On 27th July, 18:30, The National Parliamentary Library Anglo-American Reading Hall will host a lecture on "Dissident Valery Chalidze and the Path to Democracy in a Post-Soviet World.The lecture will be delivered by Dr. Lisa Chalidze, a Lawyer and Human Rights Defender. Valery Chalidze first met her after his forced exile in the United States. They worked together to publish many books and articles about the conditions of human rights in the Soviet Union and in the world. Valery Chalidze's name is associated with anti-Soviet activities, and his work was prohibited under Soviet rule in Georgia. Thus, until now there were only a few paragraphs (and those censored) about him. Chalidze worked as a well-known theoretical physicist when he was interested in human rights issues and joined the growing Soviet dissident movement in the 1960s. He soon became adept at repairing typewriters, which he used to prepare the samizdat publications that were passed from hand to hand.
On 4 November 1970, with Chalidze's initiative, was founded the Human Rights Committee. Andrei Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov joined the commitee soon. The following month 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 future activities. The Committee was among the first non-governmental organizations in the post-Stalin history of the Soviet Union and soon became affiliated with the United Nations.
His father, Nikolai, of Georgian descent, was an engineer who was killed in World War II; his mother, Francheska Yansen, was an architect who worked on designing the Black Sea resort of Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics. His mother was from a family of Polish freedom fighters who had been exiled to Russia under the czars and sent to labor camps known as the Gulag under Stalin.
Valery Chalidze was an innovative strategist of the Soviet human-rights movement. After educating himself on Soviet and international law as they pertained to human rights, Chalidze invited the Soviet dictatorship into a dialogue on human rights issues, utilizing the Committee both to offer free legal advice to those whose rights had been violated, and to the Soviet government itself. In addition to demanding that the authorities comply with the law, Chalidze also adhered to the position that the dissidents, too, must obey the law. He would later summarize this position by writing: "One must have clean hands to do good deeds". “In the dissident world, the nickname Prince stuck to him — and he wore it with dignity,” Mr. Sakharov wrote.
In 1972, he received an invitation to speak at human rights forums at Georgetown and Columbia universities. After his lecture, Soviet officials came to his hotel and asked to verify his identity. Mr. Chalidze's passport was seized and his Soviet citizenship was revoked for "acts discrediting a Soviet citizen" and because, as another government official said, he was "not a Soviet citizen in his soul." He was forced to stay in the United States for the rest of his life, where he continued his human-rights activity. He wrote books on Soviet legal and political life, including "To Defend These Rights" (1974), a Russian-language study titled “Stalin: Conquerer of Communism" and "Criminal Russia" (1977). His first marriage, to the former Vera Slonim, the granddaughter of Maxim Litvinov, who was Joseph Stalin's foreign minister, ended in divorce because of his emigration. Afterwards, togethe rwith Litvinov's grandson, he edited a well-regarded bimonthly publication, A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, which detailed arrests, imprisonments and other acts of Soviet intimidation toward political dissidents. he established two publishing houses, to print and send back to the Soviet Union books that otherwise would have been denied to readers there due to censorship. These included works smuggled out of the Gulag; memoirs of important historical figures; and major works of Western political thought.
"I know only that you will never save anyone by silence," Mr. Chalidze wrote in a 1973 essay in the Times. He lectured widely in the United States and western Europe on human-rights issues, including at Yale University. For some years he was also a Visiting Scholar in the History Department at Middlebury College in Vermont. In addition, he continued his work in theoretical physics throughout his lifetime, eventually publishing "Mass and Electric Charge In the Vortex Theory of Matter."
Valery Chalidze is recognized internationally for establishing what came to be known as the legalist branch of the Soviet human-rights movement. In the United States, his work was recognized in many ways, including by the award of the prestigious "genius grant" of MacArthur Fellowship.
Chalidze Publications also organized and published the first-ever Russian translation of The Federalist Papers (1788). It would be an official presidential gift from George H.W. Bush to M. Gorbachev at one meeting in 1990. Mikhail Gorbachev offered to restore Chalidze's USSR citizenship. He rebuffed the offer. "You had no right to take it away," he said, "and you certainly have no right to give it back."
Chalidze never returned to the Soviet Union (or the Russian Federation after 1992); he did not see his mother again. His sister Francheska, sacked from her job as a scientist in retribution for her brother's dissident activities, emigrated to the US and settled in San Diego.
“He was viewed as a dedicated proponent of the view that Soviet law (in a liberal interpretation) should be the basis of action on human rights issues by both the authorities and dissident groups,” wrote Peter Reddaway, professor emeritus of political science at George Washington University and former director of the Kennan Institute in Washington
An agreement to bring the Chalidze archive -- of great importance to Georgia -- was reached during the visit of a Library delegation to the United States in 2019. The National Parliamentary Library of Georgia is grateful to Mrs. Lisa Chalidze for the important archive for our readers. The digital archive will be available soon.
The host of the event will be the Marjory and Oliver Wardrops Anglo-American Reading Hall.
Entrance Free.