Committee on Human Rights in the USSR
| Комитет прав человека в СССР | |
| Formation | 4 November 1970 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Valery Chalidze, Andrei Sakharov, Andrei Tverdokhlebov |
| Founded at | Moscow, Russia |
| Type | Association, NGO |
| Fields | Human rights monitoring |
The Committee on Human Rights in the USSR (Russian: Комите́т прав челове́ка в СССР) was founded in 1970 by dissident Valery Chalidze together with Andrei Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov.
Valery Chalidze was a writer and dissident who published the samizdat journal Social Problems. Andrei Sakharov was an eminent Soviet nuclear physicist who had publicly opposed the Soviet plans for atmospheric nuclear tests. In 1968, Sakharov had published "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom," a plea for nuclear disarmament emphasizing the role of human rights. As a result, his professorship was revoked by Soviet authorities. He became a spokesman for the human rights in the Soviet Union. The third founding member was physicist Andrey Tverdokhlebov.
Later the Committee was joined by Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Mathematician Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin and physicist Boris Zukerman became legal experts for the group. Writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and dissident bard Aleksandr Galich became honorary members. The Committee was also joined by Grigory Podyapolsky. Other prominent members of the Committee included Yelena Bonner and Pavel Litvinov.
Unlike its predecessor, the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, the Committee functioned within a framework defined by its founding statutes. It was defined it as "a creative association acting in accordance with the laws of the land." The goals of the committee were listed in their founding statement:
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