Valery Chalidze

Valery Nikolayevich Chalidze
Native name	Валерий Николаевич Чалидзе
Born	1938 Moscow, USSR
Nationality	Russian
Fields	physics
Alma mater	Moscow State University, Tbilisi State University
Known for	human rights activism with participation in dissident movement in the Soviet Union

Valery Nikolayevich Chalidze (Russian: Вале́рий Никола́евич Чали́дзе; Georgian: ვალერი ჭალიძე, born 1938) is a Georgian-American author and publisher, and a former Soviet dissident and human rights activist.

Chalidze was born in Moscow. He was educated as a physicist at the universities of Moscow and Tbilisi. In the mid-1960s, he joined the Soviet human rights movement and published a samizdat periodical Social Issues (Obshchestvennye problemy).

On 4 November 1970 Chalidze, along with Andrei Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, became one of the three founding members of the Moscow Human Rights Committee. On 21 December 1970 Newsweek, the US weekly magazine, published Chalidze’s replies to questions from its Moscow correspondent about the Committee’s aims and the prospects for its activities.

The Committee was among the first non-governmental organizations in the history of the Soviet Union (cf. "Action Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR", set up in May 1969), and eventually became affiliated with the United Nations. Its purpose was to offer free legal advice to persons whose human rights had been violated by the Soviet authorities, and also to advise those authorities on their legal obligations in regard to human rights under international and Soviet law.

In 1972, Chalidze was invited to deliver a lecture in the United States. Once there he was deprived by the USSR authorities of his Soviet citizenship and prevented from returning to the Soviet Union.

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