Pavel Litvinov
| Pavel Mikhailovich Litvinov | |
|---|---|
Pavel Litvinov and Irena Grudzińska-Gross, reading for Natalya Gorbanevskaya, 2014
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| Native name | Павел Михайлович Литвинов |
| Born |
July 6, 1940 Moscow |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Fields | physics |
| Institutions | Moscow State University of Fine Chemical Technologies, Hackley School |
| Alma mater | Moscow State University |
| Known for | human rights activism and participation in the 1968 Red Square demonstration and dissident movement in the Soviet Union |
| Children | son Dimitri, Joseph |
Pavel Mikhailovich Litvinov (Russian: Па́вел Миха́йлович Литви́нов, born 6 July 1940, in Moscow) is a Russian physicist, writer, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident.
Born as the grandson of Ivy Low and Maxim Litvinov, Joseph Stalin's foreign minister during the 1930s, Pavel Litvinov was 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 labor 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. During his time at the Institute, Litvinov became acquainted 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.
When writers Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov were tried for publishing samizdat in 1967, Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz released their famous "Appeal to World Public Opinion", appealing to the international public to protest against the closed trial. Over the following years, Litvinov became active in the dissident civil rights movement and was an editor of its regular samizdat bulletin Chronicle of Current Events. The periodical, founded in 1968, documented searches, arrests, and court proceedings in Russia and other Soviet states.
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