Pavel Litvinov
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Pavel Litvinov (Russian: Павел Литвинов, born 1940) is a Russian physicist, writer, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident. He is the grandson of Maxim Litvinov, Joseph Stalin's foreign minister during the 1930s, and as such was born and 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 labour 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 Techology and fell in 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 Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov and Robert Conquest.
On August 25, 1968, Litvinov and six of his friends held a brief demonstration at Red Square in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that had taken place four days earlier. Among the others were Larisa Bogoraz, a philologist, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a poet and Viktor Fainberg, an art critic. They raised banners in Czech and Russian, denouncing the Brezhnev regime and expressing solidarity with Alexander Dubček, the Czechoslovak leader who was the architect of the Prague Spring.
The KGB promptly arrested the protesters, and their trial was held that October. Litvinov was sentenced to five years' exile in Chita, Siberia. In 1973, after his return from exile, he and his wife Maya left the Soviet Union and moved to America. Litvinov currently lives in the United States; he taught physics and mathematics at Hackley School, beginning in 1976. He retired from teaching in 2006, intending to write his memoirs, spend more time with his family, and travel [citation needed].
Pavel Litvinov is a son-in-law of the dissident and literary scholar Lev Kopelev.
[edit] See also
1968 Red Square demonstration
