Valery Chalidze | |
|---|---|
Валерий Николаевич Чалидзе | |
 | |
| Born | Valery Nikolaevich Chalidze 25 November 1938 |
| Died | 3 January 2018 (aged 79) United States |
| Nationality | Georgian-Polish |
| Citizenship | USSR; USA from 1979 |
| Alma mater | Moscow State University, Tbilisi State University |
| Known for | Founding legalist branch of human rights movement in USSR; developing concept of mass and electric charge in vortex theory of matter. |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | physics, human rights |
Author and publisher Valery Nikolaevich Chalidze (Russian: Вале́рий Никола́евич Чали́дзе; Georgian: ვალერი ჭალიძე: 25 November 1938 – 3 January 2018) was a Soviet dissident and human rights activist, deprived of his USSR citizenship in 1972 while on a visit to the US.
His Georgian father was killed during World War Two. His mother, Francheska Jansen, was an architect and designer, descended from Poles exiled to Siberia for their opposition to the Tsarist regime. Chalidze himself challenged the Soviet regime by mastering Soviet law, then demanding that the dictatorship comply with its own laws.[1] This strategy may have afforded Chalidze some protection from the prosecution faced by other dissidents. According to fellow dissident Pavel Litvinov, ""There were rumors that he could be killed, but it was very difficult to arrest him and put him in prison."[2]
Chalidze was born in Moscow and educated as a physicist at the universities of Moscow and Tbilisi in Georgia. In the 1960s he joined the nascent Soviet human rights movement: he began publishing Social Issues in 1969, and helped to found the Committee for Human Rights the following year. In 1972 Chalidze was deprived of his Soviet citizenship and spent the rest of his life in the United States.
- ^ Kishkovsky, Sophia (22 January 2018). "Valery Chalidze, Soviet Dissident Forced Into Exile, Dies at 79". The New York Times. Retrieved 29 September 2023 – via NYTimes.com.
- ^ "Valery Chalidze, Soviet dissident who founded human rights group with Andrei Sakharov, dies at 79", Washington Post, 11 January 2018.