino, Soviet Union on 20 January 1948 to a Jewish family. He graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. As a child, he was a chess prodigy. He performed in simultaneous and blindfold displays, usually against adults. At the age of 15, he won the championship in his native Donetsk. When incarcerated in solitary confinement, he claims to have maintained his sanity by playing chess against himself in his mind. Sharansky beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a simultaneous exhibition in Israel in 1996.
  Natan Sharansky is married to Avital Sharansky and has two daughters, Rachel and Hannah. In the Soviet Union, his marriage application to Avital was denied by the authorities. They were married in a Moscow synagogue in a ceremony not recognized by the government, as USSR only recognized civil marriage and not church marriage.
  
  wn.com/Natan_Sharansky
• 
  Naum Meiman
  Naum S. Meiman (Russian: Нау́м Ната́нович Ме́йман) (1911, Baranovichi — 2001, Tel-Aviv) was a Soviet mathematician, and dissident. He is known for his work in complex analysis, partial differential equations, and mathematical physics, as well as for his dissident activity, in particular, for being a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
  In 1932 he graduated Kazan State University as an extern. In 1937 being only 26 years old, he submitted his Ph.D. under the supervision of Nikolai Chebotaryov, and was immediately awarded the degree Doktor nauk. In 1939 he became a full professor in Kazan State University.
  He worked for two years in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Kharkiv, where he became friends with Lev Landau with whom he collaborated for many years. After the Second World War, he went to Moscow and worked in Institute for Physical Problems, where he was a head of the mathematics lab. Then he worked in the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics. In 1953, he was awarded a Stalin prize for his work in theoretical physics. He made important contributions into the development of nuclear weapons in the USSR.
  
  wn.com/Naum_Meiman
• 
  Nikita Khrushchev
  Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (April 15 [O.S. April 3] 1894, – September 11, 1971) led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev was responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. Khrushchev's party colleagues removed him from power in 1964, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier.
  Khrushchev was born in the Russian village of Kalinovka in 1894, close to the present-day border between Russia and Ukraine. He was employed as a metalworker in his youth, and during the Russian Civil War was a political commissar. With the help of Lazar Kaganovich, he worked his way up the Soviet hierarchy. He supported Joseph Stalin's purges, and approved thousands of arrests. In 1939, Stalin sent him to govern Ukraine, and he continued the purges there. During what was known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War (Eastern Front of World War II), Khrushchev was again a commissar, serving as an intermediary between Stalin and his generals. Khrushchev was present at the bloody defense of Stalingrad, a fact he took great pride in throughout his life. After the war, he returned to Ukraine before being recalled to Moscow as one of Stalin's close advisers.
  
  wn.com/Nikita_Khrushchev
• Nikolaus Riehl
  Nikolaus Riehl (1901 in Saint Petersburg, Russia – 1990) was a German industrial nuclear chemist. He was head of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft. When the Russians entered Berlin near the end of World War II, he was invited to the Soviet Union, where he stayed for 10 years. For his work on the Soviet atomic bomb project, he was awarded a Stalin Prize, Lenin Prize, and Order of the Red Banner of Labor. When he was repatriated to Germany in 1955, he chose to go to West Germany, where he joined Heinz Maier-Leibnitz on his nuclear reactor staff at Technische Hochschule München (THM); Riehl made contributions to the nuclear facility Forschungsreaktor München (FRM). In 1961 he became an ordinarius professor of technical physics at THM and concentrated his research activities on solid state physics, especially the physics of ice and the optical spectroscopy of solids.
  Riehl was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1901. His mother was Russian and his father was a professional German engineer employed by Siemens and Halske. With this background, Riehl spoke fluent German and Russian. From 1920 to 1927, he was educated at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University and Humboldt University of Berlin. He received his doctorate in nuclear chemistry from the University of Berlin in 1927, under the guidance of the nuclear physicist Lise Meitner and the nuclear chemist Otto Hahn; his thesis topic was on Geiger-Müller counters for beta ray spectroscopy.
  
  wn.com/Nikolaus_Riehl
• Nikolay Dollezhal
  Nikolay Antonovich Dollezhal (October 27, 1899 – November 20, 2000) was a Soviet mechanical engineer, a key figure in Soviet atomic bomb project and chief designer of nuclear reactors from the first plutonium production reactor to the RBMK.
  Born in Omelnik, Zaporizhia Oblast, Dollezhal graduated MVTU in 1923. Until 1930, he worked in various design bureaus, but after a tour of Europe in 1929 was arrested and spent a year and a half in prison, before being acquitted in January 1932. In 1932-1943 he headed important manufacturing plants in Kiev, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk.
  In 1943, Dollezhal was appointed to lead the new Institute of Chemical Machinery in Moscow. In 1946, the Institute was assigned to the Soviet atomic project; his first reactors, graphite moderated types A and AI, produced Soviet plutonium used in Joe 1 nuclear test of 1949 and subsequent nuclear weapons deployment. After 1950, Dollezhal focused on nuclear marine propulsion. His first proposal, Type AM, was not practical for marine uses but became the core of the first nuclear power plant in Obninsk, commissioned in 1954. In the same year, he produced a viable draft of a light water submarine reactor.
  
  wn.com/Nikolay_Dollezhal
• 
  Norman Borlaug
  Norman Ernest Borlaug (March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009) was an American agronomist, humanitarian, and Nobel laureate who has been called "the father of the Green Revolution". Borlaug was one of six people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian honor.
  Borlaug received his Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties.
  During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.
  
  wn.com/Norman_Borlaug
• 
  Oleksa Hirnyk
  Oleksa Mykolajovyč Hirnyk (Ukrainian: Олекса Миколайович Гiрник) (March 27, 1912 - January 21, 1978) was a Ukrainian Soviet dissident, an engineer by profession, who burned himself to death as an act of protest against Soviet suppression of the Ukrainian language, culture and history. The act was quickly covered up by the Soviet authorities and remained unknown to general populace for decades.
  Hirnyk was born on March 28, 1912 in the village of Bohorodchany, then Austria-ruled Galicia, currently in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast (province) in western Ukraine. He came from a family of boykos with a long background of preserving Ukrainian culture and heritage, his grandfather was the founder of the Prosvita Society in Bohorodchany, a society that promoted Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian language.
  
  wn.com/Oleksa_Hirnyk
• 
  Osip Mandelstam
  Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (Russian: О́сип Эми́льевич Мандельшта́м; IPA: [ˈosʲɪp ɪˈmʲilʲjɪvʲɪt͡ɕ məndʲɪlʲˈʂtam]; January 15 [O.S. January 3] 1891 – December 27, 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp in Siberia. He died that year at a transit camp.
  Mandelstam was born in Warsaw (then part of the Russian Empire) to a wealthy Polish Jewish family. His father, a leather merchant by trade, was able to receive a dispensation freeing the family from the pale of settlement and, soon after Osip's birth, they moved to Saint Petersburg. In 1900, Mandelstam entered the prestigious Tenishevsky School. The writer Vladimir Nabokov and other significant figures of Russian and Soviet culture have been among its alumni. His first poems were printed in 1907 in the school's almanac.
  
  wn.com/Osip_Mandelstam
• 
  Paruyr Hayrikyan
  Paruyr Hayrikyan (also known as Paruir Airikian; born July 5, 1949) is an Armenian politician and former Soviet dissident.
  In Soviet times, he was placed several times in penal labor camps for his activiies and eventually stripped of Soviet citizenship and exiled to Ethiopia after his accusations of Soviet leadership in the instigation of Sumgait pogroms of Armenian population. In Addis Ababa he applied for and was granted asylum by the United States, where he remained for some time. In 1990, following pressure of a group of United States senators led by Bob Dole, Mikhail Gorbachev restored Hayrikyan's citizenship and allowed him to return. Since then Hayrikyan has taken an active part in Armenian political life.
  Paruyr Hayrikyan from 1967 a member National United Party (NUP) and then head of the (NUP) from 1968. Afterwards in 1987 Paruyr Hayrikyan bacame leader and founder of the Union for National Self-Determination (UNSD) political party. P. Hayrikyan is known and acknowledged as the founder and director of the demctratic movements in the Soviet Union. He is also a writer and a composer.
  
  wn.com/Paruyr_Hayrikyan
• Pavel Fitin
  Lieutenant General Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin (ru: Павел Михайлович Фитин) (1907 Ozhogino, Tobolsk guberniya, Russian Empire - 24 December 1971, Moscow, Soviet Union) was a Soviet intelligence officer and was the director of Soviet intelligence during World War II, identified in the Venona cables under the code name "Viktor."
  Fitin graduated from a program in agricultural engineering studies at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in 1932 after which he served in the Red Army, then became an editor for the State Publishing House of Agricultural Literature. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) selected him for a special course in foreign intelligence.
  Fitin became deputy chief of the NKVD's foreign intelligence in 1938, then a year later at the age of thirty-one became chief. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service credits Fitin with rebuilding the depleted foreign intelligence department after Stalin's Great Terror. Fitin also is credited with providing ample warning of the German Invasion of 22 June 1941 that began the German-Soviet War. Only the actual invasion saved Fitin from execution for providing the head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, with information General Secretary of the CPSU, Joseph Stalin did not want to believe. Beria retained Fitin as chief of foreign intelligence until the war ended but demoted him.
  
  wn.com/Pavel_Fitin
• 
  Pavel Litvinov
  Pavel Litvinov (Russian: Павел Михайлович Литвинов, born 1940) is a Russian physicist, writer, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident. He is the grandson of Maxim Litvinov, Joseph Stalin's foreign minister during the 1930s, and as such was born and raised amongst the Soviet elite. As a schoolboy, he was devoted to the cult of Stalin, and was tapped, unsuccessfully, by the KGB to report on his parents Flora and Misha Litvinov (a story that is related by the journalist David Remnick in his book Lenin's Tomb).
  After Stalin's death in 1953 and the return of family friends from the labour camps, Pavel grew disillusioned with the Soviet system. He had a short-lived marriage when he was 17. While in his 20s, he became a physics teacher at the Institute for Chemical Technology and fell in with a group of intellectuals who were following the show-trials of the dissidents Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. His immersion in samizdat literature at this time brought him into contact with the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov and Robert Conquest.
  
  wn.com/Pavel_Litvinov
• 
  Pavel Sudoplatov
  Lieutenant General Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov (Пáвел Aнатóльевич Cудоплáтов) (July 7, 1907 – September 26, 1996) was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union who rose to the rank of lieutenant general. He was involved in several famous episodes, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the Soviet espionage program which obtained information about the atomic bomb from the Manhattan Project, and Operation Scherhorn, a Soviet deception operation against the Germans in 1944. His autobiography, Special Tasks, made him well-known outside the USSR, and provided a detailed look at Soviet intelligence and Soviet internal politics during his years at the top.
  He was born in Melitopol, in Eastern Ukraine, to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father. In 1919 at the age of 12 he left home and joined a Red Army regiment near Melitopol and was assigned to a company flags. He joined the Cheka in 1921, at the age of fourteen, and was promoted to the Secret Political Department of the Ukrainian State Political Directorate (OGPU) in 1927.
  
  wn.com/Pavel_Sudoplatov
• Perseus (spy)
  Perseus was the codename of a possible Soviet spy alleged to have breached U.S. national security at Los Alamos during the Manhattan project. This name is also given to a spy at White Sands Missile Range, located further south near Las Cruces, New Mexico. Evidence for his or her existence is based on a few references in KGB archives opened (and later closed) to researchers in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. There are also a few references to Perseus in the VENONA decrypts as PERS. The identity of this person, or even whether or not they actually existed, is unknown, and many of the facts in the matter are questionable.
  The first person to publicly write about atomic spy Perseus was Russian intelligence Colonel Vladimir Chikov. Starting in 1991 he wrote a number of articles in Russian periodicals that discussed Perseus. Later in 1996 he published a book with American co-author Gary Kern titled, How Stalin Stole the Atomic Bomb from the Americans (published in France in French).
  
  wn.com/Perseus_(spy)
• 
  Pyotr Grigorenko
  Petro Grigorenko or Petro Hryhorovych Hryhorenko or Pyotr Grigoryevich Grigorenko (Ukrainian: Петро́ Григо́рович Григоре́нко, Russian: Пётр Григо́рьевич Григоре́нко) (October 16, 1907 – February 21, 1987) was a high-ranked Soviet Army commander of Ukrainian descent, later a prominent Soviet human rights activist, dissident and writer.
  Petro Grigorenko was born in a village of rural Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine. He went on a military career and reached high ranks during the World War II. After the war, being a decorated veteran, he left active career and taught at the Frunze Military Academy, reaching the rank of a Major General.
  In 1949, Grigorenko defended his Ph.D. thesis on the theme “Features of the organization and conduct of combined offensive battle in the mountains.”
  In 1960, he completed the work on his doctoral thesis.
  In 1961 Grigorenko criticized Nikita Khrushchev's policies and was transferred to Russian Far East as punishment. In 1963 he created the Union of Struggle for the Restoration of Leninism. In the 1970s Grigorenko became a member of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group. The authorities sent him to a psychiatric imprisonment psikhushka from 1964–1965, and he was stripped of his military rank, medals, and retirement benefits.
  
  wn.com/Pyotr_Grigorenko
• 
  René Cassin
  René Samuel Cassin (born 5 October 1887 in Bayonne, France – died 20 February 1976 in Paris, France) was a French jurist, law professor and judge. The son of a French-Jewish merchant, he served as a soldier in World War I, and later went on to form the Union Fédérale, a leftist, pacifist Veterans organisation. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968 for his work in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. That same year, he was also awarded one of the UN's own Human Rights Prizes. René Cassin founded the French Institute of Administrative Sciences (IFSA) which was recognized as a public utility association.
  As French delegate to the League of Nations from 1924 to 1938, Cassin pressed for progress on disarmament and in developing institutions to aid the resolution of international conflicts.
  Working from a draft composed by Canadian scholar and professor of law, John Humphrey, he reduced the draft from 46 basic articles to 44. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as eventually adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December contained 30 human rights articles from the original draft.
  
  wn.com/René_Cassin
• 
  Romas Kalanta
  Romas Kalanta (February 22, 1953 in Alytus – May 15, 1972 in Kaunas) was a Lithuanian high school student known for his public self-immolation protesting Soviet regime in Lithuania. Kalanta's death provoked the largest post-war riots in Lithuania and inspired similar self-immolations. In 1972 alone, 13 more people committed suicide by self-immolation.
  Kalanta became a symbol of the Lithuanian resistance throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 2000, he was posthumously awarded the Order of the Cross of Vytis.
  Kalanta was religious; in a school essay he indicated that he would like to become a Catholic priest, which caused him some troubles with the authorities. He attended an evening school while working at a factory. Kalanta played guitar and made a few drawings; he had long hair and sympathized with the hippies. These sympathies were later exploited by the Soviets to discredit Kalanta among the older population.
  At noon on May 14, 1972, Kalanta poured 3 liters of gasoline on himself and set himself on fire in the square adjoining the Laisvės Alėja in front of the Kaunas Musical Theatre, where in 1940 the People's Seimas declared establishment of the Lithuanian SSR and petitioned the Soviet Union to admit Lithuania as one of the soviet socialist republics. He died about 14 hours later in a hospital. Before the suicide, Kalanta left his notebook with a brief note on a bench. Its content became known only after the declaration of independence in 1990 and opening up of secret KGB archives. The note read "blame only the regime for my death" (Lithuanian: Dėl mano mirties kaltinkite tik santvarką). No other notes were found to explain in more detail what provoked the suicide.
  
  wn.com/Romas_Kalanta
• 
  Roy Medvedev
  Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev (Russian: Рой Александрович Медведев; born 14 November 1925, Tbilisi, Georgia) is a Russian historian renowned as the author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge (Russian: К суду истории), first published in English in 1972. Medvedev became a prominent Russian politician and served as a consultant to Mikhail Gorbachev.^{[citation needed]}
  Roy Medvedev was the son of a Aleksander Romanovich Medvedev, professor of Military-Political Academy and has an identical twin brother, the biologist Zhores Medvedev. Their father was arrested in 1938, during one of Joseph Stalin's purges, and died in a labor camp in 1941.
  Medvedev graduated from the Leningrad University. After joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 Medvedev pursued a teaching career before becoming a researcher in the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.
  From an allegedly Marxist viewpoint, Medvedev criticized former Russian General Secretary Joseph Stalin, and Stalinism in general, during the Soviet era. In the early 1960s, Medvedev was engaged in samizdat publications. He was critical of the unscientific nature of Lysenkoism.
  
  wn.com/Roy_Medvedev
• Saville Sax
  Saville Sax (July 26, 1924 – September 25, 1980) was the Harvard University roommate of Theodore Hall who recruited Hall for the Soviets and acted as a courier to move the atomic secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviets.
  Saville Sax was born in New York City on 26 July 1924 and went by the name of Sarry Sax. He was the son of Bernard Sax (1896–1936) and Bluma Sax (1895–1986). Bluma and Bernard were both born in Russia. In 1930 they were living in Manhattan with their grandfather Jacob Sax (1874–?). Saville was introduced to Soviet agents by his mother, Bluma, who worked for a Communist front organization called Russian War Relief. Sax went by the cover name "Oldster," and periodically traveled to New Mexico to collect information from Hall. Saville had a son, Boria Sax.Saville also had a daughter, Sarah Sax. Saville had a sister, Anne Saville Arenberg (1925-1967). After drifting from job to job, Saville ended up teaching "values clarification" in a Great Society funded education program called NEXTEP, when he was "something of an adult hippie, disheveled in his personal habits and given to LSD and other hallocinogenic drugs" and "openly boasted of his role in the [atomic] spying." He died on September 25, 1980 in Edwardsville, Illinois.
  
  wn.com/Saville_Sax
• 
  Semyon Gluzman
  Semyon Fishelevich Gluzman (Ukrainian: Семе́н Фі́шельович Глу́зман, Russian: Семён Фи́шелевич Глу́зман) (September 10, 1946, Kiev, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) is a Ukrainian psychiatrist, human rights activist, the president and founder of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, founder of the American-Ukrainian Bureau for Human Rights, director of the International Medical Rehabilitation Center for the Victims of War and Totalitarian Regimes, a member of the Council of Experts under the Ukraine's Ministry of Labor and Social Policy. He also is сo-chairperson of the Babi Yar Committee, ex-dissident and ex-prisoner, author of numerous interviews and scientific publications on issues of human rights, law and ethics in psychiatry, social psychiatry.
  Semyon Gluzman was the first psychiatrist in the Soviet Union who openly opposed Soviet abuse of psychiatry against dissenters. In 1971, Gluzman wrote a psychiatric report on General Pyotr Grigorenko who spoke against the human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. Gluzman came to the conclusion that Grigorenko was mentally sane and had been taken to mental hospitals for political reasons. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Gluzman was forced to serve seven years in labor camp and three years in Siberian exile for refusing to diagnose Grigorenko as having the mental illness.
  
  wn.com/Semyon_Gluzman
• 
  Sergei Kovalev
  Sergei Kovalev (also spelt as Sergey Kovalev; Russian: Сергей Адамович Ковалёв; born 2 March 1930) is a Russian human rights activist and politician and a former Soviet dissident and political prisoner.
  Kovalev was born in the town of Seredina-Buda in Ukraine, near Sumy. In 1932, his family moved to Podlipki village near Moscow. In 1954 he graduated from Moscow State University. As a biophysicist, Kovalev authored more than 60 scientific publications. From mid-1950s, he opposed Trofim Lysenko's theories favored by the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
  Kovalev was one of a group of about 14 activists who constituted the Action Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR in 1969. The group composed a first samizdat (self-published) human rights bulletin, the Chronicle of Current Events.
  He was arrested on December 8, 1974, and tried in Vilnius, charged with "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" (Article 70 of the RSFSR Penal Code) and served seven years in labor camps in Perm region and Chistopol prison, and later three years in internal exile at Kolyma. Upon his return, he settled in Kalinin (now Tver).
  
  wn.com/Sergei_Kovalev
• 
  Sergei Soldatov
  Sergei Soldatov (24. June 1933 Narva – 24. January 2003 Tallinn) was one of the founders of anti-Soviet dissident movement in Estonia.
  Soldatov was born into a Russian Estonian family, he finished high school in Jõhvi and the Leningrad University of Technology. He worked in a number of factories in Tallinn and became a lecturer at the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute.
  In early 1970s, Soldatov participated in dissident organisation Estonian Democratic Movement and was editor of underground newspapers. Among others, he cooperated with Tunne Kelam. As an ethnic Russian, Soldatov also had connections with dissident circles in Russia, and was one of the authors of the programme of the Democratic Movement of the Soviet Union in Russian.
  Hiding himself underground since the 1974 arrest of Kalju Mätik, Mati Kiirend and Artjom Juskevitš, the KGB managed to arrest him in 1975. Soldatov was imprisoned in prison camps of Mordovia for six years. Soon after being released in 1981, he and his wife Lyudmila were expelled from the USSR. They settled in West Germany, where Sergei (thanks to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's recommendation) got the job of journalist for the Radio Liberty. For many years, he arranged broadcasts in Estonian.
  
  wn.com/Sergei_Soldatov
• 
  Sergey Kirov
  Sergei Mironovich Kirov (Russian: Серге́й Миро́нович Ки́ров; 27 March [O.S. 15 March] 1886 – 1 December 1934), born Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov, was a prominent early Bolshevik leader in the Soviet Union. Kirov rose through the Communist Party ranks to become head of the Party organization in Leningrad. Kirov was seen as a focal point of opposition to some policies of Joseph Stalin, and as a counterbalance to the increasing concentration of power in Stalin's hands.^{[citation needed]}
  On 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot and killed by a gunman at his offices in the Smolny Institute. Some historians place the blame for his assassination at the hands of Stalin and believe the NKVD organised its execution, but any evidence for this claim remains elusive. Kirov's death served as one of the pretexts for Stalin's escalation of repression against dissident elements of the Party, culminating in the Great Purge of the late 1930s in which many of the Old Bolsheviks were arrested, expelled from the Party, and executed. Complicity in Kirov's assassination was a common charge to which the accused confessed in the show trials of the era.
  
  wn.com/Sergey_Kirov
• Seán MacBride
  Seán MacBride (26 January 1904 – 15 January 1988) was an Irish government minister and prominent international politician as well as a Chief of Staff of the IRA.
  Rising from a domestic Irish political career, he founded or participated in many international as well as non-governmental organizations of the early 20th century, including the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and Amnesty International. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, the Lenin Peace Prize for 1975–76, and the UNESCO Silver Medal for Service in 1980.
  MacBride was born in Paris in 1904, the son of Major John MacBride and Maud Gonne. His first language was French and he remained in Paris until after his father's execution after the Easter Rising of 1916. He was sent to school at Mount St. Benedict's, Gorey, County Wexford in Ireland. He joined the Irish Volunteers in 1919 when aged 15, and was an active member during the Irish War of Independence. He opposed the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and was imprisoned by the Irish Free State during the Civil War.
  
  wn.com/Seán_MacBride
• 
  Shmuel Schneurson
  Shmuel Schneurson was a leader of the underground Zionist movement Hechalutz in Soviet Union from 1922 to 1928. Though he had the option of remaining in British Palestine during his 1927 visit, he chose to return to the USSR to organize underground Zionist activities. He was arrested in February 1928 and sentenced to a correction camp in the Ural Mountains, followed by a three-year sentence in Siberia. In 1934, he was released and returned to Moscow. After applying for an exit permit to return to Palestine, he was promptly rearrested and sentenced. His final whereabouts remain unknown. In 1946, his former landlady received a letter informing her of his death.
  Schneurson is a descendant of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad hasidism. He is among a number of descendants of the great rabbi, who participated in underground Zionist activities. Colleagues of Schneurson who shared his ancestry within the movement included sisters Miriam and Leah Lein. The former made aliyah in 1923, and the latter was arrested and disappeared in 1927. There were also the brothers Tuviah and Solomon Margolin, who also came from a Lubavitcher background. They were sentenced to lengthy prison terms and died in the late 1940s. Their mother, also a committed Zionist, was released in 1951, and unsuccessfully attempted to apply for aliyah. She was buried in 1953, "in accordance with Jewish custom."
  
  wn.com/Shmuel_Schneurson
• 
  Sofia Kalistratova
  Sofiya Vasilyevna Kalistratova (Russian: Софья Васильевна Калистратова), also known as Sofia Kallistratova (Софья Каллистратова; 6 (19) September 1907 – 5 December 1989) was a public defense lawyer in the Soviet Union. She defended various Soviet dissidents and from 1977 was a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), distributing information about human rights violations in the Soviet Union.
  Born in the town of Rylsk, she graduated from the Moscow State University, specializing in the field of law. Unable to find a position in prosecutor's office, she began her activity as public defender at the Moscow College of Advocates (Московская Коллегия адвокатов). According to rumors, in the 1960s, the officer who was issuing her with a new passport, misspelled the last name "Kallistratova" as "Kalistratova". Sofiya did not make a big deal out of it and signed the documents as Kalistratova ever since.^{[citation needed]}
  She joined the Moscow Helsinki Group as a legal consultant. The KGB searched Kalistratova's apartment several times and confiscated typewriters and documents. Some of Kalistratova's friends were arrested. The activity of the Moscow Helsinki Group become impossible, while the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, was making his career out of the repression of dissidents. Supporters claim that all their work defending the human right to obtain, discuss, and distribute information was legal.
  
  wn.com/Sofia_Kalistratova
• 
  Sofiya Kalistratova
  Sofiya Vasilyevna Kalistratova (Russian: Софья Васильевна Калистратова), also known as Sofia Kallistratova (Софья Каллистратова; 6 (19) September 1907 – 5 December 1989) was a public defense lawyer in the Soviet Union. She defended various Soviet dissidents and from 1977 was a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), distributing information about human rights violations in the Soviet Union.
  Born in the town of Rylsk, she graduated from the Moscow State University, specializing in the field of law. Unable to find a position in prosecutor's office, she began her activity as public defender at the Moscow College of Advocates (Московская Коллегия адвокатов). According to rumors, in the 1960s, the officer who was issuing her with a new passport, misspelled the last name "Kallistratova" as "Kalistratova". Sofiya did not make a big deal out of it and signed the documents as Kalistratova ever since.^{[citation needed]}
  She joined the Moscow Helsinki Group as a legal consultant. The KGB searched Kalistratova's apartment several times and confiscated typewriters and documents. Some of Kalistratova's friends were arrested. The activity of the Moscow Helsinki Group become impossible, while the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, was making his career out of the repression of dissidents. Supporters claim that all their work defending the human right to obtain, discuss, and distribute information was legal.
  
  wn.com/Sofiya_Kalistratova
• 
  Svetlana Alliluyeva
  Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva (Russian: Светла́на Ио́сифовна Аллилу́ева, Georgian: სვეტლანა ალილუევა; February 28, 1926 – November 22, 2011), later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife. In 1967, she caused an international furor when she defected and became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
  She was born on February 28, 1926 as Svetlana Stalina. Like most children of high-ranking Soviet officials, Alliluyeva was raised by a nanny and only occasionally saw her parents. Her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, died on November 9, 1932. The death was officially ruled as peritonitis resulting from a burst appendix. While there were various other theories as to the cause of her death (murder on the orders of Stalin, or that she was killed by Stalin himself), it appears Nadezhda Alliluyeva actually committed suicide. According to Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin was very abusive toward Alliluyeva in the later part of their marriage. In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled an occasion when Stalin, during a drunken rage at a party, dragged a crying Alliluyeva onto a dance floor by her hair.
  
  wn.com/Svetlana_Alliluyeva
• 
  Vadim Delaunay
  Vadim Nikolaevich Delaunay (or Delone, Russian: Вадим Николаевич Делоне [] ( listen); 1947–1983) was a Russian poet and dissident, who participated in the 1968 Red Square demonstration of protest against military suppression of the Prague Spring.
  Delaunay was born to a Russian-French family of Soviet Intelligentsia. His grandfather, Boris Delaunay, was a prominent Soviet mathematician and creator of the Delaunay triangulation. Among his ancestors was marquis Bernard-René de Launay, the last governor of the Bastille, murdered by the attackers on that castle. Delaunay often predicted that he would repeat the fate of his ancestor.^{[citation needed]}
  Delaunay studied at Moscow matshkola ("Mathematical School") No. 2, one of the best in the country at that time, then at the Department of Philology at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. As a student, he also worked as a freelance author for the Literaturnaya Gazeta. Delaunay started to write poetry at the age of 13. His poetry was distributed by samizdat and some of it was published abroad.
  
  wn.com/Vadim_Delaunay
• 
  Valeriy Marchenko
  Valeriy Marchenko (Ukrainian: Валерій Марченко; September 16, 1947 - October 7, 1984) was a poet, journalist, translator, and member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
  Marchenko was born into an educated family. His grandfather, Mykhaylo Marchenko, was the first Soviet dean of the University of Lviv.. His mother was a teacher of literature.. Valeriy Marchenko completed the Kiev Academy of Arts and worked in the newspaper Literary Ukraine (Ukrainian: Літературна Україна) as a translator. He translated into Ukrainian from Azerbaijani and Polish. His speciality was Azerbaijani-Ukrainian literary relations.
  On June 25, 1973, Marchenko was arrested and charged with Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, mainly for three articles he wrote, as well as his efforts to publicize Ivan Dziuba's work Internationalism or Russification? in Ukraine. On December 29, 1973, Marchenko was sentenced to 6 years imprisonment and 2 years exile.
  During his incarceration in the Soviet prison system, Marchenko worked as archivist for everything he saw. He collected and published personal accounts about the daily life of prisoners, interviews, and essays.
  
  wn.com/Valeriy_Marchenko
• 
  Valery Chalidze
  Valery Chalidze (Georgian: ვალერი ჭალიძე; Russian: Валерий Николаевич Чалидзе, Valeriy Nikolayevich Chalidze) (born 1938) is a Georgian-American author, publisher, and the former Soviet dissident and human rights activist.
  
  wn.com/Valery_Chalidze
• 
  Valery Tarsis
  Valery Yakovlevich Tarsis (Russian: Вале́рий Я́ковлевич Та́рсис; 1906 – 4 March 1983) was a Russian a writer, literary critic, and translator. He was highly critical of the communist regime.
  Valery was born in Kiev, went to school there and then to Rostov-on-Don University.
  In the twenties he published some short stories but his main focus was on translations of Western writers into Russian. He translated over thirty books while working for a publishing house (until 1937) as a specialist in Western literature.
  During World War II Tarsis was twice severely wounded.
  Once a writer and editor in good official standing, Tarsis grew disillusioned with Communism in the 1950s. The publication abroad of his scathing 1962 novel The Bluebottle earned him an eight-month stay in a Soviet mental hospital, an experience he described in his autobiographical novel Ward 7: "All around him were faces exposed by sleep or distorted by nightmares ... it is always hard to be the only one awake, and it is almost unbearable to stand the third watch of the world in a madhouse..."
  
  wn.com/Valery_Tarsis
• 
  Vasyl Stus
  Vasyl Semenovych Stus (Ukrainian: Васи́ль Семе́нович Стус; January 8, 1938 – September 4, 1985) was a Ukrainian poet and publicist, one of the most active members of Ukrainian dissident movement. For his political convictions, his works were banned by the Soviet regime and he spent 23 years (about a half of his life) in detention. On November 26, 2005 he was posthumously given the title Hero of Ukraine by order of the state.
  Vasyl Stus was born on January 6, 1938 into a peasant family in the village of Rakhnivka, Haisyn Raion, Vinnytsia Oblast (province), Ukrainian SSR. Next year, his parents Semen Demyanovych and Iryna Yakivna moved to the city of Stalino (now Donetsk). Their children joined them one year later. Vasyl first encountered the Ukrainian language and poetry from his mother who sang him Ukrainian folk songs.
  After the secondary school, Vasyl Stus entered the Department of history and literature of the Pedagogical Institute in Stalino (nowadays Donetsk University). In 1959 he graduated from the institute with honours. Following graduation, Stus briefly worked as a high school teacher of Ukrainian language and literaturein Tauzhnia village of Kirovohrad Oblast, and then was conscripted to the Soviet Army for two years. During the study and military service in the Ural mountains he started to write poetry and translated into Ukrainian more than a hundred verses by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke. The original copies of his translations were later confiscated by KGB and they were lost.
  
  wn.com/Vasyl_Stus
• 
  Vasyl Symonenko
  Vasyl Symonenko (Ukrainian: Василь Андрійович Симоненко; January 8, 1935–1963) a well-known Ukrainian poet, journalist, activist of dissident movement. He is considered one of the most important figures in Ukrainian literature of the early 1960s. By the opinion of the Museum of dissident movement in Kiev, the works and early death of Vasyl Symonenko had an enormous impact on the rise of the national democratic movement in Ukraine.
  The poet was born in a peasant family in the village of Biyivtsi, Kharkiv Oblast (today - Poltava Oblast).
  After graduating from Kiev State University in 1957, Vasyl Symonenko worked as a journalist in several newspapers in Cherkassy oblast.
  The debut book of poems "Tysha i hrim" ("Silence and thunder") came in 1962 and made clear the talent of Symonenko among the young poets, though he had only one year to live (cancer of kidneys was diagnosed later). His literary environment included the poets Mykola Vinhranovsky, Ivan Drach and Lina Kostenko, the publicists, critics Ivan Dziuba, I. Svitlichny, Y. Sverstyuk and other "shestydesyatnyky" (the sixtiers).
  
  wn.com/Vasyl_Symonenko
• 
  Viacheslav Chornovil
  Viacheslav Chornovil (Ukrainian: В'ячесла́в Макси́мович Чорнові́л) (born December 24, 1937 in Yerky, Katerynopil Raion, Kiev Oblast - died March 25, 1999, near Boryspil, Kiev Oblast) was a Ukrainian politician. A prominent Ukrainian dissident to the Soviet policies, he was arrested multiple times in the 1960s and 1970s for his political views. A long-time advocate of Ukrainian independence, he was one of the most prominent political figures of the late 1980s and early 1990s who paved the path of the contemporary Ukraine to its independence.
  Chornovil enrolled into the University of Kiev initially at the College of Philology (faculty), but after the first semester transferred to the College of Journalism. In 1958 due to conflict in the university he took a break from studying and went for construction project in Zhdanov of a blast furnace and later worked for the "Kiev Komsomolets". Chornovil was a member of the Komsomol of Ukraine. He graduated in 1960 with honors and defended his diploma with a thesis "Publicistic work of Borys Hrinchenko".
  
  wn.com/Viacheslav_Chornovil
• 
  Victor Sokolov
  The Very Reverend Archpriest Victor Sokolov (Russian: Виктор Владимирович Соколов) (February 21, 1947 – March 12, 2006) was a Russian-American former dissident Soviet journalist and an Eastern Orthodox priest.
  He wrote articles critical of the Soviet government that were clandestinely distributed throughout the Soviet Union and abroad.
  After moving to the United States in 1975, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship by an ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on September 7, 1976, for "activities discrediting the rank of a Soviet citizen", becoming only the fifth person around that time to be so penalized, among them Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1984.
  Born in Tver (at the time named Kalinin), Sokolov served his obligatory stint in the Soviet Army before graduating from the Moscow Literary Institute and working as prose writer and editor for a monthly literary magazine. He became involved as a dissident in 1968 when he copied out his first samizdat, an appeal from five Soviet intellectuals objecting to the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
  
  wn.com/Victor_Sokolov
• 
  Viktor Fainberg
  Viktor Isaakovich Fainberg (Russian: Ви́ктор Исаа́кович Фа́йнберг) (b. 1931, Kharkov) is a philologist, prominent figure of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, participant of the 1968 Red Square demonstration, and fighter against punitive psychiatry.
  He was born to the married couple of Isaac Fainberg and Sarah Dashevskaya. In his life as a child, while attending school during an antisemitic campaign of 1948-1952, he was subjected to harassment that, in his own words, he did not reconcile himself to, but entered the fray with an abuser. As the result of these frays, he got a referral to a psychiatrist which subsequently played a negative role when Feinberg was a dissident.
  In 1957, in connection with antisemitic insult, he had a fight with a policeman and for this reason was sentenced to 1 year of corrective labor.
  In 1968, he graduated from the English unit of the philological department of the Leningrad University where he defended his diploma thesis about writer Salinger with distinction. In the summer of 1968, Fainberg worked as a guide for the Pavlovsk Palace.
  
  wn.com/Viktor_Fainberg
• 
  Viktor Nekipelov
  Viktor Aleksandrovich Nekipelov (Russian: Виктор Александрович Некипелов; September 29, 1928 Harbin, China - July 1, 1989 Paris) was a Russian poet, writer, Soviet dissident, member of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
  Pharmacist by occupation, in 1968, he participated in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
  Nekipelov was arrested in 1973, sent to the Section 4 of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry for psychiatric evaluation, which lasted from 15 January to 12 March 1974, was judged sane (which he was), tried, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. In 1976, he published in samizdat his book Institute of Fools: Notes on the Serbsky Institute based on his personal experience at Psychiatric Hospital of the Serbsky Institute and translated into English in 1980. In this account, he wrote compassionately, engagingly, and observantly of the doctors and other patients; most of the latters were ordinary criminals feigning insanity in order to be sent to a mental hospital, because hospital was a ‘cushy number’ as against prison camps. According to the President of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia Yuri Savenko, Nekipelov’s book is a highly dramatic humane document, a fair story about the nest of Soviet punitive psychiatry, a mirror that psychiatrists always need to look into. However according to Malcolm Lader, this book as an indictment of the Serbsky Institute hardly rises above tittle-tattle and gossip, and Nekipelov destroys his own credibility by presenting no real evidence but invariably putting the most sinister connotation on events. After publishing his book, he was sentenced to the maximum punishment for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" of seven years in a labour camp and then five years in internal exile.
  
  wn.com/Viktor_Nekipelov
• 
  Vitaliy Kalynychenko
  Vitaliy Kalynychenko (Ukrainian: Віталій Кальниченко, born January 31, 1938) was a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
  Kalnychenko's first transgresssion of Soviet law was his nonagreement to work for the KGB. He was approached in 1964 to act as an informant, but his unwillingness to do so caused him to be arrested by a fellow student in 1965. He was released without charge, and worked in Leningrad as an electrical engineer.
  On July 20, 1966, Kalnychenko was caught trying to flee to Finland. He was taken to Moscow, where, according to standard Soviet procedure, his mental state was examined. He was ruled sane by the Serbsky Institute of General and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, and stood trial.
  On January 12, 1967, Kalynychenko was charged with "attempting to betray his homeland", and was sentenced to 10 years harsh regime labour camp.
  Kalnychenko protested to his sentence on the grounds that he had not been sentenced for trying to cross a border illegally, but rather that he was a political prisoner. In 1974, he sent an open letter in that effect to the presidium of the USSR (with a copy going to the United Nations).
  
  wn.com/Vitaliy_Kalynychenko
• 
  Vitaly Ginzburg
  Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, ForMemRS (Russian: Вита́лий Ла́заревич Ги́нзбург; October 4, 1916 – November 8, 2009) was a Soviet theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, a member of the Soviet and Russian Academies of Sciences and one of the fathers of Soviet hydrogen bomb. He was the successor to Igor Tamm as head of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Academy's physics institute (FIAN), and an outspoken atheist.
  He was born to a Jewish family in Moscow in 1916, the son of an engineer Lazar Efimovich Ginzburg and a doctor Augusta Felgenauer, and graduated from the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University in 1938. He defended his candidate's (Ph.D.) dissertation in 1940, and his doctor's dissertation in 1942. He worked at the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow from 1940. In 1944, he became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Among his achievements are a partially phenomenological theory of superconductivity, the Ginzburg-Landau theory, developed with Lev Landau in 1950; the theory of electromagnetic wave propagation in plasmas (for example, in the ionosphere); and a theory of the origin of cosmic radiation. He is also known to biologists as being part of the group of scientists that helped bring down the reign of the politically connected anti-Mendelian agronomist Trofim Lysenko, thus allowing modern genetic science to return to the USSR.
  
  wn.com/Vitaly_Ginzburg
• 
  Vladimir Bougrine
  Vladimir Bougrine (Russian: Владимир Бугрин) also known as Wladimir Bugrin (10 June 1938, Leningrad - 10 August 2001, St. Petersburg) was a Russian painter.
  Vladimir was the second child of two academic painters. His father, Alexander Bougrine, was an icon restorer and his painter mother Nathalie Anikina also worked at the Hermitage. He was brought up in two rooms at his ancestral home on the Neva River, transformed after the Revolution into community accommodation.
  When the German army surrounded Leningrad in September 1941 beginning the 900 day Siege, Vladimir and his sister suffered the famine and the cold that would kill mostly the young and the old.
  Their food ration was 125 grams of bread a day, and Volodia spent his days like the other children looking for food. They were left alone, their parents working or fighting; they ate what they could find, one day he consumed a jar of mustard and the hospital doctors saved his life. He was fortunate, a quarter of the population died, most of them children, but they were the older ones, whose food needs to survive were greater.
  
  wn.com/Vladimir_Bougrine
• 
  Vladimir Shelkov
  Vladimir Shelkov (1895–1980) was a Christian preacher and Seventh-day Adventist leader in the former Soviet Union. He headed the Church of True and Free Seventh-day Adventists, which rejected any government interference in the activities.
  Vladimir was born in Bolshaya Viska village in Ukraine.
  In 1931 Shelkov was imprisoned for the first time by the Soviet regime and spent almost all his life in prisons and camps. His last confinement began in 1979, when a Soviet court in Tashkent sentenced him (than a delicate eighty-three-year-old man) to five years of hard labor camps.
  He died in a labor camp Tabaga near Yakutsk in 1980.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Vladimir_Shelkov
• 
  Vladimir Strelnikov
  Vladimir Strelnikov (born 1939) is a Ukrainian artist and former Soviet dissident.
  Strelnikov was born in 1939 in Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, and made his studies at the local art academy. He is a member of the Odessa Group of exiled and dissident artists. In 1960, he debuted in Odessa at the autumn exhibition of the Fine Art Federation and took part in several officially-approved exhibitions in the Soviet Union and abroad until 1971. His art career resulted in loss of official approval, and from 1972 he was forced to relegate exhibition to private households in Kiev, Odessa, Moscow and Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg).
  In 1978, he emigrated from the USSR to Vienna, Austria. The following year, he settled in Munich, Germany, where he has worked and lived since.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Vladimir_Strelnikov
• 
  Vladimir Voinovich
  Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich (alternatively spelled Voynovich; Russian: Владимир Войнович; born 26 September 1932) is a Russian (formerly Soviet) writer and a dissident. He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Language and Literature.
  Voinovich was born in Stalinabad, Tajik SSR, Soviet Union. Voinovich's father was a journalist of Serbian descent, his mother a professor of mathematics of Jewish descent. His ancestor, Ivo Vojnović, was a prominent writer from Dubrovnik.
  Voinovich is famous for his satiric fiction but also wrote some poetry. While working for Moscow radio in the early 1960s, he produced the lyrics for the cosmonauts' anthem, Fourteen Minutes Till the Start ("14 минут до старта"). Between 1951 and 1955, Voinovich also did peacetime service in the Soviet Army.
  At the outset of the Brezhnev stagnation period, Voinovich's writings stopped being published in the USSR, but became very popular in samizdat and in the West. In 1974, because of his writing and his participation in the human rights movement, Voinovich was excluded from the Soviet Writers' Union. His telephone line was cut off in 1976 and he and his family were forced to emigrate in 1980. He settled in Munich, West Germany and worked for Radio Liberty.
  
  wn.com/Vladimir_Voinovich
• 
  Vyacheslav Molotov
  Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (Russian: Вячесла́в Миха́йлович Мо́лотов; 9 March [O.S. 25 February] 1890 – 8 November 1986) was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium (Politburo) of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev. He served as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Premier) from 1930 to 1941, and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1939 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1956. Molotov served for several years as First Deputy Premier in Joseph Stalin's cabinet. He retired in 1961 after several years of obscurity.
  Molotov was the principal Soviet signatory of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 (also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), after Britain and France repeatedly failed to join the Soviets in an anti-Nazi alliance, was involved in post-war negotiations where he became noted for his diplomatic skills, and knew of the Katyn massacre committed by the Soviet authorities. Following the aftermath of World War II (Great Patriotic War) Molotov kept his place, until 1949, as a leading Soviet diplomat and politician. In March 1949, after losing Stalin's favour, he lost the foreign affairs ministry to Andrei Vyshinsky. Molotov's relationship with Stalin deteriorated further, with Stalin complaining about Molotov's mistakes in a speech to the 19th Party Congress. However, after Stalin's death in 1953 Molotov was staunchly opposed to Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation policy. He defended his policies and the legacy of Stalin until his death in 1986, and harshly criticized Stalin's successors, especially Nikita Khrushchev.
  
  wn.com/Vyacheslav_Molotov
• 
  Willy Brandt
  Willy Brandt (born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm; German pronunciation: [ˈvɪli ˈbʁant]; 18 December 1913 – 8 October 1992) was a German politician, Mayor of West Berlin 1957–1966, Chancellor of West Germany 1969–1974, and leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 1964–1987.
  Brandt's most important legacy was Ostpolitik, a policy aimed at improving relations with East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. This policy caused considerable controversy in West Germany, but won Brandt the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.
  In 1974, Brandt resigned as Chancellor after Günter Guillaume, one of his closest aides, was exposed as an agent of the Stasi, the East German secret service.
  Willy Brandt was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in the Free City of Lübeck (German Empire) to Martha Frahm, an unwed mother who worked as a cashier for a department store. His father was an accountant from Hamburg named John Möller, whom Brandt never met. As his mother worked six days a week, he was mainly brought up by his mother's stepfather Ludwig Frahm and his second wife Dora.
  
  wn.com/Willy_Brandt
• 
  Yakov Dzhugashvili
  Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili (Georgian: იაკობ ჯუღაშვილი, Russian: Яков Иосифович Джугашвили) (18 March 1907 – 14 April 1943) was one of Joseph Stalin's three children (along with Svetlana Alliluyeva and Vasily Dzhugashvili). Yakov was the son of Stalin's first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze. He served in the Red Army during the Second World War, and was captured in the initial stages of the German invasion of the USSR. While there has been dispute over the circumstances of his death, historians currently resolved that he was killed in a German camp.
  Yakov was born in the village of Borji (near Kutaisi) in Georgia, then part of Imperial Russia. Until the age of fourteen, Yakov was raised by his aunt in Tbilisi. In 1921, Yakov’s uncle Alexander Svanidze urged him to leave for Moscow to acquire a higher education. Yakov only spoke Georgian and after his arrival in Moscow he commenced with learning the Russian language, aiming to apply for University studies.
  Yakov and his father Stalin never got along. Allegedly once Stalin referred to Yakov as a "mere cobbler." Later according to Yakov's stepmother Nadezhda Alliluyeva she saw a young girl running away from their Moscow dacha in tears. When she entered she saw a despairing Yakov looking near faint in the room. He ran immediately to his bedroom. It turned out that the girl was Yakov's Jewish fiancée, and when they told Stalin of their engagement he became enraged.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Yakov_Dzhugashvili
• 
  Yaroslav Lesiv
  Yaroslav Lesiv (Ukrainian: Ярослав Лесів) (January 3, 1945 - October 10, 1991) was a Ukrainian poet, priest, and member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group
  Yaroslav Lesiv was born in the village of Luzhkiv, (Ukrainian Лужків), in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast of Western Ukraine.
  In 1965, he joined the Ukrainian National Front, an underground organization working for Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union. On March 29, 1965, his membership in this organization was discovered, and Lesiv was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
  He carried out a hunger strike
  On October 3, 1977, Lesiv joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
  Yaroslav Lesiv was active in the Ukrainian Catholic Church. From the late 1980s, Lesiv was working towards the restoration of the Ukrainian Catholic church.
  In 1988, Lesiv was ordained as a priest in the Ukrainian Catholic Rite.
  In 1989, Lesiv visited Moscow twice - including a hunger strike protesting the illegal status of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
  In the night between October 9 and 10, 1991, Yaroslav Lesiv was killed in an automobile accident. He is buried in Bolekhiv, Ukraine.
  
  wn.com/Yaroslav_Lesiv
• 
  Yekaterina Peshkova
  Yekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova née Volzhina (Russian: Екатерина Павловна Пешкова, née Волжина; 26 July 1887 – 26 March 1965) was a Soviet human rights activist and humanitarian, first wife of Maxim Gorky.
  Before the October Revolution she took an active part in the work of the Committee for Assistance to Russian Political Prisoners (Комитет помощи русским политкаторжанам) under the leadership of Vera Figner. After 1914 she led the Children's Commission at the Society for Assistance to War Victims. After 1918 she was the major activist of the Moscow Committee of the Political Red Cross.
  After 1922, she was chairwoman of the descendant organization Assistance to Political Prisoners (Pompolit, Помощь политическим заключенным, Помполит). She was honoured by an order of the Polish Red Cross for her participation in the exchange of prisoners of war after the Polish-Soviet War.
  During the years of Joseph Stalin's political repressions, she was often the only person who actually helped the political prisoners, passing along letters and parcels of food, and advocating softening of the jail terms and amnesties. Thousands of Soviet intellectuals owed her their lives. Among them was Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, the sixth Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch chasidic movement, who was arrested and imprisoned in the Shpalernaya prison in Leningrad. His death sentence was commuted and changed twice. Finally he was released and left USSR.
  
  wn.com/Yekaterina_Peshkova
• 
  Yelena Bonner
  Yelena Bonner (Russian: Елена Георгиевна Боннэр; 15 February 1923 – 18 June 2011) was a human rights activist in the former Soviet Union and wife of the noted physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. During her decades as a dissident, Bonner was noted for her characteristic blunt honesty and courage.
  Bonner was born Lusik Georgievna Alikhanova in Merv, Turkmen SSR, USSR (now Mary, Turkmenistan). Her father, Georgy Alikhanov (Armenian name Gevork Alikhanyan), was an Armenian who founded the Soviet Armenian Communist Party, and was a highly placed member of the Comintern; her mother, Ruf, (Ruth Bonner), was a Jewish Communist activist. She had a younger brother, Igor, who became a career naval officer.
  In 1937, Bonner's father was arrested by the NKVD and executed as part of Stalin's Great Purge; her mother was arrested a few days later, and served eight years in a forced labor camp near Karaganda, Kazakhstan, followed by nine years of internal exile. Bonner's 41-year-old maternal uncle, Matvei Bonner, was also executed during the purge, and his wife internally exiled. All four were exonerated (rehabilitated) following Stalin's death in 1953. Serving as a nurse during World War II, Bonner was wounded twice, and in 1946 was honorably discharged as a disabled veteran. After the war she earned a degree in pediatrics from the First Leningrad Medical Institute.
  
  wn.com/Yelena_Bonner
• 
  Yevgenia Ginzburg
  Yevgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg (December 20, 1896 – May 25, 1977) (Russian: Евге́ния Соломо́новна Ги́нзбург) was a Russian author who served an 18-year sentence in the Gulag. Her given name is often Latinized to Eugenia.
  Born in Moscow, her parents were Solomon Natanovich Ginzburg (a Jewish pharmacist) and Revekka Markovna Ginzburg. The family moved to Kazan in 1909.
  In 1920, she began to study social sciences at Kazan State University, later switching to pedagogy. She worked as a rabfak (рабфак, рабочий факультет, workers' faculty) teacher. In April 1934, Ginzburg was officially confirmed as a docent (approximately equivalent to an associate professor in western universities), specializing in the history of the All-Union Communist Party. Shortly thereafter, on May 25, she was named head of the newly created department of the history of Leninism. However, by the fall of 1935, she was forced to quit the university.
  She first married a doctor Dmitriy Fedorov, by whom she had a son, Alexei Fedorov, born in 1926. He died in 1941 during the siege of Leningrad. Around 1930, she married Pavel Aksyonov, the mayor (председатель горсовета) of Kazan and a member of the Central Executive Committee (ЦИК) of the USSR. Her son by this marriage, Vasily Aksyonov, born in 1932, became a well-known writer. After becoming a Communist Party member, Ginzburg continued her successful career as educator, journalist and administrator.
  
  wn.com/Yevgenia_Ginzburg
• 
  Yevgeny Zamyatin
  Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (Russian: Евге́ний Ива́нович Замя́тин, Russian pronunciation: [jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ zɐˈmʲætʲɪn]) (February 20, 1884 – March 10, 1937) was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the CPSU following the October Revolution. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to the West for publication. The subsequent outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to Zamyatin's successful request for exile from his homeland. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents.
  Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, 300 km south of Moscow. His father was a Russian Orthodox priest and schoolmaster, and his mother a musician. He may have had synesthesia as he gave letters and sounds qualities. For example, he saw the letter "L" as having pale, cold and light blue qualities.
  
  wn.com/Yevgeny_Zamyatin
• 
  Yosef Mendelevitch
  Yosef Mendelevitch (or Mendelovitch) (b. 1947 in Riga), was a well-known Jewish refusenik, also known as a "Prisoner of Zion" and now a Religious Zionist rabbi in the former Soviet Union who gained fame for his adherence to Zionism and public attempts to emigrate to Israel at a time when it was considered to be against the law in the USSR.
  He was one of the participants of the Dymshits-Kuznetsov hijacking affair. As punishment, he was imprisoned for eleven years. In 1981 he was released and immigrated to Israel.
  He served in the Gulag with famous Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky (amongst others). In Sharansky's memoir Fear No Evil he describes innovative ways Mendelevitch used to communicate with Sharansky (via toilet bowls and radiators).
  Mendelevitch had always exhibited leadership qualities, early on in Israel he headed an organization called Soviet Jewry Information Center and has managed to attract followers to his causes. This has been attested to by his fellow refuseniks, such as Natan Sharansky: "In May 1988 he [Sharansky] founded the Zionist Forum, in preparation for the future waves of Aliyah from the Soviet Union, and based its activity on the database formed by former Refusenik Yosef Mendelevitch."
  
  wn.com/Yosef_Mendelevitch
• 
  Yosyf Zisels
  Yosyf Zisels (born 12 December 1941 in Tashkent) was a human rights activist and Ukrainian dissident.
  He was a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki group (UHG), involved in the samizdat movement, human rights activist, prominent activist in the Jewish movement in Ukraine, and a political prisoner.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Yosyf_Zisels
• 
  Yuli Daniel
  
  Yuli Markovich Daniel (Russian: Ю́лий Ма́ркович Даниэ́ль [] ( listen); November 15, 1925 — December 30, 1988) was a Soviet dissident writer, poet, translator, and political prisoner. He frequently wrote under the pseudonyms Nikolay Arzhak (Николай Аржак [] ( listen)) and Yu. Petrov (Ю.Петров [] ( listen)).
  Yuli Daniel was born in Moscow into the family of Yiddish playwright M. Daniel (Mark Meyerovich, Russian: Марк Наумович Меерович), who took the pseudonym Daniel. The famous march song of the Soviet young pioneers, "Орленок" (Young Eagle), was originally written for one of his plays. Daniel's uncle, an ardent revolutionary (alias Liberten), was a member of Comintern who perished in the Great Purge.
  In 1942, during World War II, Daniel lied about his age and volunteered to serve at the front. He fought in the 2nd Ukrainian and the 3rd Belorussian fronts, in 1944 was critically wounded in his legs and demobilized due to his resultant disability.
  In 1950, he graduated from Moscow Pedagogical Institute and worked as a school teacher in Kaluga and Moscow regions. He published his poetry translations from a variety of languages. Daniel and his friend Andrei Sinyavsky also wrote satirical novels and smuggled them to France to be published under pseudonyms. (See samizdat)
  
  wn.com/Yuli_Daniel
• 
  Yuliy Kim
  Yuliy Chersanovich Kim (Юлий Черсанович Ким; born December 23, 1936) is one of Russia's foremost bards and playwrights. His most famous works, encompassing everything from mild humor to biting political satire, include songs for movies such as Bumbarash, The Twelve Chairs, and An Ordinary Miracle, as well as the songs "The Brave Captain," "The Black Sea," "The Whale-Fish," "Cursed Lips," "Captain Bering," and "Baron Germont Went to War." Since 1998, he has been living in Israel and has made periodic tours through Russia, Europe, and the United States.
  Kim was born in 1936 in Moscow to Kim Chersan, a journalist of Korean origin, and Nina Valentinovna Vsesvyatskaya, a teacher of Russian language and literature. His parents were victims of the Great Purge of 1937 and 1938, in which his father was executed and his mother was sentenced as a "family member of a traitor of the Motherland" to five years in a labor camp and three years of exile, so that Kim didn't see her until age 9. She was rehabilitated during the Khrushchev Thaw period in 1958, but before that, she was under the "101st kilometer" law and could not live in Moscow, so Kim's family settled in Maloyaroslavets, Kaluga Oblast. In 1951, the family moved to Turkmenistan. Kim returned to Moscow in 1954 to enter the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute.
  
  wn.com/Yuliy_Kim
• 
  Yuri Galanskov
  Yuri Timofeyevich Galanskov Russian: Юрий Тимофеевич Галансков (June 19, 1939, Moscow - November 4, 1972, Mordovia) was a Russian poet, historian, human rights activist and dissident. For his political activities, such as founding and editing samizdat almanac Phoenix, he was incarcerated in prisons, camps and forced treatment psychiatric hospitals (Psikhushkas). He died in a labor camp.
  Yuri Galanskov began his dissident activities in 1959, as a participant in the poetry readings in Mayakovsky Square. Several of his works were published in the samizdat anthology Sintaksis. After Alexander Ginzburg was arrested in 1960 for publishing Sintaksis, Yuri Galanskov became the leader of dissident publishing in the Soviet Union. Galanskov’s first publication, Phoenix came in 1961, and contained direct criticism of the Soviet government, partly in the form of poetry. Phoenix published works by Boris Pasternak, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Ivan Kharabarov, and Galanskov himself.
  As a punishment for publishing Phoenix, the Soviet authorities convicted Galanskov and sentenced him to several months in a psychiatric hospital. Following his release, Galanskov formed a friendship with Alexander Ginzburg, and together the two publishers made arrangements to have their work published in the West.
  
  wn.com/Yuri_Galanskov
• 
  Yuri Orlov
  Yuri Feodorovich Orlov (Russian: Юрий Фёдорович Орлов, born August 13, 1924) 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.
  
  wn.com/Yuri_Orlov
• 
  Zoya Krakhmalnikova
  Zoya Alexandrovna Krakhmalnikova (January 14, 1929 – April 17, 2008) was a Russian Christian writer, of Ukrainian origin^{[citation needed]}. She was an activist and former Soviet dissident who was repeatedly arrested by the authorities of the former Soviet Union for her publications.
  Krakhmalnikova was born in the city of Kharkov, Ukraine on January 14, 1929. Her father was arrested in 1936 during one of Joseph Stalin's many purges. She graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute in 1954 in Moscow and completed her postgraduate work at the Gorky Institute of World Literature despite her family's background. An avid scholarly writer, Krakhmanlnikova was publishing articles in Soviet literary journals by the 1960s. She became a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute of Sociology in 1967.
  Her husband was fellow author, Feliks Svetov.
  Zoya Krakhmalnikova was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church in 1971, which led to her being fired from her job. Her baptism also led to her dismissal from the Union of Writers, which meant that she could no longer publish any of her work in the Soviet Union. Instead, Krakhmalnikova turned her attention to writing articles concerning Christianity in the Soviet Union, many of which she sent outside of the country to be published.
  
  wn.com/Zoya_Krakhmalnikova
• 
  Zviad Gamsakhurdia
  Zviad Gamsakhurdia (Georgian: ზვიად გამსახურდია, (March 31, 1939 — December 31, 1993) was a dissident, scientist and writer, who became the first democratically elected President of the Republic of Georgia in the post-Soviet era. Gamsakhurdia is the only Georgian President to have died whilst formally in office.
  Zviad Gamsakhurdia was born in the Georgian capital Tbilisi in 1939, in a distinguished Georgian family; his father, Academician Konstantine Gamsakhurdia (1893–1975), was one of the most famous Georgian writers of the 20th century. Perhaps influenced by his father, Zviad received training in philology and began a professional career as a translator and literary critic.
  Despite (or perhaps because of) the country's association with Joseph Stalin, Soviet rule in Georgia was particularly harsh during the 1950s and sought to restrict Georgian cultural expression. In 1955, Zviad Gamsakhurdia established a youth underground group which he called the Gorgasliani (a reference to the ancient line of Georgian kings) which sought to circulate reports of human rights abuses. In 1956, he was arrested during demonstrations in Tbilisi against the Soviet policy of de-stalinization and was arrested again in 1958 for distributing anti-communist literature and proclamations. He was confined for six months to a mental hospital in Tbilisi where he was diagnosed as suffering from "psychopathy with decompensation", thus perhaps becoming an early victim of what became a widespread policy of using psychiatry for political purposes.
  
  wn.com/Zviad_Gamsakhurdia